Rivera-Reyes said his organization, in addition to celebrating the performance, will also share information about Puerto Rico’s identity and the pro-independence movement for the island, a U.S. territory since 1898. It’s a stance Bad Bunny aligned with when he backed the Puerto Rican Independence Party candidate in Puerto Rico’s 2024 gubernatorial elections.
Puerto Ricans, while U.S. citizens, are “a colonized people,” Rivera-Reyes said, and Bad Bunny’s performance as a Puerto Rican and a Latino is “a really powerful message in this moment.”
That message also resonates for Latinos in Philadelphia who are not Puerto Rican, said Darly Santelises, founder of Del Cora Collective, which is hosting a Benito Bowl watch party at Percy Diner & Bar on Sunday.
Bad Bunny’s performance in Spanish is powerful, she said, as is his outspoken criticism of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
“Just being able to feel seen in this moment, where we as Latinos, even if we’re documented or undocumented, we feel very low right now,” she said. “So just being able to just see that, and him being able to speak about it, is going to express how all Latinos feel during this time …. And just being able to … showcase that, is going to make people that don’t have a voice be seen and heard.”
Bad Bunny’s performance is a moment of “visibility,” Erikka Goslin, executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño, said. The group is hosting a Super Bowl watch party with the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
The museum has hosted a Super Bowl watch party for the past two years. This year, its president and CEO, Ashley Jordan, proposed to Goslin that the two organizations collaborate on an event at Taller Puertorriqueño in honor of Bad Bunny’s halftime show.
“It’s about celebration and joy and coming together, but the personal is political,” Goslin said of the upcoming performance. “Puerto Rico is the oldest colony, and we cannot, you can’t extricate that from the performance that we’re going to see [Sunday] night. So I think that it’s celebratory, it’s a moment for coming together in love and joy, but it’s also political, and it is to show our strength and our humanity.”
