The voices that build America
Bad Bunny and the Latin American identity at the 2026 LX Super Bowl.
The 2026 LX Super Bowl halftime performance was inspiring, filled with polemics, mixed emotions, resilience, and a demonstration of how language is a political statement.
On February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny—a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and producer—performed at the Super Bowl halftime. It was the first time that a Latin American artist performed primarily in Spanish during the Super Bowl. According to Billboard Canada, this performance set a historical record with 4.157 billion views within 24-hours.
You may ask, well why was this important? Let’s understand the context first. The Super Bowl is one of the most important events in the United States—symbolically American—where families and friends get together all over the country for one night to watch a football game. In a single sitting, 50 million cases of beer are consumed and 280 million pounds of avocados are imported from Mexico, simply for the Super Bowl weekend.
But, the most iconic feature of Bad Bunny’s performance was that, for the first time ever, a Spanish-performance was staged for the Super Bowl halftime show. This comes at an unprecedented time of violence, xenophobia, and racism targeted against immigrants, particularly the Latin American community in the US.
According to the American Immigration Council, as of January 2026, more than 73,000 people have been arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are in detention centers. In most conditions, arrested people do not have access to their families, lawyers, or any sort of protection while being held in detention, suffering from unhygienic, violent, and degrading conditions. These policies against immigrants, driven by Trump’s administration, have increased racism and segregation of ethnoracial minorities in the United States.
As a result of the growing xenophobia, many people felt offended by the Super Bowl halftime performance—the very core of the traditional American identity—being in Spanish. Organised by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organisation founded by Charlie Kirk, an alternative show was streamed at the same time as Bad Bunny’s performance in response. This was planned as a rejection of Bad Bunny’s show and what he represents: Latin American and Puerto Rican excellency and culture in the US.
Throughout Bad Bunny’s show, many visual symbols that indexed Latin American identity were used, like sugarcane fields and the field workers, a taco stand, big celebrations and festive gatherings full of dance which happen around the family and the community, to celebrate the Latin American heritage.
But what does it mean to be Latin American?
Latin Americans are often grouped as a mix of different ethnicities and treated as “the other”, being racialized partly due to political instabilities of Latin American nations, as well as cultural differences. Even if Latin America encompasses diverse countries, with different ethnic and Indigenous groups, we share similarities in culture and language, where Spanish is predominant—with the exception of Brazil, where Portuguese is the official language.
Grouping together diverse ethnoracial communities risks erasing individual identities. However, “Latinx identity is a visible identity because of its variability.” Therefore, by using the term Latin American, our cultures and language variations are not fighting against each other, rather amplify a part of who we are, embracing heterogeneity as well as our commonalities.
The complicated part of this comes when our culture, language, background ,and physical features are used to marginalize us. An example of this is the racial profiling that is used by ICE to detain people, simply for how you look or what you speak.
When Latin Americans arrive in North America, they are urged to adapt to society, forced to abandon their tongues and speak in English. Whereas, when English speakers go to Latin American countries, locals adapt to understand them. It is ironic that the US gets to consume our cuisine (like the infamous guacamole made for the Super Bowl weekend) and culture (like Bad Bunny), whilst targeting, detaining, and dehumanising our people.
Amongst other things, Trump criticised the halftime show and commented on his social media Truth Social: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Here is where Bad Bunny’s performance in Spanish challenges these colonialist ideologies, using language to stand in uncomfortable spaces and to make a statement: “seguimos aquí,” we are still here. This is a sign of resistance: we are here, we are part of the continent, we built our lives here from scratch, and this is our home too!
In the end, Bad Bunny sends a message of unity, platforming all nations of the Americas, including Mexico, United States, Canada, and, his homeland, Puerto Rico. By doing this he refers to America not as a country, but as a continent with different countries, cultures, and languages. Bad Bunny was able to prove to us that our differences do not have to be a drive for hate and conflict, but to use it as a leverage to learn from one another, embrace multiculturality, and appreciate the beauty in our cultures and languages. The show highlighted that being Latinx does not have to be a dichotomy to being a US citizen. This show demonstrated that our cultures can live together, symbolised by the salsa version of Lady Gaga’s Die with a Smile.
Bad Bunny’s performance rendered Latin American culture visible through details and symbols, despite the dehumanisation and stereotypes placed upon Latin Americans. These symbols served as a tool in which Latin American culture defies the constraints of who is allowed to exist in North America, showing resilience and challenging power systems through language.
The message of this event was an example of how performances make Latin American bonds stronger. By showcasing identities and linguistic ideologies through visual symbols and the use of Spanish language, Bad Bunny reflected everyday social realities, which make Latin American culture visible. This was a performance that can help Western society realize the damage that racist and colonialist practices cause and how language can promote a social change, rejecting policies that reinforce inhumane treatments against immigrants.
A compelling look at how oral histories and marginalized narratives serve as the true architecture of a nation. By focusing on the ‘voices’ rather than just the ‘monuments,’ we get a much more textured and honest understanding of the labor, sacrifice, and diversity that define the American project.