Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s vision for a Super Bowl halftime show | Opinion
The selection of megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles.
The ostensible reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus, according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”
For the new form of conservatism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren claimed Bad Bunny is “not an American artist.”
The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: What is America, and how should it be represented?
The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-informed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.
For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American is insulting. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a U.S. citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been U.S. citizens since the passage of the Jones Act of 1917.
As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024 and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others — including the authors here — do not support mass ICE roundups.
Such free-speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As author James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago and as is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it toward our laudable goals of freedom and equality.
Further, the fact that Bad Bunny sings in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its language. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue.
While President Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration not only does not carry the weight of law, it also appears to run afoul of a host of U.S. Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual nation — including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols, which held that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.
The U.S. is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands conquered during a period of U.S. imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since World War I, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great.
So why does being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican make Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA circles?
For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color and immigrants. But Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”), can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.
Previous Super Bowl halftime acts, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best and most diverse talents.
But suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough?
Ediberto Román is a professor of law and director of immigration and citizenship initiatives at Florida International University. Ernesto Sagás is a professor of ethnic studies at Colorado State University. He has a doctorate in political science from the University of Florida.