Halfway via the Packers-Cowboys sport on Sunday appeared a 23-second industrial. Like all issues Benito Ocasio Martinez, it was deceptively easy. The video begins shut in on the face of the impish celebrity in a palm-leaf pava hat, a surprising beachfront sundown—the sort that solely Puerto Rico can ship—behind him. Waves crash and seagulls cry as we hear the opening notes of his dreamy observe “Callaita” and the digicam begins to zoom out. The singer is sitting on a goalpost in a swimsuit and flip-flops, casually swinging his legs. It’s official: Unhealthy Bunny will headline the 2026 Tremendous Bowl halftime present.
Tuning into the Tremendous Bowl is likely one of the final shared cultural experiences in our divided nation, and the announcement has ignited one other spherical within the tradition wars over what “actual America” ought to look and sound like.
Unhealthy Bunny, or Benito, as he’s affectionately referred to by his followers, is closing out a historic yr. In January, his newest album hit a billion streams in simply 13 days. Quite than tour to advertise the album, the artist introduced a summer-long residency in his homeland of Puerto Rico, known as “No me quiero ir de aquí” (“I don’t need to depart right here”). The 31 exhibits on the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, often called El Choli, had been an unapologetic celebration of Puerto Rican music and tradition that reverberated far past these of us fortunate sufficient to catch one of many exhibits in individual. The ultimate efficiency in late September was timed to the anniversary of Hurricane Maria and livestreamed on Amazon Music; it shattered the platform’s information, surpassing even Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
Unhealthy Bunny has stated he needed to keep away from touring within the continental United States to guard his followers from being focused by ICE brokers. However he had Latinos everywhere in the U.S. dancing and singing in Spanish, our heads held excessive, throughout what has in any other case been a really, very unhealthy yr.
Latino dehumanization is a trademark of the Trump administration. Movies of masked ICE officers making violent arrests have been shared often throughout social media. Latinos are hardly the one individuals being rounded up and deported, however it’s Latino faces—shoved to the asphalt, crying for his or her youngsters and for mercy—that symbolize victory to the MAGA radicals. It’s Latino faces which were was degrading memes. Final month, the Supreme Courtroom dominated that ICE and Border Patrol officers are inside their rights to cease anybody who, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “appears Latino, speaks Spanish, and seems to work in a low wage job.”
Assaults on Latino individuals have occurred in tandem with assaults on Latino tradition. English has been declared the “official” language within the U.S.; the White Home deleted its Spanish-language web site on day one in every of this administration. Plans for a Latino-history department of the Smithsonian have been halted. In all of those methods, the Trump administration is attempting to purge Latinos from this nation—a few of us bodily, all of us symbolically.
All of that is what makes the number of Unhealthy Bunny in 2026 so exceptional, and why the Latino-verse—and hundreds of thousands of People who don’t agree with Donald Trump’s insurance policies—went so wild.
This yr, 191 million individuals watched the sport. Though so lots of the previous standing markers for musicians, such because the VMAs, have vanished or misplaced their relevance, the Tremendous Bowl halftime present, America’s largest stage, can nonetheless flip artists into icons. Unhealthy Bunny is not only a Spanish-speaking artist. He’s a political one. He endorsed Kamala Harris, helps Puerto Rican independence, and, in a single mocking music video, had a voice that sounds similar to Trump’s declare that “this nation is nothing with out the immigrants. This nation is nothing with out Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans.”
Absolutely the businesses behind the halftime present—the NFL, Apple Music, and NBC, which is able to broadcast this yr’s sport—knew their choice to platform Unhealthy Bunny could be controversial.
The “common halftime viewer in Des Moines doesn’t communicate fluent reggaeton,” one commentator complained on X. The Newsmax host Greg Kelly known as for individuals to boycott the NFL due to the selection, and lamented that Unhealthy Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, hates the English language! He’s only a horrible individual.”
“There have been many explanation why I didn’t present up within the U.S.,” Unhealthy Bunny informed I.D. Journal, “and none of them had been out of hate.” However presumably, having grown up in an American colony the place residents lack the precise to vote for or towards Trump, Unhealthy Bunny does have extra conflicted emotions in regards to the function and historical past of the U.S. than, say, the common halftime viewer in Des Moines.
The businesses didn’t select Unhealthy Bunny as a result of they like, and even care about, his politics. They selected him as a result of he’s enormously in style—he’s the most-streamed male artist on the earth on Spotify—and that’s good for enterprise.
The Tremendous Bowl, after all, is a non-public occasion—and a vastly profitable one. Companies, in concept, don’t have any obligation to embrace the present authorities’s politics by hiring or firing stars in line with its preferences. The previous few months, nevertheless, have given People purpose to doubt that firms have a lot willingness to defy the Trump administration. Large media corporations have caved to his calls for. See: Jimmy Kimmel. Tim Cook dinner of Apple has been working arduous to remain on Trump’s good aspect. See: the made-in-America glass-and-gold trophy-like object that Cook dinner gifted the president final month. And the NFL just isn’t a venue Trump is prone to overlook, contemplating his possessive angle towards it. See: his order that the 2027 draft shall be held on the Nationwide Mall in Washington, and his 2017 fixation on Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling.
However the NFL counts about 39 million Latinos amongst its followers, and they don’t seem to be solely loyal watchers, but in addition loyal customers of merchandise. Half one million individuals attended Benito’s exhibits at El Choli, with greater than a 3rd of them touring from the continental U.S. The residency is estimated to have pumped $400 million into the Puerto Rican economic system. And he’s world: His world tour, which begins this fall, offered greater than 2.6 million tickets in per week.
Laid out this manner, it’s clear why the Tremendous Bowl desires Benito. However why does Benito need the Tremendous Bowl?
Not for the cash: It’s, notoriously, an unpaid gig. He has no use of extra “mainstream” American approval—he already has lots. So why come stateside, after so publicly refusing to go?
Some have urged that the choice is hypocritical: Possibly he’s prepared to put aside his considerations about ICE in return for a big-enough venue. However to these of us who comply with Unhealthy Bunny, this appears absurd. He isn’t an artist to waste a platform—nor one to chew his tongue. If Benito is doing the Tremendous Bowl, we’ve got to imagine that there’s something he desires to say, on this venue, in entrance of this huge viewers. “What I’m feeling goes past myself,” Unhealthy Bunny stated in a press release shared by the NFL. “That is for my individuals, my tradition, and our historical past.”
There’s a scene within the documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime—about J.Lo’s personal Tremendous Bowl efficiency, in 2020—during which the NFL tries to strong-arm her out of commenting on ICE’s family-separation coverage by placing little one performers in cages onstage along with her. Lopez pushed again, and he or she received her means. It’s arduous to think about Benito even being prepared to barter. It is a man whose breakthrough album was known as YHLQMDLG (quick for “Yo hago lo que me da la gana,” or “I do no matter I would like”). The NFL, Apple, and NBC could have banked on reserving a world celebrity who occurs to talk and sing in Spanish, however I ponder in the event that they absolutely understand what a political artist he’s.
Those that do not suppose Latino tradition is American tradition, as effectively those that delight within the degradation of Latino individuals, will certainly discover it troublesome to look at a person in a leisure swimsuit joyously rapping, dancing, and singing in Spanish alongside a full salsa band on the largest stage within the nation.
This Tremendous Bowl announcement is a win for anybody who desires to rejoice Latino music. However it’s additionally a win for anybody who cares about company complicity as our nation slides into autocracy. It means that some establishments are nonetheless prepared to withstand Trump’s makes an attempt to whitewash American tradition.
Will Trump have the ability to restrain himself from making an attempt to censor the present because the prospect of him being criticized on America’s greatest evening of leisure looms? The 2026 Tremendous Bowl gained’t be about simply the match enjoying out on the sector. It would even be in regards to the wrestle over whom America is for.
