For the Super Bowl X halftime show, back in 1976, members of a cult took the field in color-block turtlenecks and danced around a giant wheeled birthday cake. The group was Up With People; the theme of both the cake and the aggressively clean-cut rock medley was the bicentennial of American independence. Fewer know, but might not be surprised to learn, that UWP was a superficially multicultural offshoot of a right-wing Christian faction called Moral Re-Armament, founded in the 1930s by a Nazi sympathizer. It had been spun off in the Sixties by an MRA leader who thought pop music and some nonwhite faces might more effectively create “a positive alternative to the anti-war, anti-adult, anti-establishment mood.”

Last night, the NFL marked the United States’ 250th birthday with a far better vibe. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the 31-year-old Puerto Rican phenom better known as Bad Bunny, led a subtly all-star tribute to his island’s music, culture, and diaspora that became one of the most powerful statements of unity, defiance, and, frankly, Americanism that pop culture has ever seen.

Obviously, not everyone felt that way. About six million conservatives performatively tuned out, opting for the moral successor to an MRA halftime show: a thirty-minute livestreamed tribute to guns, monolingualism, and Charlie Kirk led by 55-year-old Robert “I like ’em underage” Ritchie, a.k.a. Kid Rock. The president seems to have skipped that one, opting instead to join the record 135 million viewers who tuned in to see Bad Bunny. In Trump’s case, it was, of course, a hate-watch. The president rushed to Truth Social and Newsmax to call it “one of the worst, EVER!” and the Grammy-winning multi-platinum star someone “I’d never heard of” (as opposed to, say, Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, and Lee Brice.¹)

“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” Trump further whined, referring to the fact that most of the performance was in Spanish, the second-most widely spoken language in the United States and the source of the names of ten states and territories, including Martínez Ocasio’s Puerto Rico and the site of Super Bowl LX itself: Santa Clara, California. The president finally complained about the suggestive dancing and the NFL’s new kickoff rule, both reminders that, three weeks before America turns 250, Donald Trump turns 80.

As many of you know, I spent half my twenties and parts of my thirties living in the Caribbean, including a fair amount of time in Puerto Rico. I have also done in-depth reporting from the island, including in the massive, deadly blackout that followed 2017’s Hurricane María—a defining catastrophe referenced in the halftime show. I also happen to have been a Bad Bunny fan since before it was cool. So as a service to our dear leader, and everyone else, here is a breakdown of some of the most “INoLVIDABLE”² moments from last night.

The show opened heavy: a shot of workers in a sugar cane field, the source of much of Puerto Rico’s historical wealth and a major driver of the brutal European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery that created the modern Caribbean and its peoples. (At least some of the stalks were, somewhat poignantly, people in costumes. The New York Times’ social media desk hilariously identified the background as “green grass.”)

With a cry of “¡Qué rico es ser latino! ¡Hoy se bebe!” (How wonderful it is to be Latin, today we drink), we get a bachata riff—a style of Dominican country music that spread to Puerto Rico, New York, and the rest of the world—which is the opening notes of Bunny’s hit “Tití Me Preguntó.” Rapping, he passes the cane cutters into scenes of village life: peddlers selling fresh coconut, old men playing dominoes, a woman getting her nails done, some extremely attractive women building a house with cinderblocks, a piragua stand—Puerto Rican snow-cones. At that moment, Martínez’s lyrics start talking about the various nationalities of women he has dated, and the background accordingly turns more international: there’s a cameo from Victor Villas, owner of a beloved Los Angeles taco joint, then the Mexican boxer Emiliano Vargas, sparring with the Puerto-Rican born Floridian Xander Zayas. Bunny gets a gold ring from a pawn shop, which he gives to a man to propose to a woman, in a bit of minor foreshadowing.

The action then turns to a typical Caribbean concrete house—a cinderblock style of construction that is good in hurricanes but can be fatal in earthquakes, as we saw in Haiti in 2010, and to a lesser extent in the cluster of earthquakes that struck PR in 2020. This casita was reportedly modeled on a real house in Humacao, on the east coast of Puerto Rico, that Martínez featured in a short film accompanying his latest album. The next song is “Yo perreo sola” — effectively “I dance to reggaeton by myself.” (Perreo is the grinding partner dance typical of the genre. It literally means doggy-style. Sorry, Don!) A host of celebrities make blink-or-you’ll-miss-them cameos at the block party including Pedro Pascal, Jessica Alba, and Cardi B.

Bad Bunny falls through the roof. (A reference to the earthquakes? Maybe that’s my brain talking.) There’s a sample of Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina, the first major international reggaeton hit from 2004. Everyone dances, including two men grinding with each other. “You’re listening to the music of Puerto Rico,” Martínez explains, before doing a snippet of one of his dirtier tracks, the trap/reggaeton/hip-hop/dancehall fantasia “Safaera,” whose lyrics seem to have scandalized the reactionaries who bothered to look them up, but not for nothing is one of Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs of All Time.

As he performs this, a cartoon toad cheers on from a screen atop Levi’s Stadium:

This is Sapo Concho, an animated version of the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad that has become a symbol of Bad Bunny fandom. El Sapo has also become a political symbol, used—with the artist’s blessing—in anti-ICE posters and costumed protests. All music is political in one way or another, but things will get more political from here.

“Buenas tardes, California!” Martínez says, prompting a cheer from the crowd—which, that’s right, Mr. President, the crowd understood. This was a freighted moment: Bad Bunny famously canceled all his U.S. mainland tour dates this year for the reasonable fear that ICE agents would use the concerts to hunt and harass his fans. (Some Trump supporters and frankly others assumed that Martínez—who like all Puerto Ricans since 1917 was born a U.S. citizen—was himself afraid of being deported, which just bolstered the point.) Announcing he was singing in the metropole was itself an act of defiance. He then says, looking straight into the camera in close-up:

Which means, after stating his full name: “And if I am here at Super Bowl LX it is because I never, never stopped believing in myself, and you too should believe in yourself. You’re worth more than you think. Believe me.” This Hallmark-ready statement, benign in its formulation, was transformed into something far more powerful by its language, its context, framing, and intended audience: an immigrant population that is currently fearing for its life, safety, and future in the face of a relentless ethnic-cleansing campaign. Bunny carries a football, its laces hidden.

The camera pans to a wedding in progress. The wedding was real.

A reveal: Lady Gaga. “Here is what you wanted!” Martínez has purred, and indeed it is: a song in English, “Die With a Smile," albeit to a salsa beat. This transitions to the aforementioned "BAILE INoLVIDABLE." “Dance! Dance without fear! Always without fear!” he intones in Spanish.

Now we are in New York — “NUEVAYoL,” the title, a joking nod to the Puerto Rican/Dominican/sometimes Cuban habit of making filial Rs into Ls. The song, sampling a salsa hit from 1975, is a paean to immigration, community, and the struggles of maintaining identity in diaspora. One of the last ungentrified Puerto Rican bars in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Toñita’s, gets a shoutout in the song. And there, at the Super Bowl, was Toñita herself, doling a shot out to the cantante.

The next shot was one of the most talked about of the night: a clip of Martínez’s recent Grammy win, followed by him handing out the Grammy to a young boy. There were unfounded rumors that the boy was Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old legal Ecuadorian immigrant rounded up with his father from Minneapolis and trucked off to a concentration camp in Texas, only to be liberated (for now) by a federal judge so enraged he quoted the Bible and the Declaration of Independence in his opinion. Lo siento a tod@s, but the lad was not Liam, nor any of the countless other children terrorized by the ICE/CBP raids, though the viewer was free to make that inference.

The camera pans up to Ricky Martin, in a white suit and framed by plantain trees, as if to say: Yes, perhaps you forgot, but I was Puerto Rican this whole time. He sings the chorus of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” Martínez’s anti-colonial protest song lamenting the damage to Hawai’i’s native culture at the hands of Anglo-American settler-colonialism and tourism and declaring that the same will not happen to his island. (The U.S. annexed Puerto Rico and Hawai’i in the same year, 1898, under the cover of war with Spain, as readers of Gangsters of Capitalism will remember.)

Suddenly, an explosion. Three electrical transformers, reminiscent of the crosses on Golgotha, have sparked, sending their linemen tumbling, Cirque du Soleil-style. Bad Bunny appears, singing “El Apagón” — the Blackout — another protest song, this one about Puerto Rico’s antiquated electric infrastructure. It was fatally damaged in the 2017 disaster that plunged the entire U.S. colony into darkness for months, with some areas remaining without power for a year.

That disaster occurred during and in large part due to the colonial apathy of the first Trump administration, which, along with the island’s right-leaning government, tried to shrug it off at the time — and judging from media coverage of the halftime show, most Americans have completely forgotten. From an initial death toll of the storms of 64 (coincidentally, or perhaps not, the jersey number Bad Bunny wore last night), the death toll from the blackout soared to somewhere between 2,650 and 3,290. As I wrote in 2020:

Another company, Cobra Acquisitions LLC, illicitly secured at least $1.8 billion in federally reimbursable contracts to rebuild the electrical grid. Cobra’s former president, Donald Keith Ellison, and Ahsha Tribble, FEMA’s former deputy administrator for Puerto Rico, who led the energy infrastructure recovery under Trump, pleaded guilty to one count of bribery each in 2022.

Rage over the disaster and its associated corruption sparked major street protests, at some of which Bad Bunny performed. That movement led to Gov. Ricardo Rosselló's resignation in 2019. (Some, including myself, wondered why Americans wouldn’t take the lead of our colonized fellow citizens and demand the same of Trump.)

At this point in the Super Bowl show, Martínez appears carrying a Puerto Rican flag, but a very specific one. The version he carried — the older version with a sky-blue pennant, rather than the newer and more Washington-friendly version with a shade of blue that matches the field in the U.S. flag — is a symbol of Puerto Rico’s independence movement, carried by those who want total decolonization rather than statehood. The symbolism was surely lost on most, but would have been screamingly clear in San Juan.

Finally, the beat drops on “CAFé CON RON,” and a crowd carrying flags of countries in the Americas rushes forward.³ Standing in front of the Stars and Stripes, Martínez utters his only English words of the performance: “God Bless America.” What he means becomes clear momentarily as he begins rattling off the names of nearly all the countries in the hemisphere⁴. Then he says, mixing English and Spanish: “United States, Canada, and my motherland, mi patria, Puerto Rico.” Having reached the end zone, he turns the football to reveal the words on the laces side: “TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA.” “Seguimos aquí,” he says. We are still here. Then he spikes it.