How Bad Bunny took Puerto Rican independence mainstream

Throughline

NPR

History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How Bad Bunny became the global voice of a generation in crisis — and what it means when resistance becomes profitable.

Guests:

Carina Del Valle Schorske, writer, translator and wannabe backup dancer. She wrote a New York Times Magazine profile about Bad Bunny you can read here.

Vanessa Díaz, professor of Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She’s been teaching a Bad Bunny college course 2023 and is the co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project. She is also the co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American History at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He’s the author of Puerto Rico: A National History. He is also the author of the history visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF album.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from 48 hours with the 48 hours post-mortem podcast.
0:05.6	Host Anne Marie Green joins producers and correspondents to discuss key evidence, dead ends,
0:10.9	and stranger-than-fiction twists they faced in the field.
0:13.8	Listen on your favorite podcast app.
0:17.1	The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music Super Bowl 60 halftime show.
0:25.3	Benito Antonio Martinez, Ocasio, who you know is bad bunny.
0:35.1	He's a Spanish-speaking artist from a colony, and he's performing at the Super Bowl.
0:46.1	At a time when the Spanish language is being criminalized.
0:50.0	The Trump administration can continue indiscriminate immigration stops targeting Latinos and Spanish speakers.
0:56.7	We want to be with patriotic Americans, people who have great music, songs you've actually heard.
1:02.9	I think it's stupid political.
1:09.6	What he did was show the world what Latinos have and when he called out all of the countries.
1:18.6	It was so special and I got super emotional.
1:26.6	United States, Canada, Canada, my motherland, my father. so special and I got super emotional. Is it revolutionary? I don't think so
1:28.3	The NFL also wants to reach a broader international audience and Benito's the biggest artist in the world.
1:51.0	The biggest artist in the world performed mostly in Spanish at Super Bowl 60 in Santa Clara,
1:57.3	which, yes, cost some fanfare.
2:00.1	But the Puerto Rican singer and rapper,
2:02.2	whose dominated global charts for the past eight years,
2:05.7	isn't a stranger to politics.
2:07.9	He refused to perform his most recent album in the continental U.S.,
2:11.9	saying he's worried that ICE will come after his fans.
	...

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