What Bad Bunny teaches us about expanding belonging

What Bad Bunny teaches us about expanding belonging

by Sarena Neyman

845 words

When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, critics predicted backlash. He’d be too Spanish. Too political. Not “American” enough. The assumption was that in a country this polarized, cultural borders were fixed — and he stood on the wrong side of them.

Instead, one of the largest audiences in National Football League history tuned in. Streams surged. Album sales climbed. Millions of viewers who didn’t understand every lyric found themselves moving anyway.

Maybe nothing flipped overnight. Maybe hardened partisans didn’t suddenly renounce their politics. What happened was subtler — and more powerful. The borders didn’t collapse. They became more permeable. How did Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio pull that off? 

His music is a joyful invitation, not a grievance. 

Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico has endured over 400 years of exploitation. And yet his music is uplifting; his community feels resilient, not defeated. Political messaging, especially among progressives, often starts with what communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio describes as “boy, have I got a problem for you.” Bad Bunny flips the sequence. He invites us to dance first. To celebrate music and food and love and family. It feels like the greatest party on earth.

When I told my husband to check out Debi Tirar Más Photos, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Album of the Year (the first Spanish language winner ever), he was reluctant. The next day, though, the album was blasting through the house. The music is so accessible because there’s something for everyone. Even within a single song, he moves across genres and generations. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was drawn to the salsa rhythms of “Baile Inolvidable.” But then the dembow pulse of “Tití Me Preguntó” had me moving too — despite years of thinking that I didn’t like reggaeton because it all sounded the same. Bad Bunny’s music loosened assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying. 

He uses curiosity as a teacher. 

Viewers who tuned in for the spectacle of the halftime show noticed people dressed as sugar cane plants, workers climbing electrical poles, empty white plastic chairs scattered across the stage. What did it mean? I know I wasn’t the only one burning a hole on the internet that evening. People don’t resist information they discover themselves, especially if they’re being entertained. 

Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of U.S. colonization: the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy; environmental catastrophes; and gentrification driven by tax breaks for wealthy developers. The result: a diaspora in which two out of three Puerto Ricans now live off the island. 

That’s not persuasion through argument. It’s softening through exposure. 

His call to connect counters the Us-versus-Them narrative used to divide us. 

Bad Bunny’s music is more than about Puerto Rico. It’s about countering the fear and anger-mongering being used to pit us against each other. The deliberate cultivation of suspicion that someone else is taking what’s yours — when the real plundering is happening from the top.

Instead, Bad Bunny’s jumbotron message called on people to view each other through a loving lens instead of a hateful one. Former President Obama praised the performance for conveying a simple message: there is room for everyone here. Contrast that to Turning Point’s All-American Halftime Show, the alternative created for those who preferred a narrower definition of who is an American.

Some observers have compared Bad Bunny to John Lennon who also insisted that love could be politically disruptive. Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t about changing policy; it was a call to picture the world differently. That imaginative shift is what unsettles power. Fear-based politics relies on narrowing who counts, on who gets to define the nation. Benito is all about expansion.

He doesn’t shrink to widen his audience. 

The NFL executives may have worried that Americans wouldn’t understand Bad Bunny if he didn’t sing in English, but he refused to change himself to accommodate a fractured country. He made the audience stretch instead. (Duolingo reported a 35% surge in Spanish learners following his show.) Understanding doesn’t always begin with translation. It can begin with proximity.

The anger directed at Bad Bunny, writes journalist Jim Heath, is about losing control over identity. “Latino culture is framed as divisive,” writes Heath, “only because its permanence challenges an older mythology about who America is.” 

Changing Heart and Minds 

We often assume persuasion begins with argument — that we must win debates before we can win anyone over. But most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that. His work is an invitation: to learn about his culture, to experience joy together, to recognize how much we share. Not to contort ourselves to fit in, but to widen the circle without losing who we are. And before long, we’re dancing beside people we were warned to fear. 

His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging — joyful, magnetic — until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.

That’s how movements grow.

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Sarena Neyman, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a writer living in western Massachusetts whose essays have appeared in Huffington Post, Business Insider, Common Dreams, and Cabin Life.