monday's mulling: bad bunny's super bowl performance

Last night over here in America we celebrated the culmination of American football by being glued to our televisions to watch the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks play in the final game of the 2025-2025 season, Super Bowl LX (that's 60 if you don't recall your Roman numerals).

My husband loves the game of football. He has his favorite teams and can watch games all day long. Me, I don't care for football. The Super Bowl is a big draw for fans whose teams are playing and it also brings us non-football fans to the TV to watch the commercials (companies shell out huge sums of money to advertise during this game) and to watch the halftime show.

This year's halftime entertainment was provided by the Puerto Rican rapper and singer, Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny? Yeah, I hadn't heard of him until the announcement came out that he would be doing the Super Bowl halftime show. The drama really snowballed when people found out that the performance would be in Spanish, a first for the Super Bowl. 

My first impression of this Spanish-speaking rapper's performance...I liked it. He highlighted Puerto Rican life and even though his words were all Spanish, the choreography told the story - the love of community, the love of family, working to overcome devastating circumstances (the electricity going out with no power for days), and the call for Americans to recognize and respect one another.

Near the end of his performance, Bad Bunny spoke his first and only English words of the show:

"God Bless America."

He then proceeded to name every Latin American country, one by one, in Spanish: Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican republic, Cuba, and more. He continued through Central and South America, before ending with USA, Canada, and finally Puerto Rico again. As he named each country, dancers carrying flags from across the Americas walked behind him, a visual representation of the hemisphere united. The jumbotron behind them lit up with the words, "THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE."

This post is a little late because this morning I watched this halftime show a few more times before writing about it. It tells the American story. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored courageous one. At the very end of the performance Bad Bunny held a football that read, "Together we are America," and spiked it into the ground. Not with anger but with joy and it made hate look exactly as small as it is.

Check out this performance that celebrated Puerto Rico and its place in the American story.