International Business Times, February 2026
On Sunday, Bad Bunny posed an indirect question to America: Is Puerto Rico part of the US? Many still aren’t sure. The Puerto Rican rapper headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, becoming the first performer to deliver a set almost entirely in Spanish. He climbed an electrical pole. He waved a Puerto Rican flag. He turned the field into Puerto Rico’s sugarcane fields, dotted with dancers in traditional jíbaro straw hats. It was a 13-minute love letter to his homeland. It was also a political act more than a century in the making.
A Grammy Speech That Lit the Fuse
One week earlier, at the Grammy Awards on 1 February, Bad Bunny accepted the prize for best música urbana album and opened with two words: ‘ICE Out.’ Then he went further. ‘We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.’ Earlier that night, host Trevor Noah had asked if Puerto Rico could be a refuge for Americans. Bad Bunny’s deadpan reply: ‘I have some news for you. Puerto Rico is part of America.’ He’s right. Technically.
Puerto Rico has been a US territory since 1898. Its 3.2 million residents hold American citizenship. But they can’t vote for president. They don’t have voting members in Congress. The Council on Foreign Relations calls the island ‘a political paradox: part of the United States but distinct from it.’
