In contemporary political grammar, certain events transcend the entertainment section to inscribe themselves in the annals of cultural sovereignty and sociopolitical history. The deployment of Bad Bunny upon the supreme altar of American nationalism—the Super Bowl LX halftime show—was not merely a phenomenon of massive audiences or a commercial milestone for the NFL. It was, in the strictest sense, an aesthetic and semiotic “Storming of the Bastille”.
In a historical moment when neoconservatism, embodied by the MAGA movement, attempts to legislate identity, bodily autonomy, and the right to exist through systemic exclusion, Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) has erected what anarchist thinker Hakim Bey would call a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) in the heart of the empire. For 15 minutes at Levi’s Stadium in California, the field ceased to be a terrain of corporate conquest and transformed into a liberated enclave—a space where perreo solidified as the official language of a new, transnational citizenship.
Bad Bunny and Heartbeat of a New World
The Semiotics of Fascism, Border Necropolitics, and Lost Purity
To understand the magnitude of this event and its temporal urgency, we must deconstruct the underlying logics of power. The current rhetoric of the MAGA movement, with its pathological obsession with foundational purity and its constant demonization of “tropical rhythms” across social media, operates under a semiotic architecture that resonates dangerously with the dehumanization processes of the 1930s. As Umberto Eco warned in his essay on Ur-Fascism, a primary characteristic of totalitarianism is the fear of difference and the obsession with an external plot threatening the identity of the “chosen” people.
If Kristallnacht represented the physical and material shattering of plurality in the European public square, the current machinery of immigration policies and Trump’s discourse against “cultural contamination” seek an equivalent fragmentation of the social fabric, based on relentless identity cleansing. It is here that the theory of necropolitics, coined by philosopher Achille Mbembe, acquires chilling relevance. The contemporary State arrogates the right to decide which bodies matter, which deserve the status of legal subjects, and which can be marginalized, locked away, or discarded.
However, against this “aesthetic of the wall”—rigid, militarized, frigid, and punitive—Bad Bunny frontally opposes an “aesthetic of the flow”. Where the State seeks to control, classify, and restrict movement through citizen surveillance, Bad Bunny responds with the total, overflowing, and playful occupation of space.
This does not constitute an “invasion”, as the far-right narrative attempts to frame migration; it is the undeniable manifestation of a post-national and mestizo America. White conservatism, in its desperate urge to recover a “founder whiteness” that never existed as a monolithic bloc, faces a demographic reality it cannot halt with executive orders.
Cultural Technopopulism and Visual Sovereignty
The staging designed for Super Bowl LX was much more than a choreographic display; it was a manifesto of political autonomy and visual sovereignty. By utilizing floating stages that dominated the stadium’s airspace, the Puerto Rican artist symbolically nullified the gravitational jurisdiction of US soil. It is a masterclass in contemporary sovereignty: Latin culture no longer asks for permission to be “assimilated” into the Anglo-Saxon narrative; instead, it executes an absolute cultural reclaiming.
The Bad Bunny phenomenon must be understood through the lens of cultural technopopulism. In traditional political theory, populism relies on a charismatic leader constructing a “people” against a corrupt “elite”. Technopopulism supercharges this dynamic through digital networks.
Bad Bunny operationalizes this outside of electoral politics by leveraging algorithmic virality, streaming dominance, and mass digital affect, bypassing traditional Anglo-centric gatekeepers to articulate a transnational “people”—the Latin diaspora. This digital populace is united by shared cultural signifiers and affective bonds rather than physical borders.
Transforming the aseptic concrete of the empire into a vibrant Puerto Rican Casita—complete with domino games, local businesses, and everyday symbols—was not a nostalgic act in this performance; it was a technopopulist territorialization. Bad Bunny forced the Super Bowl to adapt to the Caribbean. This reclaiming reached its political climax when the artist waved and projected the flags of all the countries of the Americas, raising an American football inscribed with “Together, we are America.”
Furthermore, having an icon like Ricky Martin perform lines from Bad Bunny’s song, “El Apagón” (“Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawaii”) as a warning against gentrification, followed by Lady Gaga immersing herself in the codes of salsa to perform her and Bruno Mars song, “Die With a Smile”, proves that the cultural epicenter has shifted. The Spanish language and Caribbean identity are not subcultures; they are the new sovereign mainstream.
The Sonic Architecture of Perreo as Anti-Colonial Critique
A rigorous analysis of the performance broadcast reveals that the acoustic curation operated as a historical treatise of resistance. Bad Bunny did not soften his rhythms to appease the Anglo ear—the historical norm for pop crossovers in the United States. By opening his set with the distorted bass of “Tití Me Preguntó” and transitioning into the polyrhythms of “Safaera” and “Yo Perreo Sola”, he imposed the sonic architecture of underground reggaeton onto the country’s most sterilized broadcast.
The presence of figures like Cardi B, Karol G, and Pedro Pascal did not function as mere commercial cameos but as the consolidation of a united Latin American front spanning from Caribbean heritage in the Bronx to the global South. Musically, the use of live drums and the participation of Los Pleneros de la Cresta—anchored in genres born from Afro-Puerto Rican resistance—subverted the stadium’s acoustics. When “El Apagón” resounded across the stadium and the broadcast, denouncing energy privatization policies, the Super Bowl ceased to be a celebration of corporate capitalism and became an anti-colonial loudspeaker.
By singing entirely in Spanish, without condescending translations or subtitles, Bad Bunny employed his mother tongue as both a shield and a sword. In this acoustic ecosystem, the conservative English-speaking viewer was forced to inhabit the (for some) discomfort of the unintelligible, experiencing firsthand the “otherness” that the system daily imposes on migrants. The sound of perreo thus instituted the official anthem of demographic insurgency.
State Brutality vs. The Affirmative Biopolitics of Pleasure
The aesthetic force of this spectacle acquires its true specific weight when contrasted with the institutionalized brutality outside the Super Bowl LX stadium doors. It is the direct response to the dehumanizing machinery of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the state administration concentrates its resources on the detention of infants like the Ecuadorian Liam Conejo, or the criminalization of young dreamers like the Honduran Kilmar Abrego García and Any Lucía López Belloza, the Temporary Autonomous Zone of the concert functioned as a refuge of visibility.
Within that ephemeral “rhythmic nation”, the bodies that are usually profiled and persecuted by the State become the legitimate heirs of the culture. The show was an exaltation of what philosopher Baruch Spinoza would call the management of “joyful passions”. The execution of a live wedding on stage, the symbolic handing of a Grammy award to a child, and the unabashed celebration of bodily fluidity clash head-on against the castrating puritanism of the MAGA movement.
If the politics of state fear operate through the management of “sad passions”—the terror of the other and the paranoia of losing privilege—perreo stands as a technology of interdependence. On the dance floor, just as in a vibrant pluralistic democracy, the celebration of the diverse body is the rule, not the exception.
The Thermometer of the Collective Psyche: The Collapse of Professional Distance
The magnitude of this paradigm shift was validated not by traditional music critics or academic circles, but by figures anchored in everyday media. Their reaction to the event must be read as the definitive barometer of the collective psyche.
The specific moment occurred during a live broadcast for ESPN Deportes. John Sutcliffe, a veteran reporter synonymous with the stoic objectivity of sports journalism, found himself unable to maintain professional distance. Standing amidst the euphoria of the stadium, he broke character on air, his voice cracking as he fought back tears.
Sutcliffe wasn’t analyzing plays or stats; he was confessing the sheer overwhelming weight of seeing a Spanish-speaking icon command the Super Bowl halftime show without apology. For a few seconds, the reporter vanished, replaced by a member of a diaspora witnessing his own validation on the world’s largest stage.
When a communicator forged in the harshness of competitive analysis breaks down in this manner, we witness the definitive collapse of the borders between the “niche” and the “universal”. Sutcliffe’s raw emotion is the irrefutable proof that the Latin world has overflowed the margins to situate itself at the emotional and identity epicenter of the United States.
Love as a Political Imperative and Act of Insurgency
American neoconservatism is fighting an aesthetic and demographic war it has already irretrievably lost. Its constant search for “inspiration” in border brutality and punitive exceptionalism is an anachronism against the vitality of a multicultural society that insists on celebrating fluidity and the free management of the body.
Ultimately, the monochromatic “traditional family” that conservatism attempts to protect with deportation laws and walls appears minuscule against the immense global family Bad Bunny summons. The final lesson left by Super Bowl LX is profoundly democratic and simultaneously radically simple. Faced with the architecture of the politics of hate, we are left with the undeniable urgency to defend the plurality of life.
As Bad Bunny declared in the middle of the performance, bathed in the blinding intensity of the neon lights: “Mientras uno está vivo, uno debe amar lo más que pueda” (“While one is alive, one must love as much as one can”). In the era of state hyper-surveillance, detention centers, and the criminalization of identity, loving ourselves without asking permission, dancing without apologizing, and existing out loud have become the most insurgent acts of sovereignty we possess. Perreo is, at the end of the day, the heartbeat of a new world that refuses to be deported.
Works Cited
“Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show”. YouTube.
Belloza, Lucía López. “19-year-old college student deported while flying home for Thanksgiving”. ABC News via YouTube.
Conejo-Ramos, Liam. “ICE Detains 5-Year-Old Liam Conejo-Ramos In Minneapolis As Trump Weighs Insurrection Act”. CNN News via YouTube.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Books via Scribd.com
Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism”. The New York Review of Books. 22 June 1995.
García, Kilmar Abrego. “Here’s what Kilmar Abrego Garcia Said in Spanish Following Release from Detention Center”. New York Post via YouTube.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics”. Public Culture. Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003. Duke University Press.
Sellers, Simon. “Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone”. Research Gate. September 2010.
Sutcliffe, John. Response to Bad Bunny’s half-time performance at Super Bowl LX. ESPN via YouTube.