Can Bad Bunny Build a Bridge for Healing?

Photo Credits: © Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com

BTS helped heal historic rifts in the East with their newest album, Arirang, but another musician has diligently been working to heal rifts in the Americas. Few contemporary artists occupy the surreal civic position that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny, now holds. He is, at once, a reggaetonero from a small town in Puerto Rico, a Grammy-winning global pop star, a lightning rod in U.S. political discourse, and, increasingly, something closer to a cultural diplomat for a region whose internal relationships have rarely been simple. To understand why his music resonates so powerfully across Puerto Rico, Mexico, the nations of South America, and the Hispanic and Latino communities of the United States, it helps to first understand how divided that audience has historically been. This post examines those divides, while also considering how Bad Bunny's music, and his public role functions as a form of cultural healing.

It is tempting to speak of Latin American identities as though they describe a single coherent culture. They do not. The Spanish-speaking Americas were built through centuries of overlapping and often contradictory histories: Spanish colonization that imposed one imperial language on hundreds of distinct indigenous nations; the uneven process of independence in the nineteenth century that left some territories, like Puerto Rico and Cuba, under Spanish rule for decades after their mainland neighbors had already broken free; and, later, direct American territorial and military intervention across the hemisphere including the annexation of half of Mexico's territory in 1848, repeated U.S. occupations in the Caribbean and Central America, and the acquisition of Puerto Rico itself as a spoil of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Puerto Rico's case is particularly instructive, because it sits at the center of Bad Bunny's own artistic project. The island has never been fully incorporated into the United States nor granted independence; it exists in a kind of political suspension as an unincorporated territory, a status whose ambiguity has shaped everything from its economic policy to its migration patterns. Successive waves of Puerto Ricans left the island for cities like New York, producing a community and a diaspora identity distinct from, yet still bound to, island life. That relationship runs through nearly all of Bad Bunny's recent work.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Mexico and the broader Latin American south has its own history of distance. National rivalries, distinct musical traditions, and competing claims to cultural preeminence within "Latin" identity have often created regional tensions rather than intertwining them. Even within the United States, Hispanic and Latino communities have frequently been treated by the broader American public as a homogeneous group, all while minimizing real differences in history and experience.  Further, these actions simultaneously expose these communities to the same currents of nativism, language discrimination, and, in the current political moment, aggressive immigration enforcement. These are tensions built from a long history.  There does not exist a naturally occurring or pre-existing solidarity.  which Bad Bunny reflects, but rather his music is a means to heal tensions and construct a new one.  Music is one of the few things powerful enough to build such bridges and bonds.

Bad Bunny's aesthetic choices are not incidental to this argument, they are the argument itself. His 2025 album Debí Tirar Más Fotos is constructed almost entirely from Puerto Rican musical vocabulary — plena, jíbaro folk music, salsa, and bomba — rather than the more globally legible trap and reggaeton sound that made him famous. Critics described the record as his most personal and most explicitly political work, an album that treats Puerto Rican musical tradition as an archive of resistance rather than a nostalgic backdrop. The rollout made this intent explicit: each song's music video was paired with a slide history of the island compiled with a University of Wisconsin historian, walking listeners through Spanish colonization, U.S. acquisition, the Puerto Rican diaspora, and mid-century political repression. This is, functionally, a history lesson delivered through pop music, narrating a colonial past to an audience that may never encounter it in a classroom.

That same album reaches outward from Puerto Rico toward the rest of the hemisphere. Its opening track samples a classic salsa record about the Puerto Rican experience in New York, while another song draws an explicit parallel between the gentrification and displacement facing Puerto Rico and the dispossession of Native Hawaiians, linking Puerto Rico's colonization to a broader pattern of American territorial appropriation rather than treating it as a uniquely Caribbean grievance. Bad Bunny's influence has helped fuel renewed mainstream interest in regional Mexican music, and Mexican artists have folded his sound into their own genre experiments, creating a two-way exchange between Puerto Rican and Mexican popular music. The effect is to treat Puerto Rican, Mexican, and broader Pan-Latin American musical traditions as dialects of a shared musical language. If the musical syncretism does the work of historical argument, the lyrical content does the work to directly address the diaspora. Songs built around the immigrant experience in the United States explicitly name multiple national origins together; Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Cuban, refusing to treat "Latino" as a single undifferentiated category while still insisting that these distinct communities share enough common ground to be addressed and to act together. This is a delicate balance: Bad Bunny is effectively creating harmony and solidarity, without asserting sameness.

This has taken on more urgency in the current political climate. Citing fears that large gatherings of Latino fans could become targets for immigration enforcement, Bad Bunny excluded the U.S. mainland from his 2025–2026 world tour, choosing instead to hold an extended concert residency in Puerto Rico itself, a decision which challenged the usual pattern of international artists treating the U.S. music industry as the ultimate destination, and instead made the island the site of pilgrimage. When he did appear on major U.S. stages, at the Grammy Awards and later at the Super Bowl LX halftime show, he used the platform to speak directly against immigration enforcement operations, becoming a focal point in an already polarized national conversation about language, belonging, and who counts as American. The public reception of that Super Bowl performance illustrates both the healing function of his performance and demonstrates its limits. Many Latino viewers described watching a nearly all-Spanish-language broadcast at the center of a quintessentially American ritual as a moment of collective validation. They were essentially being seen and claimed as part of the American fabric rather than apologized for. In contrast, some conservatives, as well as Latin American observers, criticized the performance as vulgar, and unrepresentative of the diversity of Latin American cultural values. That split itself, is evidence of something important: Bad Bunny's music does not achieve unity by smoothing over disagreement. It creates a shared occasion, a halftime show, an album, a protest chant, around which agreement and disagreement can both be organized, which is a more historically realistic form of cultural work than the language of healing sometimes implies.

What Bad Bunny's project offers, is not resolution but recognition. In doing so, he offers millions of listeners across the hemisphere something that these histories rarely provided: a shared narrative in which their distinct experiences of dispossession and displacement are legible to one another. Those shared experiences, more than any single lyric or gesture, is the real cultural work being done; and that has the power to be healing.

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Sources consulted: reporting and criticism from NPR, Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, the Boston Globe, and the National Catholic Register, among others, covering the release and reception of Debí Tirar Más Fotos (2025) and the 2026 Super Bowl LX halftime performance.