In six minutes flat, Puerto Rico itself immigrates to the sour heart of America. As the number-based fighting of Super Bowl LX stops and the ICE agents start scanning the stands, an entire Salinas sugar cane field grows out of the grass of Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, populated by coconut sellers, dice players, boxers and twerkers. And one man in white wandering through this colourful maelstrom on a mission to show the world the vivacious worth of his people.
This is the real battle underway at Super Bowl 2026: pride versus intolerance. Last year’s Halftime Show marked the point where this 16 minutes of maximal A-list cash-in – historically a major sales and streaming boost for the likes of Usher, Beyonce and Maroon 5 – became not just the biggest show on earth but the planet’s highest-profile platform for protest against Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. Then, Kendrick Lamar danced in a divided stars and stripes made up of Black dancers. Now Bad Bunny breaks his recent US boycott, in part to deliver his Grammy-winning 2025 album Debí Tirar Más Fotos to 100 million viewers and in part to expose – via the medium of Latin trap – the rot at the core of today’s USA.
As he grabs a cocktail from a street stall to the dembow beats of “Tití Me Preguntó” and disgusted bartenders in Nashville flick their TVs over to Erika Kirk’s alternative “All-American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock, we might reasonably ask how we got here. Only a few years ago Bad Bunny – aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – began cropping up in lists of the world’s most-streamed artists. He seemed a very online sort of phenomenon, but as his Grammys and Artist of the Year accolades stacked up he began using his position to advocate loudly against corruption, displacement and gentrification in Puerto Rico, all core themes of his latest album.
Recently, he’s come to personify America’s anti-ICE backlash. In 2025 he scrapped all of his US dates in order to protect his Latino fan-base from persecution, while his Super Bowl appearance has prompted much anger at his “un-American” background from MAGA mobs who weren’t complaining about Coldplay playing it in 2016. Bad Bunny’s arrival, then, is an inherently political stand –a brazen statement of Hispanic defiance.
But with mainstream commercial concerns – and, frankly, culture-wide fear – at play, no-one was expecting Kendrick levels of subversion in 2026. Even Green Day, who called on ICE to quit their jobs and changed a lyric of “Holiday” to “the representative for Epstein Island has the floor” at a San Francisco pre-game party on Friday, dutifully strip the song of any potentially Trump-baiting lines for their punchy opening medley (although, to be fair, “American Idiot” gets more pointed by the week). Yet Bad Bunny’s Latin-to-the-max show is every bit as forthright and confrontational as Lamar’s. His only words in English are “God bless America” and his effervescent, field-wide montage of Puerto Rican culture sets out to prove itself a fundamental part of the identity of that country formerly known as the land of the free.
It’s a head-spinning trip. Having toured the sugar fields, he takes to the roof of a trap club – literally, the roof collapses on him. A blink or two later he’s spinning around the salsa dancefloor of a traditional Puerto Rican wedding with Lady Gaga as the star turn, singing her own “Die With a Smile”. Then he’s falling backwards into a margarita street party full of mariachi trumpeters. The lyrics, when translated, might be all love, sex and tequila, but their overarching message is clear. Would you rather be here shaking multicultural booty with Bad Bunny, or watching a bunch of bitter country bores in a miserable Texan bar?
As the show evolves, it grows sharper. Ricky Martin makes an appearance for “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”, a reminder of how deeply engrained Latin pop music has been in US culture. Ocasio pauses to hand a Grammy to a child actor presumably playing his younger self. He finds himself waving a Puerto Rican flag in a grove of sparking electricity pylons, finding pride in the hardiness of his downtrodden homeland.
It ends in a flag parade carnival for “DTMF” celebrating the whole panoply of Central and South American countries and their brightening influence on American life. It might even be the moment that the Latin world steals away the global musical zeitgeist from a nation folding in on itself. Did the ICE agents present stand impotently by as Bad Bunny became an icon of hate-defying unity tonight? Or did they dance even a little, on the inside? Because this – this wild, inclusive fiesta – was Old America at its best.
