Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show announcement inspiring Bay Area’s Latin community

By Amanda Hari

Latin Superstar Bad Bunny will be headlining Apple Music’s Super Bowl Halftime show at Levi’s Stadium this February.

Puerto Ricans living in the Bay Area are already talking about what it means to see Bad Bunny represent their culture on one of the biggest stages.

“Involuntary swelling of the chest,” said Pablo Eduardo Paredes about his reaction to hearing about the Bad Bunny performance. “So much pride and joy, honestly. He is a brown man right now. He speaks for a Latin American experience of invisibility, of marginalization, of deportation.”

Something Paredes knows well, he’s Puerto Rican and spent part of his life living on the island. He’s currently a performance studies PhD candidate at UC Berkeley studying music, like Bad Bunny’s.

He said he’s also experienced stereotyping and racism and is seeing that in some reactions to Bad Bunny’s announcement.

“It’s interesting because when he was on the cover of Calvin Klein in his underwear, they had no problem with Bad Bunny,” Paredes recalls, about reactions to Bad Bunny’s opportunities in the past. “When he was starring in ‘Narcos’ there was no problem with Bad Bunny, so it’s OK if we stay in line with the stereotype, don’t bat an eye. But now that an artist is being taken seriously on one of the biggest stages that the United States offers on a yearly basis and that’s where it’s rubbing people the wrong way.”

But the naysayers don’t dampen the joy of those who need the representation.

“I was ecstatic,” said 16-year-old Edgar Jayden Valle. “I was on my phone just scrolling through social media, and I was really hyped.”

Even as a High Schooler, Valle already knows the weight of this performance.

“It’s such a big moment more than anything to have somebody of that magnitude take the stage and represent us,” said Valle.

His grandmother, Maria Acevedo Campbell, is president of the Puerto Rican Civic Club in San Jose.

She said while she doesn’t always like all the lines in Bad Bunny’s music, he does agree with his philosophies.

“But lately he has taken a stand on bringing to the forefront political and social issues that have impacted our island,” Campbell said about the evolution she’s seen in the performer.

Most recently, Bad Bunny finished up a historic Puerto Rico residency, bringing in tourism to his homeland.

It also kept his fans elsewhere safe. Bad Bunny recently decided to skip the U.S. on his world tour, citing ICE raids.

“It’s true that a tour throughout the US probably would have had a lot of migrant folks easily targeted at his concerts,” Paredes admits but doesn’t think those same officers will target his halftime performance. “It’s not so true that the Super Bowl is a place that ICE would want to target.”

He thinks it would cause delays and distractions, and Bad Bunny and all Puerto Ricans are American citizens, despite sometimes feeling like foreigners.

Paredes said having a Puerto Rican on this stage is a big step.

“It needs to happen that we have a Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl,” Paredes stated. “That he doesn’t translate himself. That he’s a household name. That he is the most-streamed artist globally and that is actually the cultural groundwork for when my kids get to call a Latina the first president of the United States.”