The halftime show is always the highlight of the Super Bowl, but usually people at least pretend to care about the game more. This year, though, it seemed like, if you weren’t born in Massachusetts or Washington, you simply couldn’t care less (the Seahawks won, if you didn’t know). Across the nation, people that have never watched a football game in their lives tuned in to watch Latin America’s premier heartthrob, Bad Bunny.
Fresh off of his most loved album yet, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Puerto Rican R&B star Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio was announced as the headliner for the Super Bowl all the way back in September. When he took the field, he was surrounded by fields of sugar cane (actually living people wearing costumes!) to represent Puerto Rico’s founding as a plantation slave state. Throughout the show, Bad Bunny sang and danced through a highlight reel of some of the most iconic elements of Latin culture. Just a few of the symbols on the field included a piragua cart (a stand selling ice topped with fruit syrup), tíos and abuleos playing dominoes, and a young boy sleeping on a chair (for those who don’t know, Latin parties run a little late for young children).
To a large part of the country, Bad Bunny’s show was simply an extremely entertaining and upbeat halfway point in a mostly uneventful game. But for the large Hispanic population of the United States who’ve been facing a huge surge in prosecution and prejudice in today’s political climate, the halftime show represented a huge explosion of culture in the most watched event of the year.
While the show was shockingly well received by people across the States, the most dissenting portion of the population was, predictably, the most powerful. Right after the show, president Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media site, that this show was “one of the worst, EVER” and a “‘slap in the face’ to our Country.” However, for once, the people didn’t follow along with him. In a YouGov poll conducted after the game, people interviewed were asked “Who better represents America?” And in a surprising majority, 42% of people said they believed Bad Bunny was a better showcasing of America’s values than the actual president of the country.
At the very end of the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny projected the message “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” and boldly said “God Bless America,” then shocked people by listing every Latin American country, showcasing on the largest stage in the United States that the most American value is love. And luckily for his powerful thesis, the people of the States seem proud to support that idea.
