PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NEW YORKER

Bad Bunny performs at the Super Bowl LX halftime show.

When it was announced a few months ago that the halftime performer for Super Bowl LX would be Bad Bunny, who has been the dominating top global artist of this decade, I thought this to be perfectly suitable. Others didn’t seem to think so.

The truth is, you can pose any excuse you want, but if you went out of your way to purposefully avoid the Bad Bunny performance this Super Bowl, you’re the problem.

I could have never imagined Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl would become politicized. Yet, many people seem to think that the artist’s selection was a radical and anti-American act by the National Football League, when in reality, it’s quite the exact opposite. 

America would be nothing without immigrants. Literally. The country was originally founded solely because a group of Europeans decided to immigrate overseas and call this land their home. (Then, they did do a bunch of terrible things to the Native population, but that’s not the point here.) 

At times like these, it seems like people seem to forget this fact, and, unless you’re an indigenous American, your ancestry in America is rooted in immigration. Moreover, this migration was not driven by any external force or state division, because, from the beginning, it has always been a human’s natural right to migrate. 

The American Revolution was fought in the name of individual freedoms and liberties, and, thereafter, America has been built on the backs of those who chose migration as a path for a better future.

In the 1980s, former President Ronald Reagan made the Liberty Park Speech, where he said, “Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” 

The U.S. has always coined itself to be a “melting pot” nation, and a country where any person of any color or place can plant their roots and belong.

There has never been and will never be one single way to be American. America is not just white and America is not just English, because America is the people who give their lives to it. With that, immigrant populations in the U.S. spend the better part of their lives assimilating within an environment where they’re a stranger. 

Much of the immigrant population is forced to constantly consume American media that doesn’t conform to their respective culture or language, so what’s the big deal if the Super Bowl halftime show, for the first time ever, commemorates and represents American Latinos in their own language? 

Bad Bunny’s message this Super Bowl, “the only thing more powerful than hate is love,” pushes exactly this. You cannot call yourself a proud American and simultaneously hate the people who make America.

Furthermore, I know for a fact that you are reading this because you vibe to Latino music. I can still vividly recall how almost every single person in my Spanish I class in high school was on the edge of their seat waiting to share that their favorite song in Spanish was “Gasolina”. Hating on Bad Bunny’s performance now looks performative and fake.

I can promise that absolutely none of the viewers of the alternative halftime show, put on by Turning Point USA, would’ve melted had they just sat through the actual (and objectively better) Super Bowl halftime show. 

I’ll choose a Latino over someone like Kid Rock any day. That’s just me, though.

So let’s get one final thing straight: Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, so, as an American citizen, Bad Bunny is pretty much as American as it gets. 

As many users online have compared the situation: the same people who “need” their own halftime show now were the same people who “needed” their own water fountain then.

Categories: Opinion