Que Rico Es Ser Latino: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Brown Optic Makeover
- Frederick Aldama
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
I’m deep in the final stages of writing my book Latinx TV, a study of how U.S. television has constructed, contained, and occasionally blown wide open the doors of Latinx representation across seven decades of comedy, drama, reality programming, animation, and streaming. Seven decades of presence managed through stereotyping, assimilation, backgrounding, selective cultural display. Seven decades of characters included while cultural meaning remained controlled. Of appearance without perspective.
Then last night happened. And I had to stop everything to write this.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—Bad Bunny—stepped onto the field at Levi’s Stadium and, in thirteen breathtaking minutes, gave Super Bowl LX the most radical Brown optic makeover in the history of American television. Not a makeover as in a cosmetic touch-up. A makeover as in a total restructuring of who gets to organize story, language, and viewpoint when over 135 million people are watching.
In thirteen minutes, Bad Bunny restructured who gets to organize story, language, and viewpoint when over 135 million people are watching.
Let’s be precise about what happened. The Super Bowl halftime show is not a concert. It is the single most concentrated televisual event in American culture, one of the last moments when the nation watches the same images at the same time. Television here doesn’t simply broadcast culture. It stages a shared understanding of who belongs within it. For decades, that staging has been governed by what I call a white optic, a default lens through which Latinidad registers as decoration, as accent, as background flavor, but never as the organizing principle of narrative itself.
Bad Bunny shattered that lens.
His opening words told you everything: “Que rico es ser Latino.” How wonderful, how delicious, it is to be Latino. Not an apology. Not a translation. Not a nod to comprehensibility for English-dominant audiences. An unapologetic declaration of joy delivered in Spanish on the biggest English-language broadcast platform on earth. From the first beat, the Brown optic was in full effect: Latinx experience organizing the story, the language, the visual grammar, the emotional register. The audience wasn’t being invited to observe Latinidad from the outside. They were being pulled inside it.
Puerto Rico as Narrative Center
The field at Levi’s Stadium transformed into a living, breathing Puerto Rican vecindad. Sugar cane fields thick enough to walk through. Jíbaros in pavas, those rural farmers in their signature straw hats, alongside viejitos bent over domino tables. A piragua cart. A coconut vendor. A barber shop. A boxing match between Puerto Rican fighters Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas. La Marqueta. Tacos from Villa’s. Toñita from the Caribbean Social Club, handing Benito a shot of rum.
This wasn’t set design. This was world-building. This was what I theorize in my work as the will to style, a creator’s deliberate choice to shape every element of the aesthetic experience in ways that refuse the dominant culture’s visual and narrative defaults. Every detail functioned as what I call a space-clearing device: making room for cultural specificity to breathe, to organize, to mean. The sugar cane wasn’t a prop. It was a portal into the history of Puerto Rican labor. The dominos weren’t décor. They were the rhythms of community. The pink and orange casita, like Benito’s San Juan residency, wasn’t a house. It was a thesis statement about who gets to be home on American television.
The casita on the field wasn’t a house. It was a thesis statement about who gets to be home on American television.
Television has historically fixed Latinidad to a narrow palette of cultural signifiers: food, cars, bad hombres, mysticism, hypersexiness. What Bad Bunny did was take those elements that reductive framing has turned into floating signifiers of otherness and re-embed them in lived experience. The sobremesa at the wedding table. The children asleep on chairs because the party went too long, as parties do. The intergenerational gathering where abuelitos and babies share the same dance floor. This is the dinner table as site of identity negotiation, except blown up to Super Bowl scale. Bad Bunny didn’t just represent Puerto Rico. He geometrized it: gave it shape, depth, temporal weight, emotional architecture.
Casitas, para todos
And then: a real wedding. An actual couple married on the field during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Bad Bunny served as witness, signed their marriage certificate. There was a real cake. Lady Gaga emerged in a powder blue dress with a red flower at her shoulder, singing a salsa-inflected “Die With a Smile.” The wedding singer at a Puerto Rican wedding, not as cultural tourist, but as invited guest. Ricky Martin appeared to belt the furious anti-colonization chorus of “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii.” Two generations of crossover history on the same stage: Martin, who in the late ’90s had to sing in English to be legible to mainstream audiences, now lending his voice to Bad Bunny’s unapologetically Spanish-language vision.
Up on the rooftop of the casita and under its canopy: Pedro Pascal, Jessica Alba, Karol G, Cardi B, Young Miko, Carlos Santana—all perreando. The expansiveness of community and joy and life, right there in the frame. This is what I call the Brown optic in full flower: Latinx cultural life functioning not as spectacle for an outsider gaze but as the gravitational center that pulls everyone else into its orbit. Gaga didn’t translate Bad Bunny for white audiences. She joined his world. Pascal didn’t perform Latinidad for the camera. He lived it.
Gaga didn’t translate Bad Bunny for white audiences. She joined his world. Pascal didn’t perform Latinidad for the camera. He lived it.
El Apagón
Bad Bunny climbed a utility pole to perform “El Apagón”—the song that excoriates Puerto Rico’s chronic power outages, its crumbling infrastructure, the corrupt mishandling of the island’s energy grid. The utility poles on the field during the Super Bowl. The blackout that has been literal and metaphorical: an island of U.S. citizens left in the dark, over and over.
His custom white Zara football jersey bore the number 64 and the name Ocasio. Sixty-four: his mother’s birth year. Also the number that was initially (and falsely) reported as Hurricane Maria’s death toll in 2017, when in reality nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans perished in one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history. Also the 64th Congress, which passed the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, granting statutory citizenship to Puerto Ricansafs—a citizenship that has always felt conditional. And, yes, the 64th Grammys, where his Un Verano Sin Ti became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Album of the Year.
One number. Four histories layered into a single jersey. That’s not symbolism. That’s what I call helical time—the past spiraling through the present, each loop adding depth, refusing the flattening that mainstream television so often imposes on Latinx stories.
The vignette focused on the chavalito was equally layered. Cameras cut to a child watching the Grammys on TV with his family, then Bad Bunny appeared and handed him the Grammy statuette. Was it a reference to five-year-old Liam “Conejo” Ramos, the five-year-old Minneapolis chavalito whose detention by ICE sparked national outrage? The production later confirmed it wasn’t Liam. But the resonance was unmistakable and intentional. Any Latino kid. Every Latino kid. The child who sees himself in the dream and is told the dream is not for him, handed the trophy anyway.
One number. Four histories layered into a single jersey. The past spiraling through the present, refusing the flattening that mainstream television so often imposes on Latinx stories.
“God Bless the Americas”
And the closing. “God Bless America,” Bad Bunny said in English. Then, in Spanish: “O sea…”—the clarification—and he began naming countries. Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Colombia. Venezuela. Costa Rica. Mexico. The Dominican Republic. Canada. The United States. “My motherland, Puerto Rico.” Dancers carried every flag of the Americas behind him. The football in his hand read: “Together, We Are America.” The screen behind him: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
This was a huge, necessary corrective delivered on the biggest platform imaginable. America is a continent. Not a country. Bad Bunny popped, once and for all on the grandest stage, the bubble of narcissism and ego that assumes “America” begins and ends at U.S. borders. And he did it while dancing.
“Estamos aquí,” he said in Spanish just before spiking the football. We’re still here.
Meanwhile, at the Other Halftime Show…
The contrast could not have been sharper. Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show,” headlined by Kid Rock, streamed to roughly four million concurrent viewers—a fraction of the 135 million watching Bad Bunny. The alternative show turned out to be less a concert than a tribute to the late Charlie Kirk, saturated with the imagery of grievance and cultural gatekeeping.
This is what the Latinx-threat narrative looks like when it goes live: the insistence that Latinx cultural presence on a national stage constitutes an “affront.”
And then Trump’s Truth Social tirade, predictable as clockwork: the halftime show was “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” A “slap in the face” to the country. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” The dancing is “disgusting.”
“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” —Nearly 500 million people worldwide speak Spanish as their mother tongue. Over 41 million speak it at home in the United States.
This is the white optic laid bare. It’s the same logic that has governed Latinx television representation for seventy years: the assumption that cultural specificity must be translated, contained, or eliminated for a “national” audience to comprehend it. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” is a sentence that erases nearly 500 million Spanish speakers worldwide and over 41 million who speak it at home in the United States. It is the Latinx-threat narrative in its purest distillation—the idea that Latinx presence, untranslated and uncontained, is itself a danger.
Except 135 million people watched. . .and danced.
From Toeholds to Takeover
In my book I trace the slow accumulation of what I’ve called toeholds of resistance—the incremental ways Latinx creators and performers have carved out space within an industry that has preferred to manage their presence rather than cede narrative control. Gloria Estefan at the Super Bowl in 1992. Shakira and J.Lo with Benito as their guest in 2020. Each one a foothold. Each one widening the crack.
Last night the crack became a door, and Bad Bunny walked 135 million people through it. He didn’t crossover. He didn’t translate. He didn’t accommodate. He did what the best Latinx television has been trying to do for seven decades: he made Spanish function as dialogue rather than decoration. He let cultural specificity organize the narrative rather than interrupt it. He didn’t ask permission to be the subject of the story rather than the background.
This is what a Brown optic looks like at maximum volume. Just a week after winning the first Album of the Year Grammy for a fully Spanish-language record, just days after declaring “ICE out!” from the Grammy stage, just hours after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the President would “much prefer Kid Rock,” Benito walked into the biggest room in American media and said: Que rico es ser Latino.
And then everyone danced.
He didn’t crossover. He didn’t translate. He didn’t accommodate. He made Spanish function as dialogue rather than decoration. He let cultural specificity organize the narrative rather than interrupt it.
Television rarely changes through a single program. Change occurs through accumulation. But sometimes a single performance is so total, so uncompromising in its will to style, that it marks a before and after. Last night was that moment. When Bad Bunny spiked the football, he spiked the assumption that Latinx stories need permission, translation, or containment to matter on a national stage.
The viewer is no longer asked to encounter Latinidad as difference. It is and always be an integral part of the everyday life across the Americas.
Estamos aquí!
We’re still here.
And we’re dancing.