What Next - Bad Bunny Has Already Won The Super Bowl
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show means for Puerto Rico, Latin Americans in the U.S., and his haters.
Guest: Dr. Vanessa Díaz, associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University and co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Heads up here at the top, there's a little spicy language in this show. |
| 0:11.5 | You know how sometimes when people are talking about a peak life experience or some competition, |
| 0:17.8 | a thing they think maybe you're not going to get. |
| 0:20.7 | They'll say, this thing is my |
| 0:23.3 | Super Bowl. That is how Vanessa Diaz feels about the actual Super Bowl this weekend. |
| 0:31.8 | I'm extremely excited for the Super Bowl this year, and I am not a football fan. |
| 0:37.9 | Vanessa is a professor, who is also something of an expert on Bad Bunny. |
| 0:42.8 | She teaches an entire collegiate class about him. |
| 0:46.2 | Bad Bunny is, of course, the star of Sunday's halftime show. |
| 0:49.2 | That's why this weekend is Vanessa's Super Bowl. |
| 0:52.7 | I literally had no idea who was even in the game until recently, |
| 0:58.5 | because for me, the only participant I'm interested in is Bad Bunny. |
| 1:04.0 | El Equipo de Benito, that's who I'm rooting for. |
| 1:08.2 | Vanessa lays out all the reasons she studies Bad Bunny in the book she co-authored. |
| 1:13.4 | It's called Pefakenere, which is a shout-out to one of Benito's more popular anthems. |
| 1:19.3 | But in short, there's the music. |
| 1:22.2 | There's also the fact that Bad Bunny is singularly obsessive about Puerto Rican history and culture. He has no problem, |
| 1:29.2 | spinning bars about the island's notorious power outages or debt crisis. Also, he plays with |
| 1:35.8 | stereotypes of Latino masculinity, like he released this song back in 2018, Keto, that translates |
| 1:42.5 | to expensive. It opens with Benito getting his nails painted. |
| 1:47.5 | At one point, he actually is portrayed by an androgynous female model. |
| 1:52.5 | He has a part in the song where he is saying, |
... |
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