Throughline - How Bad Bunny took Puerto Rican independence mainstream

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

How Bad Bunny became the global voice of a generation in crisis — and what it means when resistance becomes profitable.Guests:Carina Del Valle Schorske, writer, translator and wannabe backup dancer. She wrote a New York Times Magazine profile about Bad Bunny you can read here. Vanessa Díaz, professor of Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She’s been teaching a Bad Bunny college course 2023 and is the co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project. She is also the co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American History at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He’s the author of Puerto Rico: A National History. He is also the author of  the history visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF album.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Latif from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen, wherever you get podcasts. The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music, Super Bowl 60 halftime show. Benito Antonio Martinez, Ocasio, who you know is Bad Bunny,

He's a rich that's the Latino. He's a Spanish-speaking artist from a colony, and he's performing at the Super Bowl at a time when the Spanish language is being criminalized. The Trump administration can continue indiscriminate immigration stops targeting Latinos and Spanish speakers. We want to be with patriotic Americans, people who have great music, songs you've actually heard. I think it's stupid political. God bless America What he did was

show the world what Latinos have and when he called out all of the countries It was so special and I got super emotional Is it Is it revolutionary?

I don't think so but it's political. You know, the NFL also wants to reach a broader international audience and Benito is the biggest artist in the world. The biggest artist in the world performed mostly in Spanish at Super Bowl 60 in Santa Clara, which, yes, cost some fanfare. But the Puerto Rican singer and rapper, whose dominated global charts for the past eight years,

isn't a stranger to politics. He refused to perform his most. recent album in the continental U.S., saying he's worried that ice will come after his fans. An idea he doubled down on after he won the Grammy for the album of the year and Best Musica Urbana album. Before I say, thanks to God, I'm going to say, ice out. When he took the stage at the Super Bowl, he made a statement and a compromise. He didn't speak out directly against ice, but he did use the global stage to do what his music has always done,

make the world look at Puerto Rico, a U.S. Commonwealth whose people are U.S. citizens, but who live in what some critics call the world's oldest colony. He's always said that he is producing music primarily for Puerto Rico, but he knows that the world's listening. And in that way, his music is... An archive of the current moment that we're living. living in and we can use it to sort of understand this moment.

As a musician myself, I love this idea of thinking about music as both an archive and a historical record or soundtrack to history. And so for today's episode of Thulein, all about Bad Bunny, we're going to leave the politics surrounding the Super Bowl behind. And instead, we're going to lean into that idea and look at what Bad Bunny's music tells us about Puerto Rico's history and vice versa. And we'll explore both sides of his meteoric success, how bad money has become a voice of a generation in crisis,

and what it means when resistance becomes profitable. Before we get started, let me be the first to pedir desculpas, say sorry, to all the conejos and die-hard bad bunny fans out there. We've only got an hour here, and there's going to be some stuff we don't get to. Think of this episode as a bad bunny mixtape, through line style. So don't press skip on that. next track and stay with us as we dive into the life and music of El Conejo Malo and the island

that made him. This is Megan from Rhode Island and you're listening to ThruLine. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get Wise. Download the wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from 48 hours with the 48 hours post-mortem podcast. Host Anne Marie Green joins producers and correspondence to discuss key evidence, dead ends, and stranger than fiction twists they faced in the field. Listen on your favorite podcast app.

Hey, it's run. In this month's ThruLine Plus episode, our producers take us behind the scenes of making our episode on the first transatlantic cable. To listen to these insider bonus episodes every month, sign up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.com. On NPR's wildcard podcast, Melinda French Gates on seeing her ex-husband Bill Gates's name in the latest Epstein files. For me, it's personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation. on the NPR app or on YouTube at NPR Wildcard.

Parte una. La Isla Dona Nasee. The island where I was born. My first impression of him was in the passenger seat of his manager's car when I went to meet up with him in the garage where he kept his Lambo. And he turned around from the front seat wearing a mask and said, What's up? He looked like any. Puerto Rican boy I would meet

who's, you know, my little sister's age. This is Karina del Valle Shorsky. She's a freelance writer, translator, and researcher. My connection to Bad Bunny is that my feature debut at New York Times Magazine was writing a profile about Bad Bunny in 2020. For that profile, Karina got to spend time with Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico.

It was 2020 during the height of the pandemic, hence the mask he was wearing, And it was just four years after his first big hit in Puerto Rico, Soie Pior. We'll get back to that song. The year Karina first met Bad Bunny, he was the most dreamed artist in the world. He has a sort of paradoxical combination of shyness and charisma that I think is palpable in his mode of performance and engaging the public. But what I remember is his willingness to think.

out loud in a way that was surprising to me for a figure of his fame. She calls Bad Bunny a modern-day Hibaro, roughly translated, a modern-day Puerto Rican farmer. Hibaros actually play a mythic role in Puerto Rico in the same way that cowboys function in the western frontier of the United States. Real, but also larger than life. And Bad Bunny is a little bit of both. A star who many people see as representing the essence of Puerto Rico, and also just a guy from the countryside. His hometown is called Vega Baja. Begabaha is a small town that's still in driving distance of San Juan

or where you could maybe commute in if you had a job there. You know, he's not from Monte, Monte deintero, as we would say, like the kind of dramatic central mountains of Puerto Rico where, you know, it can be super off the grid. People still don't have water and, like, Begabaha's not like that, but it's distant enough that kind of Hibarito culture would be fundamentally like who he is. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, was born on March 10, 1994. To a school teacher and a truck driver, he had what he's described as an extremely typical childhood.

You know, his parents kind of struggling to make ends meet, but always providing for them in a really responsible. and loving way. He was part of his church choir as a kid. And would perform at talent shows, you know, ballads, salsa, stuff like that. And he doesn't come from a family of Puerto Rican revolutionaries or anything like that.

His nuclear family was Penepe. And that's the pro-statehood party. In Puerto Rico, there are three main political parties. There's the new progressive party, or Penepe, which wants to make Puerto Rico the 51st U.S. state. There's the Popular Democratic Party that wants to keep Puerto Rico as a Commonwealth, basically status quo.

And then there's the Independence Party that wants Puerto Rico to be its own sovereign nation. Not a lot of Puerto Ricans are necessarily growing up in massively radical, you know, revolutionary type households. This is Vanessa Diaz. She's professor of Chicano Chicano and Latino Studies at Loyola Marymount, an author of the book, PFKNR,

How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican resistance. There's a lot more people who probably grew up in a Commonwealth Party household or a statehood party household or a mixed household, like a lot of mixed kind of political vibes in Puerto Rican families.

And Bad Bunny kind of speaks to that. Because it wasn't his parents' political views that shaped him. It was just what he experienced growing up in Puerto Rico, the water he was swimming in. Bad Bunny being born in 1994. I mean, it's a really important time.

We live in an age of possibility. A hundred years ago, we moved from farm to factory. Now we move to an age of technology, information, and global competition. In 1996, when Benito was just two years old, his world would be reshaped by a decision made 1,500 miles away in the White House by then-president Bill Clinton. Clinton ends the Section 936 U.S. tax code that exempted corporations. doing business in Puerto Rico from paying federal taxes on their profits. Once those businesses started to have to pay taxes, many closed up shop,

including one of the cornerstones of Puerto Rico's economy, pharmaceuticals. Big companies like Pfizer and Procter & Gamble, shuttered factories, and thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared. In the mid-90s, families were feeling it. They were feeling it big time. And this is really the beginning. of what ends up becoming the financial crisis. To understand why this moment was such a big deal for Benito and his generation,

we've got to give you a quick crash course in Puerto Rico's history. And that's why it's a good thing that we spoke to Puerto Rican historian Jorel Melendez-Badillo. He's a Latin American and Caribbean history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm also the author of the book, Puerto Rico, A National History. He's going to break it down for us. When I talk to people that are not from Puerto Rico, particularly in the United States, I always begin with the same phrase that Puerto Rico is a Latin American and Caribbean country colonized by the Spanish since 1493 until 1898 and by the United States since.

After 1898, Puerto Rico becomes a colony of the United States. And it's not until 1917 with the passing of the Jones law that Puerto Ricans become U.S. citizens. To this day, however, Puerto Ricans aren't fully protected by the U.S. Constitution. They don't have voting representation in Congress. They can only vote in U.S. presidential elections if they reside in one of the 50 U.S. states, so not if they live in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are second-class U.S. citizens as scholars have argued. So Puerto Ricans live in a kind of limbo.

The island officially became a Commonwealth in 1952. It has its own constitution. But even that constitution is in a lot of ways still beholden to the U.S. Puerto Rican officials never articulated a national economic policy rooted in Puerto Rico itself, but we've always tried to attract foreign investment. And in this crash course version of Puerto Rican history, we get to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton changes the tax code, and that foreign investment flies out the door. Welcome to the governor of Puerto Rico.

Pedro Roseo. Pedro Rosseo was the Puerto Rican governor for most of the 1990s. He's from the pro-statehood party. And once he's elected, he begins privatizing the health sector, the privatization of hospitals, etc. The domino pieces were being lined up,

basically, for a big economic crash. And at the same time, the governor rolled out a tough on crime policy. Mano dura contra crime. strong hand against crime. Policies that largely over-policed the island's projects and working-class neighborhoods. We have just begun to fight the forces of lawlessness and violence. As a kid, Benito likely wasn't conscious of what was happening at that level.

But he would have heard the music that was responding to all of this. Underground music, as it was called, stemmed from that sort of reaction to the violence of the state. Underground Puerto Rican rap and reggae, reggaeton, and later track were fast becoming

the island's soundtrack, and the kid who would become Bad Bunny was all ears. By the time Bad Bunny was coming up as a child, Regetone had kind of survived

a major governmental crackdown and censorship program to triumph as the popular music of all young people in Puerto Rico. His mom wasn't crazy about him listening to Hreton, but she would let him play. He remembers driving to school in the morning and hearing Degal Calderons

for that Hretto sing on the radio and wanting to get in right on time because they would play it at the same time every day. The song is a hedonistic anthem. That's hard to translate because there's no perfect English word for Betozen. Karina says it's sort of like, for your pleasure, so you can get down. And it was his jam.

So Benito is coming of age in the heyday of 2000s reggaeton, getting this amazing sort of musical education from artists across Puerto Rico, artists like Dego Cadoron, who made dance tracks with the express purpose of centering black Puerto Ricans. And so the message Benito is getting is... About like being yourself, like owning who you are, not being afraid to be. be out there. He got so inspired that he decides to drop out of college. Starts working at a grocery store and at home in his room.

He's making beats. He came up as a rapper through SoundCloud, just like posting music, which allows, you know, musicians to post music for free. And that's how Bad Bunny is born. He picks his name based on an old photo of himself dressed as a bunny and keeps it until he is discovered off of SoundCloud and eventually gets his first big hit

in Puerto Rico. The song, Soi Peor. Told you we'd hear it again. Soy pejor is about how after a breakup, the singer Bad Bunny is even more

badly behaved, neurotic. You know, if before he was a son of a bitch, now he's worse because of her. It has that very, like, trap. beat. The beat is very sexy and then also his voice has always been so distinctive, you know, that like underwater sound. And then that chorus,

Now Soi pejor, now so I'm worse off, right? Like, I'm worse off because of you. The idea of now I'm worse because of you, it's so easy emotionally to redirect that towards the empire. You heard that right. Empire. So like we promised you at the top of the episode, this is a mix tape with a point of view. And we're looking at the songs that show us how Bad Bunny's music is rooted in and reflective of a broad Puerto Rican experience. And it all starts with this first big hit in Puerto Rico. Remember the row of domino pieces that cobbled together Puerto Rico's economy throughout Benito's childhood?

Well, in 2015, the last domino piece. drops. The Deuda Public, considering the level of activity economic actual... Garcia Padilla gives this address where he's, like, very somber. Alejandro Garcia Padilla was governor of Puerto Rico at the time. And he's like, we cannot pay this $72 billion debt. It impagable.

And this is like one of the most important addresses in Puerto Rican political history. When the corporations started leaving in the 90s, Puerto Rico began accruing a huge debt. And because it's a U.S. territory, it can't declare bankruptcy. Instead... The 1952 Constitution argues that Puerto Rico needs to repay its debt before paying for public services. Meaning that until Puerto Rico paid off its debt, it couldn't really function as a local government. Pensions were cut. Hospital hours were cut. Schools were shuttered with no end in sight.

So that was a recipe for the cester that exploded. And then in 2016, the year Soi Peor became a hit. People of Puerto Rico need to know that they're not forgotten, that they're part of the American family. The U.S., under the Obama administration, comes in with a solution. A bill called Promesa. And so what the Promesa law did is that it created a fiscal oversight board of eight unelected members that have more power than the executive branch, meaning the governor of Puerto Rico, the highest elected office, and the legislative branch in Puerto Rico, meaning the Puerto Rican Congress. The board's job is to restructure and reduce the debt, and they can make cuts to get it done. Puerto Ricans call it La junta.

Which evokes sort of those 1970s, 1980s sort of military junta in Latin America. La Junta is very, very, very, very unpopular in Puerto Rico. So Benito's coming of age in a moment in which the crisis begins. He was under 25 when Promesa was passed and lowered the minimum wage for people under 25 to below $5 an hour. The school he went to when he, his elementary school no longer exists. It was one of the schools that was shut down through the austerity. Even though this is not a perfect bill,

at least moves us in the right direction. Even though the song Soi Peorod makes absolutely no gestures towards being read as a political song, I always strongly associate the mood of that song with the passage of Promesa. now I'm worse because of you. It's, you know, a generation that feels that there's nothing for them, that any future that they might have had was stolen. I've always thought of Bad Bunny's music as kind of giving room for the hopelessness and ugly feeling and disappointment of our generation.

Coming up. There's a before and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny makes his message clear. Hi, this is Abdullah, calling from the Bay Area in California, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Sources and Methods is NPR's National Security podcast. When World News changes by the hour, we help you zoom out to understand shifting alliances, global flashpoints, and what is really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland.

Our reporters on the ground connect that. dots to explain a world order changing beneath our feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Venezuela, Iran, Greenland. World events move quickly. Make sense of them with state of the world from NPR. We bring you on the ground reporting from around the globe in just a few minutes every weekday. Listen to state of the world on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pactedo, Generation Crisis Generation. On September 20th, 2017, Hurricane Maria, a category four storm with 155 mile-per-hour winds hit Puerto Rico. It completely devastates the island. No one is left unaffected. I'm really scared right now. Homes were just obliterated. People can't get water. People can't get food.

The entire roof was blown off, she says. Everything got soaking wet. The response is horrifying on the part of the U.S. federal government. TARPs never get there. FEMA is like nowhere to be found. They lied to Puerto Rican saying that only a handful of people had died. And we're seeing our family members die. They said that they had done a good job because only a handful of people had died.

The reality was different. A study by the Universidad Carlos Albusu and Harvard University basically argued that the number was more around 4,645 people. And that was a conservative estimate. You call these events like Hurricane Maria natural disasters, but really they're just natural events and unnatural disasters, right? Human-made disasters. This is where the benefits of being U.S. citizens should be showing up and it's not. Because of the failure of the federal and the local government, a lot of people started having conversations about Puerto Rico's colonial relationship. And I'm not talking about the circles that I come from, which are circles that have always been talking about this.

But my family members for this first time were talking about imperialism, about colonialism. It's that opening synth live. That sounds so much to me like a choir of like electronic angels. you know, kind of cutting in and out through an unstable internet connection. You know, it reminds me of dial-up internet, but it also reminds me of, like, trying to communicate with relatives after Maria hit. Bad Bunny was on tour at the time. When Hurricane Maria hits Bad Bunny is not in Puerto Rico.

He is outperforming and he can't reach his family. He finally connected with family and was able to return to Puerto Rico. And then the following year. He has his first album come out in 2018. And in fact, the first single from his album is the song, Estamos Bien. Stamos Bien is a trap ballad that has a self-consciously political register. It's such a complicated song, right? Estamos Bien means like we're okay, we're good.

And so it's kind of hopeful, but it's also, you know, acknowledging like he has a about the fact that we don't have light in the house, right? One of my favorite lines in the song is when he says, And if tomorrow I die, like, that's okay. I'm already accustomed to having my head in the clouds. And to me, that, like, combines in a really beautiful way some of the kind of nihilism or hopelessness I was talking about before with a kind of, like,

spiritual commitment to dreaming. He is nominated for five Latin American music awards and is making his TV debut with us tonight. We get to see it really come through as a protest song in his very first appearance on American television, which is in 2018, almost exactly a year after Hurricane Maria. Roughly two weeks after President Trump claimed

he didn't believe thousands died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria. He appears. on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It's the first time that I think I heard Benito speak in English. And he addresses President Trump directly in national television. And he says, After one year of the Uri King,

there's still people without electricity and their homes. More than 3,000 people die on Trump is still in denial. But you know what? And in the background, we have this imagery of like the force of Hurricane Maria and devastation. And then we get to these like images of like joy and happiness. And I think that this really shows the kind of messaging that he's always been about, which is the highs and the lows. Like Puerto Rico is beautiful and wonderful and full of pride and full of culture.

And also it's really messed up. While Soy Peor had captured the mood of Puerto Rico by mere coincidence, Weizabeth was catchy and intentional. It was very organically taken up as an anthem. It was everywhere. I remember when it came out, it was absolutely everywhere. Bad Bunny was growing as an artist. And at the same time, he was singing and talking about

what he and other Puerto Ricans his age were seeing and feeling. Benito is the product of the crisis generation, which is a concept that I take from a colleague at the University of Puerto Rico, Maira Bale-Serrano, in which she argues that for the past two generations, the only thing that these people have known growing up is crisis. And as Bad Bunny's career continued to take off, topping the charts with Cardi B and J. Balvin on I Like It. The crises kept coming for Puerto Rico. summer of 2019. Just two years after Hurricane Maria, Governor Ricardo Rossello, yes, the son of Pedro Rosseo, who was governor when Benito was born, was caught in a major scandal. His private communications were leaked to the press. All of them from a telegram chat in which Ricardo Rossello was talking to a group of friends, some of them in the government, others in the private sector. People in the group

were mocking Puerto Ricans who died in Hurricane Maria. Don't we have some cadavers to feed our crows? Making jokes about everyday folks in Puerto Rico, Congresswomen, people in their party. I'm salivating to shoot her. After those chats were leaked, people took to the streets, and that's when the Verano Boricua, the summer of 2019, really started.

People started protesting. Every single day protest grew and grew and grew. Bad Bunny is in Europe on this tour, and he decides that he's going to abandon his tour. He does a video. He starts encouraging people to come. He's like, we have to get out there. I want you to come with me. Like, you know, he's telling people we are never going to back down.

Like, we have to get out there. And in the middle of all of this, he's in touch with Residente, who has been in the protests already. Residente, as in René Perez-Huglar, the frontman of Calle Treese, a group he formed with his siblings, Ile and Visitante. Their first super big, super big hit was Atrevetete, Tete, Santa de Closete, Tapate, Kittate, Elismarte. Residente had grown up in a revolutionary household, but back. Bad Bunny had grown up listening to Calle 13, and early on, Residente had given him some advice about navigating the music industry. And so in 2019, in the midst of the protests, they reconnect, and Bad Bunny, Residente and Ile make a song.

The three of them each have a role, Resente and Bad Bunny exchange verses Ile does the chorus. And none of them were together, right? They all record their components, and it comes together. and then the day, basically, Bad Bunny, gets to Puerto Rico from Europe, and the song's ready to drop. So the song is called Afilando Los Cucchios, which means sharpening the knives.

And this song is a takedown. It is a takedown of Ricardo Rosseyo and his, you know, cronies, it is so pointed in the sense that they're talking about the protests specifically. Like, oh, the protesters

are in the streets and they're doing graffiti and defacing and Bad Bunny has a lyric where he's like, no, like, this isn't graffiti. This is basically us taking back what's ours, right? Just like rats, we need to clean everything out, right? We got to start from scratch because what we have right now is not serving us.

And he and Ile and Residente and other artists like Ricky Martin, they go to the streets and Afilando Los Cucillos is literally like they're on a truck, they're blasting the song, it's being heard everywhere. They posted it to YouTube. So it just like immediately becomes this. soundtrack of the moment. It became an anthem for the people in the protest. You know, people were singing it.

And still, I think it became part of the broader cultural repertoire of protest music in Puerto Rico. Today, I'm going to say, I'm going to be renunciating to the In the end, he steps down. It's seen as the people ousted him. Bad Bunny is out in the streets with everybody celebrating. At one point, he addressed the crowd, and he's like, so many people that have never protested showed up because there's no more fear.

That maybe they're the fear. That's maybe they're in the fear, but that fear was to be. Puerto Rico doesn't back down. Welcome to the generation of Yono Me Dejo, which loosely translates to the generation I'm not to be messed with. It was this unifying moment, I think, that really changed

and actually provided a kind of new opportunity for how we've seen not just Bad Bunny evolve as an artist, but even the growth in young people becoming increasingly in favor of Puerto Rican independence. Bad Bunny was once again tapping into his role as the voice of his generation. Like so many Puerto Ricans, he wanted more and was increasingly in favor of dreaming about an island free from corruption

and perhaps even U.S. rule. Like, I do not think that we get to where we are now with Bad Bunny's music. Without 2019, there's just no way. And from that point on, Bad Bunny got more political, producing dance tracks that celebrated Perero, Queerness, and Puerto Rican youth culture, while still keeping focus on big issues facing the island. So he has this song, El Apagon, that, you know, again, references the blackout. The song came out in 2022 and directly addresses the ongoing blackouts in Puerto Rico.

after Hurricane Maria, blackouts that continue to this day. But it's also a party song. It's a protest song, and it's a party song. And it says, in the beginning, Puerto Rico, is, bien cabron, right? Which is, bien cabron can mean it's the shit, it's awesome. It also can mean it's messed up, it's fucked up. We're fucked, right?

In the music video for El Apagon, Bad Bunny takes this political critique a step further. Right in the middle of the music video, he and his team insert an entire short documentary called Acique Vieve Jente, or people live here. In Puerto Rico there's a lay that let's not paying certain impuptuos when they're moving. With the reporting of Bianca Gralau is sort of talking about the reality of displacement of people that don't want to leave. The documentary looks at how laws touted as good economic. policies for Puerto Rico that seek to attract millionaires are actually pushing Puerto Ricans out as investors buy properties, raise rents, and block off access to treasured beaches, which are, according to Puerto Rican law, public land. These are conversations that are happening in Puerto Rico

and Benito is using his platform to amplify it. And then, of course, right, the end of that song where we have the chorus that he wrote, I don't want to leave here They should leave These people want to take from me What's mine, but they should be the ones to go That they should be the ones to go And this is a direct reference

To gentrification and to the influx of mostly, you know, wealthy American business people I think that It definitely showed the intention behind him as an artist Which is that you want to listen to my music, you're going to learn some history. Coming up, Bad Bunny picks aside.

Hi, this is Sivoguono from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to Throughline. Pate 3, Independence, Independence. So I was traveling with my family on Bates, vacation. We were in Portugal. I'm a bit of a workaholic. And so I had promised my partner, my kid, my therapist, that I was going to leave my computer behind for that break. On December 24 of 2024, Christmas Eve, I was added by three different people in Instagram. And so I immediately got a

message from one of them, who's a producer for Bat Bunny, and asked me if I was interested in having a potential collaboration with Benito. You know, my heart dropped. I immediately said yes. The record in question was Bad Bunny's 2025 album, The Beat Tirals Most Photos. I should have taken more photos, which made history at the 2026 Grammys

as the first Spanish-language album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. They basically said, so Benito wanted to use his platform to amplify Puerto Rico. history. The idea was to have Jorrel write quick explainers of different moments in Puerto Rican history that would be the backdrop or visualizers that would play in the background of Bad Bunny songs on YouTube. Benito really wanted the history of political repression in Puerto Rico throughout

the 20th century. There's no such thing as objectivity in historical writing and historical thinking. And so I think that for Benito, this is also a political move. Bad Bunny has created a whole universe around Debithira Mas Photos, or DTMF for short. That is unapologetically a celebration of Puerto Rico and a kind of political treatise on the future of the island. In addition to the visualizers, Bad Bunny released a short film featuring an animated toad called Concho. Wow! Concho is not just any toad. He's a... The Puerto Rican-crested Toad.

It is endemic to Puerto Rico. It's also endangered and at risk of disappearing. In the short film, Concho is talking with famed Puerto Rican director Jacobo Morales about how the Puerto Rican way of life is also disappearing due to gentrification. Morales tells Concho that he should have... "...devie to have more photos, have lived more. I should have

made more more when I could have taken more photos, lived more, I should have loved more

when I could a nod to the titular song And then there's the album itself I would say

that that you need to irretemas photos is a kind of irreverent ode to Puerto Rout's

music, and it's also his coming out party as a independentist. Well, obviously, what he's passed to Hawaii. I mean, that's like you can't be more clear in your stance against statehood there. He sings, they want to take my river and my neighborhood and for my neighborhood and for grandma to leave. No, no, don't let go of the flag or forget the Lelolai. I don't want Puerto Rico to become Hawaii, which is a state. And he's asking people to not let go of the Puerto Rican flag, meaning we are our own nation.

We have our own flag. Don't forget that. And that flag comes up again. Then he has La Mudanza. And La Moldanza has lyrics where he talks about things like the gag law, which was the law that made it illegal to display the Puerto Rican flag, or even to have it in. one's home.

He really says the lyric like, Here you know, he says the lyric like, Here Mataur They killed people for having a flag here, right? And that's referencing a lot of these massacres that happened against Puerto Rican Independence Advocates. And it's specifically about

the light blue flag, which is the flag, um, color, right? It was light blue with red. And that was not under U.S. rule. They made that flag illegal. And then it was rebranded with dark blue. And the dark blue then could be seen as more associated with the U.S. And in the video, we see him running with the light blue flag, right?

Which is, he's not saying I'm an independence party advocate or I just a independent. I believe in independence. He's talking about it through the flag, through the color of the flag. You don't understand the significance of the light blue, then you're not going to be like, oh, well, he's for independence. But if you know those things,

then you know that that's exactly what he's saying. DTMF is an extension of an anti-colonial politics that Bad Bunny has become much more open and direct about. In the last gubernatorial election, he spoke in support of the independence candidate. And Puerto Rico, those who have said to me that this 5th of November

we've got to vote for Juan, Dalmao, and the alliance of the country. And also bought billboards against the pro-statehood party. I was driving my kid to school

and I would read banners in black, background, white font that said, every time you lose power, remember that that is the P&P, which is the new progressive party's fault. And in many ways, his pro-independence stance is again reflecting back what so many in his generation feel.

Benito is part of that broader phenomenon of a younger generation that has been tired of living through crisis after crisis and crisis after crisis. And that think that the future has been robbed from them. I think they're losing that fear of what independence might be. And Bad Bunny has doubled down on Puerto Rican. independence. Rather than tour in the continental U.S. in 2025, he set up a months-long residency in Puerto Rico, with many shows exclusively for Puerto Rican residents. Karina went to one of the shows. The show was amazing.

The residency made news. It brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the Puerto Rican economy. But Karina also has critiques. Honestly, it was like a theme park. All of someone and even some of the the other little towns I went to on that trip felt like a Bad Bunny concert theme park. You see Church's Chicken doing a pop-up looking like a little roadside chinchotro, you know, kind of reproducing like tropes of rural life

in corporate plastic. Because Bad Bunny, for all his political causes, is also a brand, and he's just one person. And yet, in many ways, he's become the stand-in for all of Puerto Rico, which has its pros. It brings attention to the island.

And it's cons. Whenever Bad Bunny does anything, I get 100 emails. And then when in the times in between, I have trouble placing stories that have to do with other elements of Puerto Rican culture or politics. So one begins to resent kind of the dominance that Puerto Rico only matters if it's through Bad Bunny's voice. And sometimes it feels like we're all working for him.

We're embroidering his. Guayaveras. We are doing the research, sourcing archival footage for the short films that go before his concerts. We are writing the explainers. We are, you know, setting up a fortune-telling booths and outside his concert. We are, all these things are things that people I know are doing for Bad Bunny. And sometimes it inspires like deep pride in a sense that together, we're quilting something very large and very beautiful. But at the end of the day, it's all attributed to him. You know, and I think however much he tries to hold up the mirror and say, you know, it's you,

I know that you've made me. That's not how it gets treated in the mainstream media. And I think some of us are left imagining and desiring other possibilities. And this raises big questions. Because Bad Money's pro-Po Puerto Rico message raises awareness, but it also makes some money. And the money and the politics can often be at odds. These days, it seems like Bad Bunny can do no wrong.

I didn't see that much skepticism, people expressing that much skepticism about the Amazon partnership. Karina questions Bad Bunny's decision to stream his last show on Amazon and his work to create an Amazon digital storefront committed to selling Puerto Rican products, including food, music, and books, all sporting an Echo in Puerto Rico badge. I doubt that the partnership with Amazon will be a kind of unblemished tale of upliftment and sovereignty

for Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. He is a brand. He is producing sort of a product and it has a market and it sells. I don't condemn Benito for being a, a millionaire. And, you know, I think that curtail some of the things that he can say and cannot. Pop culture will not save us. You know, for me, it's very simple. Coming from the punk community, kill your idols. This is a person that is trying to make sense of the life. His living,

we've seen Benito grow in the spotlight. The point is that he's an artist, that he has contributed a lot of really consequential art, that he's provided the tools to get people excited to think about and learn about Puerto Rico. But that doesn't make him perfect, and that's also okay. You know he stands for Puerto Rico, whether you're Puerto Rican or not. You know he stands for that.

And that means something, right? Because we all have a homeland. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randaabed al-Fatah. I'm Ramtin-Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and...

Julie. Kaye. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Irene Noguchi. Kiana Mohetam. Thomas Coltrane. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Emmanuel Martinez, Luis Treyes, Johanna Sturgy, Rebecca Farrar, Dylan Kurtz, Susie Cumbings, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. And a special thanks to Westwood One Sports. Also, thank you to Desire Bayonne. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

Music for this episode was composed by Romtine and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.