Bad Bunny signs the most political show of the Super Bowl

It has shown that the show can be more than just entertainment: it can be memory, identity and cultural powerand that thirteen minutes are enough to rewrite the rules of the country’s greatest television ritual.

What happened on that stage was not just music. It has been a millimetrically constructed visual and political narrative: rural Puerto Rico as a starting point; the house as a community center; the body and reggaeton as a cultural archive; the flags disputing the meaning of “America.”

Even the most imperceptible details have spoken – a bottle of rum with the Spanish flag – reminding us that the colonial past is still part of the present. Nothing has been there by chance. Everything has worked as a message directed to millions of viewers accustomed to consuming Latin culture without stopping to listen to what it says.

The reaction has been immediate and deeply revealing. While one part of the country has celebrated the show as a historical and necessary statement, another has reacted with outright rejection, even with a parallel show. Donald Trump has called the show “absolutely terrible” just minutes later, confirming that what Bad Bunny has put on stage has not been neutral or conciliatory.

It has been a mirror. And in a United States crossed by tensions over identity, migration and belonging, that mirror has exposed a fracture that is not closed with applause or silence. This show didn’t end when the music turned off: it started there.

The child, the symbol and politics

If you can only choose one moment that concentrates the political charge, it was when Bad Bunny gave one of his Grammys to a child whose appearance and context have immediately activated a massive association with Liam Rabbit Ramosthe five-year-old boy detained by ICE and become a symbol of the immigration debate in the United States.

The reaction has been withering: social networks turned upside down, immediate political readings, a shared intuition that this gesture could not be innocent. The country was already prepared to see Liam there, because the image of migrant childhood remained openunresolved, in public conversation.

The clarification came later and has not diminished the impact. The boy on stage was not Liam, but an Argentine-Egyptian actor who later published the video of the moment on Instagram thanking Bad Bunny and writing a simple phrase: “I will always remember this day.”

The data has closed the factual confusion, but it has not emptied the meaning of the moment. It was not about representing a specific case, but rather about placing an open image. A Grammy in the hands of a child, at the center of the most American ritual of the year, has been read as symbol of belonging and recognition; and, due to the context—with Liam’s story still recent—that image has activated an inevitable question about childhood, borders, and who belongs. The contrast has not been explained, it has occurred.

There silence has been decisive. After explicitly criticizing immigration agents at the Grammys, Bad Bunny has chosen to include immigration policy at the Super Bowl without saying a single word about it. This omission has not been neutrality, but rather narrative calculation: in the most closely watched scenario in the country, the symbol has been more effective than the slogan. The political reaction has confirmed it.

Donald Trump has not limited himself to rejecting the show, he has questioned whether it represents American values ​​and has insisted that “no one understands what he sings” because it is in Spanishreducing the conflict to language and belonging. Faced with that defensive reading, Bad Bunny has said something else from the stage: that he is there because he has never stopped believing in himself.

In this context, the gesture with the child has functioned as a direct appeal to the children—and especially the Latino children—so that they do not be afraid, so that they do not shrink, so that they understand that the world can also be theirs.

Puerto Rico in the center of the US

But the symbolism has not been concentrated in a single isolated gesture, but in its complete design. Bad Bunny has turned the stadium into a map of Puerto Rico. The show began in a sugarcane field—an image steeped in economic and colonial history—and from there it moved through specific scenes of daily life: jibaros with kettles, canoe stands, people gathered as in a plaza, dominoes, boxing, music playing at ground level.

They were not generic or folkloric references: they were recognizable scenes, precisely placed to establish a starting point. Before the global artist there is the island; before the show, life.

This display has not functioned as a set, but as a narrative structure. The stadium has been transformed into a community space, almost a town festival, where La Casita has acted as a symbolic nucleus without absorbing the entire story. Street, stalls, bodies and music have coexisted around it, composing a choral scene that shifts the focus from the individual to the group.

In the greatest ritual of American entertainment – traditionally focused on the exceptional figure – Bad Bunny has told a story where exceptionality does not exist without community.

Music has sustained that displacement. Reggaeton has not appeared as an exported sound or as a provocation, but as historical continuity: linked with plena, bomb and salsa, with rhythms that speak of the neighborhood, of resistance and of collective celebration. The body that dances has been an archive, the language that sings has been memory. Nothing has been translated and nothing has been explained. The show has not facilitated entry: it has demanded that the viewer enter its code.

In this context, the —real— wedding celebrated on stage has acquired a specific weight. It was not a romantic gesture or an emotional resource. It has been an affirmation of life and future. Putting a wedding at the center of the national ritual has said something very concrete: here you not only dance, here you live; Here it is not only celebrated, here it is built. In a country where the Latino presence is often narrated as provisional or conditional, that gesture has placed stability, heritage and tomorrow at the forefront.

The stars who have accompanied the show have reinforced that logic without displacing it. Figures like Jessica Alba, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal o Karol G They have not validated the story from the outside: they have entered it. The hierarchy has been reversed. It is not Latino seeking approval, it is the mainstream orbiting a narrative already constructed from another place.

That is why the subsequent criticism of the majority use of Spanish has not been a musical issue. It has been a resistance to that image of a complete, visible and fearless community.

Hawaii, The Blackout and the fight for America

The last section of the show was the moment in which Bad Bunny stopped suggesting and began to affirm. The entrance of Ricky Martin It has not operated as a tribute or as shared nostalgia, but as a political warning.

What happened to Hawaii —the chosen song—has functioned as a mirror: a territory converted into a product, a culture erased by tourism and capital until it becomes unrecognizable to those who support it. It is not an abstract metaphor, but a concrete reading about Gentrification, displacement and contemporary colonialism.