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Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show performance united music fans around the world, according to real-time listening data from Apple Music and Shazam. |
The answer came into sharp, unmistakable focus in that unforgettable cultural moment when Bad Bunny took center stage in a spectacle as massive and symbolically loaded as the Super Bowl.
What unfolded was not simply a performance—it was a cultural intervention at scale. An estimated 128.2 million viewers watched live in the United States alone, with the performance generating over 4.1 billion views globally within 24 hours across broadcast, streaming, and social media platforms (Brown, 2026; PR Newswire, 2026). This was not marginal visibility. This was mass presence—a re-centering of language, sound, and identity before one of the largest audiences in the world, without translation, dilution, or apology.
And it was deeply personal.
You could feel it—not as branding, not as choreography, but as conviction. This was not an artist accommodating an audience. This was an artist bringing his full world with him, insisting that the audience meet him there. Spanish was not a flourish; it was the foundation. Puerto Rico was not a reference; it was the frame. The performance did not ask for inclusion. It assumed presence.
That is what winning looks like.
But this moment also reveals something deeper. For generations, Latina/os have been cast through a narrow and racialized script—criminal, foreign, disposable. These narratives were not accidental; they were produced through institutions that controlled what stories could be told and how. Film, television, journalism, and publishing have long functioned as gatekeeping structures that shape public perception and, in turn, public policy. When a community is consistently misrepresented, it becomes easier to marginalize it politically, economically, and socially.
Culture, in this sense, governs. It shapes what feels legitimate, who is perceived as belonging, and which policies are seen as reasonable or necessary. It prepares the ground on which law and policy take hold.
This is why moments like Bad Bunny’s matter so profoundly. They do not simply “represent” Latina/os; they reconfigure the terms of representation itself. They shift the center. They expand what is legible, audible, and possible. They interrupt the long-standing assumption that Latina/o/x/e identity must be translated, softened, or made palatable to be accepted. More than visibility, this is a form of epistemic power—the authority to define reality rather than be defined by it.
But we must be clear: this kind of moment does not emerge out of nowhere. It is the result of years of refusal, experimentation, and risk. It is built on the insistence that one’s language, one’s rhythms, one’s histories are not obstacles to success—but the very source of it.
That insistence is political.
If we understand culture as a site of power, then “winning” the culture war requires more than visibility. It requires control over the production of meaning. It means moving from being objects of representation to being authors of narrative. It means asking not only who is on the screen, but who is behind the camera, who is writing the script, who is financing the project, and who ultimately decides what stories get told.
And this is where the analysis must turn to structure.
Latinas/os cannot rely on institutions that have historically excluded them to suddenly tell their stories with nuance and care. Change requires pressure—organized, sustained, strategic. It requires building alternative platforms while also demanding accountability from existing ones. It requires recognizing that culture industries respond to economic and reputational forces, and leveraging that reality to push for transformation. This is the work of building cultural sovereignty—not just inclusion within existing systems, but the capacity to shape them.
And this is where the analysis must also turn inward.
As a people, this requires more than visibility—it demands a deeper reckoning with who we are and how we show up for one another. Our diversity is not incidental; it is foundational. We are Indigenous, Afro-Latina/o, Afro-Indigenous, Caribbean, Central and South American, immigrant and U.S.-born, multilingual, multiracial, and multigenerational.
We also name ourselves in ways that reflect history, place, and struggle: Mexican, Mexican American, Chicana/o, Tejana/o, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Brazilian, and more. We are also gender diverse, encompassing women, men, nonbinary, queer, and trans communities whose experiences and leadership have long been central to our survival and resistance.
These identities are not interchangeable, nor are they reducible to a single narrative. They carry distinct histories of migration, colonization, dispossession, resilience, and creativity. This is not a complexity to be managed or simplified for public consumption—it is a source of intellectual, cultural, and political strength. And yet, it is too often flattened, sanitized, or erased in ways that limit how we are seen—and how we come to see ourselves.
We are American.
We are not uninteresting. We have never been.
At the same time, we must confront a harder truth: there is no path to transforming cultural power without transforming ourselves. Colorism, anti-Blackness, and the persistent marginalization of Indigenous, Afro-Latina/o, and Afro-Indigenous voices are not peripheral issues—they are central to how power operates within our own communities.
Consider, for example, how lighter-skinned Latina/os continue to dominate media representation, while Afro-Latina/o and Indigenous voices remain underrepresented or erased. Left unaddressed, these dynamics replicate the very logics of exclusion we seek to dismantle. A politics of representation that elevates only the most palatable, light-skinned, or culturally assimilated among us is not transformation—it is tokenization, fostering an illusion of inclusion.
If we are serious about reshaping the narrative, then we must be equally serious about building a cultural and political project that is explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, decolonial, and accountable to those most historically erased—particularly within our own ranks.
Winning, then, is not simply about being seen. It is about who among us gets seen, and how.
Bad Bunny’s rise—and moments like that Super Bowl performance—also remind us of something else: the power of imagination. When communities are consistently erased or distorted, their ability to imagine themselves differently is constrained. Cultural production—music, art, storytelling—is not ornamental. It is foundational. It shapes what people believe is possible, who belongs, and what futures can be envisioned.
That is why these moments resonate so deeply. They do not just entertain; they expand the horizon of the imaginable.
And yet, even as we celebrate them, we must resist the temptation to treat them as endpoints. They are not. They are openings—evidence of what becomes possible when the rules are broken, when the center shifts, when the story is reclaimed.
This brings us directly to Texas.
In Texas, where battles over education, curriculum, immigration, and public life continue to intensify, the stakes of this cultural struggle are especially clear. The fight over curriculum—what is taught, whose histories are included, whose knowledge is valued—is inseparable from the broader struggle over narrative power. Whether in the revision of social studies standards, attacks on ethnic studies, or policies that reshape access to higher education, we see again and again how narrative frames policy, and policy structures possibility.
This is why the question of “winning” matters.
Latinas/os will not win the culture war by asking to be included in someone else’s story. We will not win by translating ourselves into frameworks that were never designed for us. And we will not win by mistaking visibility for power.
We win by reshaping the story itself—by insisting that our languages, our histories, our cultures, and our communities are not peripheral, but central. We win by building and controlling the platforms through which meaning is produced. We win by confronting internal inequities even as we challenge external ones. And we win by refusing to separate culture from the broader structures of power that govern our lives.
What Bad Bunny showed us on that stage was not just performance.
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| Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images |
It was posture.
A posture of refusal. Of affirmation. Of unapologetic presence.
And perhaps most importantly, a posture that said:
We are not asking to be part of the story.
Brown, M. (2026, February 10). Super Bowl LX viewership second highest all-time; Bad Bunny has 128.2M viewers. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2026/02/10/super-bowl-lx-viewership-second-highest-all-time-bad-bunny-has-1282m-viewers/
PR Newswire. (2026, February 10). Bad Bunny sets global viewership record for most-watched Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show performance of all time, reaching 4.157 billion views. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bad-bunny-sets-global-viewership-record-for-most-watched-apple-music-super-bowl-halftime-show-performance-of-all-time-reaching-4-157-billion-views-302701639.html
