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When Bad Bunny emerged from a row of towering sugar cane stalks to kick off his Super Bowl halftime show performance, it might have been easy to read the set design as little more than a lush backdrop: a tableau of Caribbean paradise imported to the Bay. Bad Bunny certainly didn’t explicitly acknowledge the sugar cane: He was too busy singing “Tití Me Preguntó,” a brash ode to his sexual prowess, which has racked up a billion streams both on Spotify and YouTube.
But like everything that Bad Bunny does, the scene cut deeper than its appearance. The Puerto Rican singer surrounded himself with men and women cutting down the stalks, summoning the territory’s centuries-long colonization, in which sugar played a central role. Spain brought the crop to the island in the 1500s and set up massive plantations manned by slaves. At the end of the 19th century, the United States took the island by force and set up its own lucrative sugar colony, with mainland corporations controlling a significant share of production and reaping massive profits.
For rulers abroad, the Puerto Rican people were mostly a nuisance to be managed. But despite all of this, Boricuas found ways to thrive. They created their own music, food, oral traditions and businesses, forging a fiercely resilient and joyous culture that has now been exported to the world. And Bad Bunny, in just a few minutes of television, communicated all of this: the oppression, the ingenuity, the joy of his people. Eighty years after the government made it illegal to fly a Puerto Rican flag or sing a patriotic tune, there was Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, proudly waving that flag and singing his proudly Puerto Rican songs, surrounded by Latinos carrying their own banderas on America’s biggest stage.
The show arrived against the backdrop of the U.S. invading another Latin-American state to gain control of its resources; and of masked government agents abducting Latinos from their own homes. Last week at the
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