getting gender envy from all my blorbos

It’s not even that we’re proud that one of our own is up there—we were proud when Shakira and JLo performed a few years ago. It’s not even that he’s the first solo Hispanic artist to headline the halftime show with Spanish-only music. There are so many Latine artists I can think of that would’ve made us so proud to see on that stage for the mere act of representing one of our cultures (because there are many Latine cultures, not just one, even if we do share a lot of commonalities).

But the thing about Benito is…that man is family, y’all. I don’t even know how to explain it. That’s my fucking cousin performing at the Super Bowl.

And we don’t feel that way about every Latine artist, okay? It’s a rare thing, what he has done. It’s not that he has united Latines across the globe with his music, but that he has done it with music that is so specifically Puerto Rican. The genre, obviously, but also the slang and references to the island in most of his songs, especially those calling out the ongoing history of colonization in Puerto Rico.

With a few key exceptions like that line in “El Apagón”—todos quieren ser latinos pero les falta sazón (everyone wants to be latino but they lack flavor)—most of his music does not talk about what it’s like to be Latino, but what’s it’s like to be Puerto Rican. There’s a stark difference there. In perfect Boricua fashion, Bad Bunny is letting everyone know where the fuck he’s from every chance he gets. He’s not going to let you forget it. He’s Puerto Rican before he’s Latino, and that’s a distinction we have lost sight of. Outside of the United States, most Latinos don’t identify as such. We claim our countries and that’s it. But because of the Othering we face in the United States, we have bonded under this group identity as a means of survival and community in a country that criminalizes our existence at every turn, but in doing so, we get this homogeneity assigned to us that erases our cultural individuality. Our music gets grouped under the term “Latin music” even though there are dozens of different genres that fall under that umbrella term, each with its own history and influences. Our cultural practices are labeled as one “Latin culture” when there’s 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Hispanic artists get drowned in that faux homogeneity sometimes (notice how I said Hispanic and not Latino—that’s because the two are not mutually exclusive. Brazilians are Latinos but they speak Portuguese, not Spanish, therefore they’re not Hispanic). Their music is in Spanish, so most of their fans are Hispanic, obviously, and they embrace the unity of our different countries and their shared commonalities, but sometimes, as proud as they are to be from where they come, you can forget where they’re actually from. This is mainly because they sing in Spanish, but they don’t sing about their respective homelands. Of course, they don’t have to, but it’s still worth mentioning.

And then there’s Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio who so assertively proclaims his Puerto Rican-ness, thanking his mother in his songs and Grammy-winning speeches for birthing him in the island he ardently loves.

There’s patriotism, and then there’s Boricua pride. It’s a whole different level.

And yet, it is that almost unbelievable level of cultural specificity in his music with which Bad Bunny has united Latines across the world—not despite its specificity but because of it. By singing about Puerto Rico, he has managed to capture what Latines feel like being from their respective country.

I can’t help but think about that outro in “La Mudanza,” the last song on the track list of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS: “De aquí nadie me saca / De aquí yo no me muevo / Diles que esta es mi casa / Donde nació mi abuelo / Yo soy de P fuckin’ R” (Nobody’s kickin’ me out of here / I’m not going anywhere / Tell them this is my home / Where my grandfather was born / I’m from P fuckin’ R). That whole song is an ode to his family history, how he came to even exist. It criticizes the displacement and gentrification of Puerto Rico, boldly alluding to the independence movement against U.S. rule. That whole album is the product of pure love as an act of resistance. And it has resonated with all Latines across various generations and our shared history of memory and displacement.

But that last line: “I’m from P fuckin’ R.” I have seen so many TikToks of people singing that line with their whole chest (I do, too, every time it comes on), with the added caveat on screen that they’re not Puerto Rican, and yet they sing that line at the top of their lungs, not because it’s part of the song, but because they feel it—Bad Bunny’s pride and love for Puerto Rico is that contagious, that powerful, enough to transcend imaginary borders.