Lucy Gellman File Photos.
On the screen, Bad Bunny had just emerged from a sugarcane field, his white-on-white outfit luminous against the tall green stalks, when he dipped into the third verse of “Tití Me Preguntó,” and the lush, easy flow of the words became propulsive. Beneath the musician’s voice, a beat dropped, and he bounced forward, from a cart piled with sweet coco frío to a game of dominoes in full force. He two-stepped toward a piragua cart, dancing past a nail tech with her acrylics ready, and took a small cup filled with gem-colored ice.
Yo dejo que jueguen con mi corazón / Quisiera mudarme con toas pa una mansión, he rapped into the camera, handing the piragua off in one clean motion. From his couch in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood, artist Juancarlos Soto remembered his childhood in Cayey, Puerto Rico, and began to cry.
Those universes folded in on each other again and again Sunday night, as Puerto Ricans across greater New Haven—and across a diaspora—watched Bad Bunny take the stage at the 2026 Super Bowl, set this year in Santa Clara, California. Long before the Seattle Seahawks defeated the New England Patriots, the game became about another kind of victory altogether, with a performance that was as steeped in Puerto Rican history and culture as it was sonically significant and complex.
It marked the first ever performance of a Superbowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish. By the end of a 15-minute stretch, it had folded in centuries of Puerto Rican history, from the heavy weight of colonization and enslavement to the rich culture that has grown out of resistance, activism, and the Afro-Boricua diaspora. In between, it criss-crossed genres from bomba y plena to salsa to reggaeton and dembow in under 20 minutes, telling that story in music and dance that a person could feel in their bones.
Juancarlos Soto during a fundraiser for the New Haven Pride Center in 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
“Oh my God, it’s the most amazing thing,” said Soto, a visual artist who works as the PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) Navigator at Anchor Health CT, in a phone call shortly after the performance. “So good. It’s just like, oh man. There’s something so amazing about our culture being celebrated on the world stage like that. Everything from the sugarcane workers to the piraguas, to seeing Lady Gaga singing salsa … it helps us feel so seen as so celebrated.”
“I’m so overwhelmed in the best possible way,” said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF) who is also a member of the bomba group Proyecto Cimarrón. She flowed through the performance in her head, from sugarcane fields to dominoes, piragua, salsa and the bright, history-laden backdrop of “NUEVAyol” (we see you, María Antonia Cay) to a nod to the island’s failing infrastructure and rolling blackouts in “El Apagón.” “It was a love letter to Puerto Rico and it was a celebration of Latino culture … it felt for a moment like I was back on the island.”
For both of them—and so many others watching the Benito Bowl from bars, restaurants, dance studios and the comfort of their own homes—that love came down to the performance itself, and the detail and care that the artist worked joyfully into every moment of the show. When, with a tinny, resonant strum of a cuatro, camera panned over the image of a sugarcane field, the sustenance farmers known as jíbaros working in its rows, Matos knew that Bad Bunny was about to have a conversation with his viewers and listeners. When at the end, he began to shout out the Americas, starting with Chile and then traveling northward all the way to Canada and the United States, Professor Carlos Torre could feel the number of different cultures celebrating across the globe. In between the musician delivered, in every possible way.
“We are talking here about these tragedies … and it’s being done with joy,” said Torre, a professor of curriculum and learning at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). He noted Bad Bunny’s ability to weave the painful histories of colonization, racism, forced migration, enslavement, and failing infrastructure into a profound commitment to resistance through the arts. “That joy comes from the Taíno worldview.”
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF) who is also a member of the bomba group Proyecto Cimarrón, during a performance on the New Haven Green in 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Even in the writings of colonizers like Christopher Columbus or Bartolome de las Casas, he continued, there are records of Indigenous Taíno people smiling and laughing. “The laughing part is in spite of the tragedies,” he said. Last week, he wrote a song about the need to hope in the face of incredible violence. “That laughter is protest.”
For viewers like Matos, who watched from her home in Fair Haven, “it was the way that he [Bad Bunny] has interpreted this conversation,” starting with the cane fields at the very top of the show. For centuries, sugar was Puerto Rico’s largest and most lucrative export, an industry that relied on the unpaid, forced labor of enslaved Africans from the early sixteenth through the late nineteenth century. Embedded in the rhythms and tradition of bomba are painful, layered stories of sugarcane plantations, and a parallel narrative of profound resistance.
It’s one that echoes through today, she said. Even after the formal abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, Puerto Rico’s elite—a wealthy, land-owning, mostly European ruling class—forced poor farmers to take over much of that labor, in a system that was designed to keep poor people poor and consolidate wealth. That’s not new, nor is it over: the ecological and economic disenfranchisement of Afro-Boricuas on and off the island continues today.
In under three minutes, Bad Bunny delivered it as an ear-wormy, visually lush history lesson to over 130 million viewers.
With a football cradled in the crook of his arm, he was just getting started. Emerging from makeshift rows of sugarcane in the center of Levi’s Stadium, Bad Bunny bounced between cultural touchpoints that have become part of the Boricua diaspora, from dominoes to piragua to the way Puerto Rico has transformed boxing from a 20th century colonial import, mired in history of military interventions, into a tradition of its own. By the time he flowed into his 2020 hit “Yo perreo Sola,” it was nearly impossible not to stand up and dance.
In one moment, he could see himself in his mid-30s, rethinking the importance of land and of farming as he sat down to draw the folkloric hero Juan Bobo (that rendering, by Soto, is pictured to the left). In another, he was that little kid, sleeping across three chairs during a salsa-studded wedding.
In another still, he was close to screaming as Ricky Martin took the stage for a cover of “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” in a politically charged reminder to listeners that what made Bad Bunny possible Sunday was years of Latino artists fighting for recognition, as they still are today. Before there was Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, there was Martin’s ceiling-shattering performance of "La Copa de la Vida" at the 1999 Grammy Awards, and two decades later, a Superbowl spot from Jennifer Lopez and Shakira at which a baby-faced Bad Bunny, still on the come up, performed.
“What Bad Bunny is doing is making Americans have this conversation,” Soto said. “Even if you say. ‘Puerto Ricans are Americans,’ it’s painful. We are Americans not because we want to be, we are Americans because we were invaded and we are being held hostage. We are a country held hostage by the United States.”
“It kind of brought all those things up,” he added. “There’s this joy, this pride, the first time that an entire show was done in Spanish,” and at the same time, there’s room for a deep critique of colonialism and the impact it has had on the island.
"Salsa Beneath the Stars" with Alisa Bowens-Mercado last summer, before New Haven was a frozen tundra. Jarelis Calderon File Photo.
Across town, salsera Alisa Bowens-Mercado and her husband, John Mercado, were already feeling the music when a wedding party on screen parted to reveal Lady Gaga with a full salsa band behind her, and dancing became a non-negotiable. On stage, Gaga swayed to a reimagined version of “Die With a Smile,” Los Sobrinos carrying the tune. When they shifted into “Baile Inolvidable,” salsa unfolding across the stage, Bowens-Mercado’s dad, William Bowens, agreed that it was probably finally time for him to get to the studio.
At points, she joked, it was hard to say who was more excited: Bowens-Mercado, a Black artist and brewer who has studied salsa between Puerto Rico and New Haven for the past 25 years, (in 2022, she earned the title of “honorary Boricua” from Puerto Ricans United, Inc.), or her husband, a proud Puerto Rican who grew up in the Bronx, and now calls the Elm City his home.
Sunday, the performance took her back to a recent trip to the island, during which she traveled to Loíza with a group of 15 women including her mom, and took her first formal bomba lesson. Bomba, she knew, is a form of musical call-and-response that grew out of the Afro-Caribbean slave trade. But as she moved through the dance, “it connected us to our roots,” she said. By the end of the class, many of the attendees were crying, aware of the weight of the moment.
So too Sunday’s concert, which reminded her of the power of the arts in building community and speaking out for the love that holds it together. In the past several months, she said, she’s seen a rise in the number of people seeking out classes at her Westville studio, in part because they are interested in learning more about Latin dance and in part because they don’t want to feel alone. In any language, she said, dance and music can do that.
“It just gave me pride,” she said. “I didn’t grow up with the language, but the common denominator of music is universal. Even though I didn't understand what they [teachers] were saying 25 years ago, I connected with the rhythm and the beat and the joy, and it was infectious. So watching the halftime show, it was a full-circle moment on one of the world’s biggest platforms. That culture and that energy, it’s a feeling. Bad Bunny took us through an entire story.”
“It was all about positivity and love, every song that he performed,” Mercado chimed in, still floating on the final moments of the performance. From his living room, he had watched Bad Bunny glide forward, shouting out countries across the Americas while holding a football printed with the words “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Before he finished, the stadium sending bursts of red, white and blue smoke into the evening sky, he had faced the camera and announced “Seguimos aqui.” “We’re still here.”
“My smile hasn’t gone away since halftime,” Mercado said, adding that it has reminded him of the value of compassion at a time that feels increasingly divisive. “When you’re dealing with any type of adversity and you see this on such a large stage, it bursts open another door. It’s like ‘You need to pay attention to this.’”
Matos in the summer of 2025, at a fundraiser for the family of Nancy Martinez. Martinez, a Mexican immigrant living in New Haven, was arrested, detained and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in June of last year. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Throughout the show, Matos felt that excitement too, enthralled with the sharp, only sometimes nuanced skill with which the musician delivered his message. When he lifted a Puerto Rican flag with an unmistakably turquoise triangle, she clocked it as the late nineteenth-century design now aligned with independence. During “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), an unabashed love letter to the island first released in 2022, there was no mistaking a dig at Puerto Rico’s failing power grid—and the decades of government negligence (including a chronic lack of U.S. assistance) that have caused it.
At the end, when Bad Bunny called out to countries across the Americas, she remembered the joy of resistance—a tradition that is baked into her own practice—that gets her through some of the heaviest work she has done in almost four decades, including two and a half in New Haven. Or as she referred to it Sunday, “the ugliest battle that I have ever fought around the dignity and rights of immigrants.”
“After tonight’s performance, my cup is full,” she said, praising the artist for using his platform to speak out against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), from his "No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí" residency last year to the Grammy Awards just last week. “I will be joyfully engaging in my work. It is what I have been called on to do.”
Soto, still floating on the performance when he picked up Sunday night, agreed. Before ending the phone call, he noted the power of not just Puerto Rican and Latino representation, but of queer representation, a reminder to millions of viewers that the LGBTQ+ community is part of every identity and every diaspora. He could feel that from dancers onstage to Martin himself, who came out publicly in 2010 after years of performing while in the closet.
“This is us taking our power and showing who we are,” Soto said. “It was a beautiful snapshot. It really cements the idea of ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,’ these small photographs of what it means to be a Puerto Rican.”