Bad Bunny and the Battle for Cultural Hegemony in the USA

February 12, 2026

The night reggaeton defied the empire

HAVANA TIMES — In the midst of the most polished, commercial, and quintessentially US American spectacle—the Super Bowl—a Puerto Rican dressed like a Harlem street vendor climbed onto a beat-up car and, without asking permission, took the microphone. He didn’t come to assimilate or to smile, nor to thank anyone for the opportunity. He came to set up an entire barrio in the middle of an United States football field, to pour drinks in a corner bodega, to recall the bloodied hands of the sugar harvest, and to make 134 million people perrear.

Bad Bunny didn’t just deliver a show; he detonated an act of perfectly choreographed cultural insubordination—a political manifesto wrapped in reggaeton that laid bare the wounds of a migrant Latin America and unleashed the predictable fury of a right wing in the midst of a geopolitical and domestic offensive.

This was not mere entertainment. It was the spearhead of a battle for hegemony, in the most Gramscian sense of the term. While Donald Trump and his accomplices ranted with utmost contempt on social media, millions of Latinos—from grandparents in Miami and Chicago to youth in California and New York—recognized themselves in every detail of that staging. The message was clear and confrontational: this is our history, this is our music, this is also our country, and we do not need your approval to sing and dance, to exist.

From Perreo to Urban Symphony: The Artistic Evolution of a Marginal Genre

For decades, cultural elites—including many within Latin America itself, looked down on reggaeton. It was branded simplistic, repetitive, vulgar, limited to explicit sexual expression and ostentatious fashion. Bad Bunny’s show elevated alleyway language into a visual and sonic epic. He did not abandon perreo; he placed it in dialogue with history.

The most sublime and political moment was the transition. While backup singers danced salsa in an elegant red convertible, Bad Bunny, at the center, imposed a cavernous, percussive rhythm. It was not a mashup; it was a generational conversation with salsa—that genre created by Caribbean and Puerto Rican migrants in New York neighborhoods in the 1970s. Reggaeton is the rebellious, digital, streetwise grandchild. Together on that stage, they sketched an unbroken lineage of sonic resistance. It was the artistic answer to an unasked question: “Where does this come from?” The reggaetonero answered defiantly: from us. From our ability to create beauty in adversity.

This qualitative leap is not innocent. It demonstrates that artists born in marginalized neighborhoods of San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Panama possess the capacity, complexity, and depth to musically create and recreate their past and present experiences at the very center of empire—and to tell, from there, their own version of history. It is no longer music that casually plays at a party; it is music that gives meaning to the celebration.

The Little House, the Corner Store, and the Sugar Harvest: A Visual Dictionary of Migration

Any Latino who grew up in a US city instantly recognized that set. It was not fantasy; it was collective memory turned into stage design. The Puerto Rican casita with its tiles and colors: not a quaint cabin, but the dream of homeownership, the nucleus of the extended family, a piece of the island rebuilt in the Bronx or Orlando.

The metal folding chairs: the universal furniture of garage parties, grandma’s birthday, the child who falls asleep at 3 a.m. while adults keep dancing. The chair of community—easy to set up and move because indoor space is small but the will to celebrate is enormous.

The streetlight on the neighborhood corner—the witness to childhood games, furtive romances, late-night conversations. A landmark on an emotional map. A pole that goes dark every week because of official incompetence.

Toñita’s corner store: this was a core detail. Toñita, owner of “Toñita’s Sports Bar & Grill” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a living legend. Her business, for decades, has been far more than a bar: it is a community center, an unofficial social services office, a refuge. Seeing her there, serving Bad Bunny a drink, canonized the figure of the community matriarch—the one who sustains the invisible network the US American dream overlooks and ignores.

The sugar harvest: the hardest and most poetic blow. Men with machetes, sweat, farm labor. The memory of origins, of colonial exploitation that forced mass migration. A lyric that seemed to say: “Before our rhythm filled your stadiums, our hands filled your cups with sugar.”

And then, the culmination: the parade of flags. Not only Puerto Rico’s, but those of all the Americas. The message was a slap against the idea of “America” as the exclusive property of one nation. This continent has many names, many histories—and all of them were there, walking across a US football field. It was the reclamation of an entire hemisphere within the borders of the country that appropriated its name.

The Fury of Power: Why Trump and His Court Reacted with Visceral Hatred

Reactions were swift. Donald Trump, on his Truth Social platform, called it “horrible” and “the worst performance in history.” Fox News commentators spoke of “trash,” “vulgarity,” and an “attack on US American values.” They did not criticize pitch or choreography (a legitimate aesthetic critique). Their attack came from the gut, loaded with acidic adjectives and a contempt that betrayed panic.

Why the fear? Because they understood the message better than anyone. Bad Bunny was not asking for a seat at the table. He was shaking the table—showing that millions were already seated, eating their own food, speaking their own language. The show was an act of hegemony in real time: the takeover of the supreme symbol of USA commercial sports to narrate a story opposed to that of “Make America Great Again.” A story of diversity, migrant resistance, racial pride, and joy as a political weapon.

The furious reaction proves the blow landed. Gramsci would say the cultural “trench” was successfully assaulted. This is not a war of tanks; it is a war of meanings. And that night, the meaning of “American” expanded violently—and some reacted for powerful reasons.

Grandparents Perreando: Audience Expansion and Collective Emotion

A myth collapsed: that perreo dancing is only for Generation Z. Cameras captured mothers, fathers, and grandparents moving and swaying in the stands. In homes across the continent, entire families sang “Tití Me Preguntó” and recognized grandma’s house through the images produced by the most sophisticated technology.

The emotion unleashed was not about Bad Bunny’s fame, but about recognition. For the first time on a stage of that magnitude, the Latino migrant experience was not the joke, the stereotype, or the exotic backdrop. It was the absolute protagonist, in all its texture: nostalgia, effort, community, celebration as catharsis. Those tears were the shock of feeling fully seen—without filters or apologies. Reggaeton thus completed its cycle: from dark-room music to a cross-generational anthem capable of uniting the diaspora in a single cry of belonging.

Beyond the Show: The Dawn of a Narrative

Does this constitute an alternative narrative to Trump’s? I believe it goes further—it is his real-time antithesis and his greatest nightmare. For multiple reasons, each open to debate and enrichment:

This narrative generates a powerful emotional response. While Trump mobilizes through fear and nostalgia for an imagined white past, this narrative mobilizes through love, combative joy, and nostalgia for a real, shared origin. It also spans historical time—connecting the colonial plantation past, the migrant urban present, and projecting a future of Latin American unity (the flags). An epic in 12 minutes.

This discourse was instantly decodable for its community: each symbol was a word in a language that 63 million Latinos in the United States understand perfectly. No translation was needed. And in turn, it provoked an adversarial reaction: the right’s fury became the certificate of authenticity of its disruptive power.

Finally, it defined the battlefield. On one side: exclusionary, white, nostalgic nationalism. On the other: the diverse, mestizo, multicolored Latino archipelago proclaiming that “love is stronger than hate,” the closing slogan that dazzled across the stadium’s giant screens.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was far more than a concert. It was the storming of the cultural Bastille. It demonstrated that true power does not always lie in formal political authority, but in the capacity to tell the story millions live. And that story—told through the art of music and dance—is unstoppable. This battle for hegemony presents itself as decisive in a war that began forcefully at the start of this century, and that a decade earlier Samuel Huntington had foreshadowed in his book The Clash of Civilizations.

*Jesús Tovar is a Professor and Researcher at the Center for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities (CICSyH) at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEMEX).

First published in Spanish by Latinoamérica 21 and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.