2026/02/09 by José Patricio Pérez-Rufí · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Latin American Literature Studies #Sports, Gender, and Society
paper · doi:10.5281/zenodo.18560944
openalex publication_date 2026/02/09 · openalex created_date 2026/02/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This paper examines Bad Bunny’s (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) televised halftime performance at Super Bowl LX, broadcast on 8 February 2026. Drawing on the theoretical framework of media events, media rituals and the culture of spectacle, it interprets the performance as a device of visibility and memory that reorganises the ritual of the major sporting event. The staging unfolds a symbolic grammar centred on Puerto Rico and the Latin diaspora: the opening amid sugarcane fields activates a colonial memory; the little house condenses home, community and cultural pride; the live wedding and the neighbourhood party advance a politics of affect; and the sequence focused on electrical infrastructure positions the island’s material precarity within the global public sphere. In its closing movement, the re-signification of the formula “God bless America”, through the enumeration of countries across the continent and the display of flags, constructs an inclusive pan-Americanism that challenges the appropriation of the term “America” as an exclusive synonym for the United States. The analysis argues that the spectacle offers a counter-narrative of citizenship: against contemporary discourses of fear, criminalisation and exclusion directed at Latin migration, Bad Bunny articulates recognition, self-esteem and continental fraternity without resorting to belligerent rhetoric.