SAN JUAN — Like a conquering Boricua, Puerto Rican global superstar Bad Bunny revealed on social media Sunday that he will perform at the Super Bowl LX halftime show, the sacred ground of American national identity. He announced it while sitting atop a goalpost planted on a Caribbean beach, wearing a pava, a straw hat that is a powerful symbol of Puerto Rican culture, and swinging his chancleta-clad feet. 

“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” Bad Bunny, who has been critical of Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the United States’ colonial hold over Puerto Rico (just watch the video of his song "NUEVAYoL"), said soon after the news came out. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown… this is for my people, my culture, and our history.”

“Ve y dile a tu abuela, que seremos el HALFTIME SHOW DEL SUPER BOWL.” (“Go tell your grandma we’re going to be the Super Bowl halftime show.”) 

The show, which will air on NBC and Peacock, is executive-produced by U.S. music mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation and Jesse Collins and presented by Apple Music. It will be broadcast live on February 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. 

“What Benito has done and continues to do for Puerto Rico is truly inspiring,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “We are honored to have him on the world’s biggest stage.”

Of course he is. 

Who wouldn’t want the publicity and eyeballs that come with one of the world’s most-streamed artists (after Taylor Swift and The Weekend), whose 2022 “Un Verano Sin Ti” stands as the second Spanish-language album to reach number one in the U.S (Bad Bunny's 2020 album El Último Tour del Mundo was the first all-Spanish album to top the Billboard 200 chart), who has three Grammy Awards to his name, and just finished his historic three-month DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS residency in Puerto Rico.

The residency brought more than 600,000 people to the archipelago — both local and international — and a direct economic impact of $250 million, with an estimated total spending of $400 million once you include purchases not directly related to the concerts, according to Moody’s Analytics.

This November, Bad Bunny will launch a world tour, but will not play in the U.S. because he was worried that “fucking ICE could be outside” his shows and target his fans, as he said in an interview with i-D magazine. 

Still, he did decide to play just one U.S. date — the Super Bowl. 

Bad Bunny will follow in the heels of American rapper and singer Kendrick Lamar, who headlined last February, bringing in 133.5 million viewers, more than those watching the game. It was the highest-rated halftime show ever. I am running a bet that Bad Bunny’s will be even better. 

But not everyone is happy, as is to be expected in Trump’s America. Benny Johnson, right-wing political commentator and contributor to conservative outlets such as Breitbart News, went on X and called Bad Bunny a “massive Trump hater; anti-ICE activist; No songs in English.”

Conservative talk show host Dan O’Donnell also went on X to criticize the NFL’s decision. “Bad Bunny said two weeks ago he won’t perform in the U.S. because he’s scared ICE agents would deport his fans,” he said. “Turns out his business sense far outweighs his moral convictions.”

Sure, it’s about business, and who can blame him? However, there is a key point that many Americans overlook — more than the money or fame (which he already has in abundance), for Bad Bunny, this is all about representing the island. 

For many of us, Benito at the Super Bowl is better than when Boricua basketball megastar Carlos Arroyo brandished his Puerto Rico team shirt after defeating the United States in the 2004 Athens Olympics. This will be our Bad Bunny, the son of Vega Baja, holding up the flag and telling our story on the U.S.’s greatest stage.

This is a seminal moment for Puerto Rico — a colonial holding of the United States since the latter invaded in 1898 and an archipelago Washington has held in constant “extractive colonial purgatory,” as arts journalist Adrian Horton recently wrote in The Guardian.

Benito, and his generation — La Generación de la Crisis (The Crisis Generation) —   came of age in this purgatory and its debris: a crippling $70 billion debt; an unelected fiscal control board; deep cuts to education and pensions; a collapsing health system; the eight-year-old ravages of Hurricane María; corrupt governments; a defunct electrical grid and displacement through Act 22 (now Act 60) benefiting outsiders while marginalizing Puerto Ricans. This is what he sings about. 

Will Bad Bunny’s half-time show — set to be entirely in “non-English” — deliver a blow to Trump’s America, just like Jesse Owens did to Adolf Hitler's racist "Aryan supremacy" at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by winning four gold medals? Is Benito the Boricua Trojan Horse we need to make it clear that Puerto Rico has had enough of U.S. colonialism? 

Maybe. Yet it certainly will render the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) supporters and PNP Governor Jenniffer González mad. Since emerging 10 years ago, Benito has been vocal about Puerto Rican politics, but never more so than in the 2024 elections. He paid for billboards across the capital, calling the then PNP candidate González corrupt and a liar, and drove home the point that Puerto Rico deserves better.  

As a Puerto Rican (and one who is not a fan of the Super Bowl), I will sit and watch the halftime show, just to see Bad Bunny sing “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” in front of millions of people and tell our story, in our language. It will feel like vindication — a Puerto Rican singing in Spanish on the most precious stage of the colonizers. 

Now that will be Un Baile Inolvidable. 

A former News Director for Univision Puerto Rico and conflict correspondent, Susanne Ramirez de Arellano is a Columnist for The Latino Newsletter.

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Mario Guevara’s Son: From MSNBC, an opinion piece by Oscar Guevara, the son of detained journalist Mario Guevara. “Any moment now, my father, Mario Guevara, could be sent to El Salvador. Already, he has been held for over 100 days in five different facilities, and I risk losing him from the country as you read this article,” Oscar writes.

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