Bad Bunny did not just headline Super Bowl LX’s halftime show; he turned the biggest stage in U.S. sports into a living mural of Puerto Rican and pan‑American life. From the first shot of him emerging through towering cane fields to his final declaration that “Together, we are America,” the 13‑minute performance functioned as a love letter to the people who rarely see themselves centered in this kind of spectacle.
The show opened in the fields, with Bad Bunny carrying the Puerto Rican flag as dancers dressed like agricultural workers moved between stalks of sugarcane. The imagery nodded to the island’s plantation past, its generations of field laborers, and the working‑class communities who built Puerto Rico from the ground up. Rather than presenting an abstract “tropical” fantasy, the staging grounded viewers in real histories of land, labor, and colonization.
From there, the field gave way to a bustling barrio. The stadium floor morphed into familiar Puerto Rican urban spaces: bright bodegas, food carts selling piraguas and coco frío, a pink casita, and bustling sidewalks packed with neighbors. Everyday details—plastic chairs, plantain trees, a corner bar—signaled that this performance was built from lived culture, not a sanitized tourism brochure. At one casita, legendary New York bar owner Toñita of Brooklyn’s Caribbean Social Club appeared behind a counter, a quiet tribute to the Puerto Rican social spaces that have anchored diaspora life for decades.
Throughout the set, Bad Bunny refused the typical Super Bowl hierarchy that isolates the star at the center. Dancers, musicians, and extras surged around him as a collective, emphasizing community over individual stardom. At one point, the casita roof collapsed and the cameras followed him into a living room party where celebrities such as Cardi B, Karol G, Jessica Alba, Young Miko, and Pedro Pascal joined the celebration, blurring the line between global fame and neighborhood function.
The performance’s sharpest political edge arrived with “El Apagón,” his blistering anthem about Puerto Rico’s privatized, unreliable power grid. As the track pounded, workers scaled wooden electrical poles rising from the field, sparks flashing as they mimed repairing failing lines. When Bad Bunny himself climbed a pole, the image turned everyday frustration—constant blackouts, crumbling infrastructure—into a towering visual metaphor for the island’s unequal treatment and vulnerability to disaster.
Halfway through the show, the field became something else entirely: a wedding hall. A real couple stood at the 50‑yard line, surrounded by friends and dancers, and exchanged vows in front of millions of viewers. Reporters later confirmed that the ceremony was legally binding and that Bad Bunny signed the marriage certificate as a witness. At a time of intense polarization, centering a joyful, multiracial wedding on live television was a literal embodiment of his message that “the only thing more powerful than hate is love,” a phrase he had recently highlighted in his Grammy acceptance speech and that appeared on a massive stadium billboard during the show.
If the visuals rooted the performance in Puerto Rico, the language choices expanded the frame to the entire hemisphere. Bad Bunny became the first Spanish‑language Latin solo artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, and he delivered almost the entire set in Spanish. Before the game, he’d brushed off pressure to switch tongues, noting that English is not his first language—and, pointedly, “it’s not America’s first language, either.” On Sunday night, the NFL’s most coveted stage finally sounded like the multilingual country it entertains.
The climax fused all these threads into a single, unmistakable statement. Holding a football stamped with the phrase “Together, We Are America,” Bad Bunny shouted “God bless America” and then proceeded to name country after country across North, Central, and South America, not just the United States. Behind him, flag‑bearers from across the Americas flooded the field in a moving tableau of regional unity. The moment reframed “America” as a shared continent rather than a single nation—a quiet but pointed rebuke to narrow, exclusionary visions of who gets to belong.
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX performance was built for recognition, not translation. Viewers did not need to understand every lyric to feel its pulse: a show that insisted Puerto Rico is part of America, that immigrants are central to the national story, and that joy itself can be an act of resistance. On a night often dominated by corporate ads and safe nostalgia, he offered something riskier and far more enduring—a reminder that the future of American identity is already here, singing in Spanish, dancing in the sugarcane, and holding a football that reads, simply, “Together, we are America.”
President Trump, reacted negatively to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, posting criticisms on his Truth Social platform shortly after the performance ended. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”, He labeled it “absolutely terrible,” “the worst EVER,” and an “affront to the Greatness of America.” and described the performance as a “slap in the face to our country,” contrasting it with his administration’s “new standards” and economic records.
📸: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty; Brynn Anderson/AP; Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP; Charlie Riedel/AP; Mike Blake/Reuters; Matt Slocum/AP; Julio Cortez/AP; Chris Graythen/Getty Images; Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP; Lynne Sladky/AP; Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images
