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Midway through the Packers-Cowboys game on Sunday appeared a 23-second commercial. Like all things Benito Ocasio Martinez, it was deceptively simple. The video begins close in on the face of the impish superstar in a palm-leaf pava hat, a stunning beachfront sunset—the kind that only Puerto Rico can deliver—behind him. Waves crash and seagulls cry as we hear the opening notes of his dreamy track “Callaita” and the camera begins to zoom out. The singer is sitting on a goalpost in a suit and flip-flops, casually swinging his legs. It’s official: Bad Bunny will headline the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.
Tuning into the Super Bowl is one of the last shared cultural experiences in our divided country, and the announcement has ignited another round in the culture wars over what “real America” should look and sound like.
Bad Bunny, or Benito, as he’s affectionately referred to by his fans, is closing out a historic year. In January, his latest album hit a billion streams in just 13 days. Rather than tour to promote the album, the artist announced a summer-long residency in his homeland of Puerto Rico, called “No me quiero ir de aquí” (“I don’t want to leave here”). The 31 shows at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, known as El Choli, were an unapologetic celebration of Puerto Rican music and culture that reverberated far beyond those of us lucky enough to catch one of the shows in person. The final performance in late September was timed to the anniversary of Hurricane Maria and livestreamed on Amazon Music; it shattered the platform’s records, surpassing even Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
[Read: The trouble with Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico takeover]
Bad Bunny has said he wanted to avoid touring in the continental United States to protect his fans from being targeted by ICE agents. But he had Latinos all over the U.S. dancing and singing in Spanish, our heads held high, during what has otherwise been a very, very bad year.
Latino dehumanization is a hallmark of the Trump administration. Videos of masked ICE officers making violent arrests have been shared regularly across social media. Latinos are hardly the only people being rounded up and deported, but it is Latino faces—shoved to the asphalt, crying for their children and for mercy—that symbolize victory to the MAGA radicals. It is Latino faces that have been turned into degrading memes. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and Border Patrol officers are within their rights to stop anyone who, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work in a low wage job.”
Attacks on Latino people have happened in tandem with attacks on Latino culture. English has been declared the “official” language in the U.S.; the White House deleted its Spanish-language website on day one of this administration. Plans for a Latino-history branch of the Smithsonian have been halted. In all of these ways, the Trump administration is trying to purge Latinos from this country—some of us physically, all of us symbolically.
All of this is what makes the selection of Bad Bunny in 2026 so remarkable, and why the Latino-verse—and millions of Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump’s policies—went so wild.
This year, 191 million people watched the game. Although so many of the old status markers for musicians, such as the VMAs, have vanished or lost their relevance, the Super Bowl halftime show, America’s largest stage, can still turn artists into icons. Bad Bunny is not just a Spanish-speaking artist. He’s a political one. He endorsed Kamala Harris, supports Puerto Rican independence, and, in one mocking music video, had a voice that sounds just like Trump’s declare that “this country is nothing without the immigrants. This country is nothing without Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans.”
Surely the companies behind the halftime show—the NFL, Apple Music, and NBC, which will broadcast this year’s game—knew their decision to platform Bad Bunny would be controversial.
The “average halftime viewer in Des Moines doesn’t speak fluent reggaeton,” one commentator complained on X. The Newsmax host Greg Kelly called for people to boycott the NFL because of the choice, and lamented that Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, hates the English language! He’s just a terrible person.”
“There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the U.S.,” Bad Bunny told I.D. Magazine, “and none of them were out of hate.” But presumably, having grown up in an American colony where citizens lack the right to vote for or against Trump, Bad Bunny does have more conflicted feelings about the role and history of the U.S. than, say, the average halftime viewer in Des Moines.
The companies didn’t choose Bad Bunny because they like, or even care about, his politics. They chose him because he’s enormously popular—he is the most-streamed male artist in the world on Spotify—and that’s good for business.
The Super Bowl, of course, is a private event—and a hugely lucrative one. Businesses, in theory, have no obligation to embrace the current government’s politics by hiring or firing stars according to its preferences. The past few months, however, have given Americans reason to doubt that corporations have much willingness to defy the Trump administration. Big media companies have caved to his demands. See: Jimmy Kimmel. Tim Cook of Apple has been working hard to stay on Trump’s good side. See: the made-in-America glass-and-gold trophy-like object that Cook gifted the president last month. And the NFL is not a venue Trump is likely to overlook, considering his possessive attitude toward it. See: his order that the 2027 draft will be held on the National Mall in Washington, and his 2017 fixation on Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling.
But the NFL counts about 39 million Latinos among its fans, and they are not only loyal watchers, but also loyal consumers of merchandise. Half a million people attended Benito’s shows at El Choli, with more than a third of them traveling from the continental U.S. The residency is estimated to have pumped $400 million into the Puerto Rican economy. And he is global: His world tour, which starts this fall, sold more than 2.6 million tickets in a week.
[From the November 2022 issue: Let Puerto Rico be free]
Laid out this way, it’s clear why the Super Bowl wants Benito. But why does Benito want the Super Bowl?
Not for the money: It is, notoriously, an unpaid gig. He has little need of more “mainstream” American approval—he already has plenty. So why come stateside, after so publicly refusing to go?
Some have suggested that the decision is hypocritical: Maybe he’s willing to set aside his concerns about ICE in return for a big-enough venue. But to those of us who follow Bad Bunny, this seems absurd. He is not an artist to waste a platform—nor one to bite his tongue. If Benito is doing the Super Bowl, we have to assume that there is something he wants to say, in this venue, in front of this enormous audience. “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” Bad Bunny said in a statement shared by the NFL. “This is for my people, my culture, and our history.”
There is a scene in the documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime—about J.Lo’s own Super Bowl performance, in 2020—in which the NFL tries to strong-arm her out of commenting on ICE’s family-separation policy by putting child performers in cages onstage with her. Lopez pushed back, and she got her way. It’s hard to imagine Benito even being willing to negotiate. This is a man whose breakthrough album was called YHLQMDLG (short for “Yo hago lo que me da la gana,” or “I do whatever I want”). The NFL, Apple, and NBC may have banked on booking a global superstar who happens to speak and sing in Spanish, but I wonder if they fully realize what a political artist he is.
Those who don’t think Latino culture is American culture, as well those who delight in the degradation of Latino people, will surely find it difficult to watch a man in a leisure suit joyously rapping, dancing, and singing in Spanish alongside a full salsa band on the biggest stage in the nation.
This Super Bowl announcement is a win for anyone who wants to celebrate Latino music. But it’s also a win for anyone who cares about corporate complicity as our nation slides into autocracy. It suggests that some institutions are still willing to resist Trump’s attempts to whitewash American culture.
Will Trump be able to restrain himself from attempting to censor the show as the prospect of him being criticized on America’s biggest night of entertainment looms? The 2026 Super Bowl won’t be about just the match playing out on the field. It will also be about the struggle over whom America is for.
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