About This Case Study

In February 2026, Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show — a record-smashing, Spanish-language performance in the same season as his Album of the Year Grammy. The reaction split on cue: celebration of a Puerto Rican artist commanding American television's biggest stage in Puerto Rican Spanish, and political backlash asking, in effect, what that language was doing there at all. The halftime show is the most commercial twelve minutes in American culture — a slot built to sell, sponsored end to end, curated by the NFL. That is the puzzle: it is exactly the kind of venue where nothing political is supposed to happen, and yet a performance there set off a public argument about language, belonging, and who counts as "American." An event this engineered for consensus does not usually produce a controversy about colonialism.

The scholars Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, in P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, read Bad Bunny's career as Puerto Rican politics in musical form: joy fused with protest, sung in the island's own Spanish, carrying the debt crisis, Hurricane María, and the 2019 protests that unseated a governor into songs that chart worldwide. Puerto Rico is a territory the United States holds but does not represent — its residents are citizens who cannot vote for president and have no voting member of Congress — and the book's claim is that the performance of that condition can itself be a form of resistance. The analytical move is to read the halftime stage as an instrument: to ask what work it does, whose language and bodies it makes legible as "American," and what happens to resistance when the empire's biggest venue hosts it. You will examine the performance and its coverage, close-listen to one song, and then test how far the frame — and the comparison to Indigenous performances of sovereignty — actually goes.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The halftime performance itself. No stable open link exists; the performance is available through the NFL's official channels and widely rebroadcast. If you cannot access full video, the exercise can be completed from the coverage below plus your close listening of one song.
• NPR's preview of the show: "'A party and a protest': What to expect from Bad Bunny on Super Bowl Sunday." Read the preview.
• The PBS News Hour's assessment: "The cultural impact of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show." Watch or read the segment.
• The Bad Bunny Syllabus, the open educational project by Díaz and Rivera-Rideau. Explore the project. You will use it to source context and one song's lyrics with translation.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency and access: This case study reads a recent event whose coverage, clips, and controversies are still moving. Record the date of anything you cite, note which pieces were published before the performance and which after, and expect links to video to shift — if one goes dark, work from the coverage and your chosen song.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Where were you when the halftime show happened — watching, scrolling, or hearing about it afterward? In what language was the conversation around you, and what was its verdict?
• Can the most commercial stage in American life host resistance — or does the stage absorb whatever appears on it? What would you need to see to decide?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Event, As Covered (10–12 minutes)

Establish the event neutrally before analyzing it. Read the NPR preview and the PBS assessment — one written before the performance, one after — and log in your notes: what was expected, what happened, what was celebrated, and what was attacked. Note who is quoted in each piece and what each speaker treats as the stakes. Mark at least one place where the before-coverage and the after-coverage disagree about what the performance would be or was. Resist, for now, the urge to take a side; the analysis comes later.

For groups: Split the two pieces between members, brief each other, and build the expected-versus-happened log together.

Phase 2: Close Listening (15–20 minutes)

Choose one song from the performance. Using the Bad Bunny Syllabus or your own searching, find its lyrics alongside an English translation, and work through:

1. What it says. Who speaks, to whom, about what? Identify the song's subject and any claims — about the island, about money, about love, about the United States — that survive translation.
2. How it sounds. Genre, register, and language choices: Puerto Rican Spanish specifically — slang, place-names, pronunciation — rather than a generic "Spanish." What does the specificity signal, and to whom? Note what the translation cannot carry; the untranslatable parts are data, not noise.
3. Where it lands. What changes when this song moves from the album, the island, or the club to the Super Bowl? Same words, new venue: list two things the new audience adds and two things it cannot hear.

For groups: Each member close-listens to a different song, then the group compares: do the songs make the same claims, or did the setlist itself have an argument?

Phase 3: Resistance and the Stage (10–12 minutes)

Now bring the frame to the event. Díaz and Rivera-Rideau read Bad Bunny's career as resistance — colonial politics carried in joy. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall added a warning that fits this stage: popular culture comes with "no guarantees" — the same performance can resist and be sold, and neither outcome is fixed in advance. Work through:

• Where in the performance and coverage do you see resistance in Díaz and Rivera-Rideau's sense — the island's politics made audible, the language itself as the claim?
• Where do you see the stage doing its own work — sponsorship, curation, spectacle — converting the same material into product? Name the specific mechanism, not just "commercialization."
• Consider the backlash: does outrage at a Spanish-language halftime show refute the performance's politics or complete them? Who benefits from the controversy?
• The strain test. Where does "performance as resistance" fit this event well — and where does it strain? Be honest about the hardest case for the frame: a resistance that the NFL scheduled, staged, and profited from. What would Hall's "no guarantees" have you conclude?

For groups: Run the strain test as a structured debate — half argues the performance resisted, half argues the stage absorbed it — then step out of role and record where each side had the better evidence.

Phase 4: The Comparison Test (10–12 minutes)

This case study sits inside a unit about Indigenous sovereignty performed — occupations, encampments, art on Native terms. The comparison needs a guardrail, and the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang supply it: decolonization, they argue, names something specific — the repatriation of Indigenous land and life — and is not a metaphor for other struggles, however real those struggles are. Puerto Rican colonial subjection and tribal sovereignty share a colonial grammar but make different political claims: territorial status and belonging on one side; nationhood, treaties, and jurisdiction on the other. Run the comparison both ways:

• Where does setting the halftime stage beside the unit's Indigenous performances illuminate? Name two shared mechanics — who speaks, in what language, before what audience, against what erasure.
• Where does the comparison flatten? Name at least one claim the Indigenous performances make that the halftime show does not, and one the halftime show makes that they do not.
• Tuck and Yang distinguish alliance from sameness: struggles can be allied without being commensurable. On your evidence, what would an honest alliance between these two politics look like — and what would it refuse to say?

For groups: Build the two lists — illuminates and flattens — on a shared page, then have each member add one entry the group missed before agreeing on the alliance question.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

What the performance resisted, on my reading, was __________. What the stage converted into product was __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which element resisted, exactly which mechanism sold, and exactly where the comparison stopped holding.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your close-listening notes on one song and your illuminates-and-flattens lists from Phase 4 — together they record what the performance claimed and what the comparison could and could not carry.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 splits the coverage; Phase 2 is individual listening with a group comparison; Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative, with Phase 3 run as a debate. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The deeper collection behind this case: the Bad Bunny Syllabus, Díaz and Rivera-Rideau's open educational project gathering readings, podcasts, news, and video on Puerto Rican politics through Bad Bunny's work. Explore the project. It appears in the unit's Open Educational Resources.
• The book that grounds the frame: Díaz, Vanessa, and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026. Publisher page. It appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The method behind the comparison test: Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Read the article. It appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.