Earlier tonight Bad Bunny took the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show, and it was more than a performance. The Super Bowl field was transformed into a sugarcane farm in a matter of minutes. Bad Bunny walked through the cultivated landscape, grounding his performance in the culture, the laborers, and the artists of Puerto Rico.
The show was a cultural moment, an opportunity for football audiences across the United States to learn, reflect, and even stand in solidarity with Puerto Rico. For a place repeatedly devastated by hurricanes and failed government responses, the reality of a warming world—and its impacts on human health and self-determination—must be central to this conversation.
The power of music
Through reggaeton and Latin trap, infused with salsa, plena, and bomba, Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, has helped unite his fellow Puerto Ricans at some of their most difficult moments.
His Grammy-winning album No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí (“I Don’t Want to Leave Here”) is the latest example. It is more than a love letter to his home; it’s a loud lesson on issues, like economic sovereignty, gentrification, and environmental harm, that Puerto Rico is confronted with.
Last year, Bad Bunny brought the album to life during a 30-show residency on the island that intentionally showcased cross-generational Puerto Rican talent. Night after night, audiences watched him perform with iconic local artists in an emotional celebration of cultural richness.
The residency also generated tangible economic benefits. Nearly 600,000 people attended—many traveling from outside Puerto Rico during a tourist season that had otherwise been slow because of hurricanes. Fittingly, the final show fell on the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017, transforming the concert into an evening of remembrance.
For months, fans speculated about potential guest performers at tonight’s halftime show. Ricky Martin’s appearance was especially meaningful. He sang one of the more politically explicit songs from Bad Bunny’s latest album “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”). This song warns about the threat of gentrification to local communities and ecosystems.
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The lasting impact of Hurricane Maria
Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent and more severe. Fossil fuel emissions are heating the planet and accelerating the scale of climate disasters. Today, 93% of Puerto Ricans are concerned about climate change, and the U.S. EPA projects increasing storm intensity and sea level rise, among other climate impacts, across the Caribbean.
Hurricane Maria struck just two weeks after Hurricane Irma. It led to more than 3,000 deaths and triggered one of the most severe humanitarian crises in Puerto Rico’s history. Roads, bridges, schools, and homes were damaged. Flooding polluted waterways and created hazardous indoor conditions. Families lived with prolonged mold exposure linked to respiratory illness, and many were without clean drinking water for almost a year. Puerto Rico’s healthcare system was crippled, and anxiety and depression grew widespread. Maternal and child healthcare programs, nutrition services, and research initiatives were all halted.
But it was the collapse of Puerto Rico’s power grid that became a symbol of Maria’s destruction. Widespread blackouts hindered essential services, and it took months for electricity to be unevenly restored.
Bad Bunny recalled the blackouts on the halftime stage, climbing powerlines during his performance of “El Apagón: Aqui Vive Gente” (“The Blackout: People Live Here”). He released this song in 2022 alongside a 20-minute documentary that addressed the persistent outages. He didn’t shy away from criticizing a multi-million-dollar deal that privatized Puerto Rico’s energy grid amid ongoing instability and continues to threaten public health and quality of life on the island to this day.
Salvador Gómez-Colón, a Puerto Rican student turned climate advocate, lived with his grandmother after the storm, and they spent months without power. “It’s not just the hurricane itself,” he says. “It’s the aftermath.” In response, he founded Light and Hope for Puerto Rico to distribute solar lamps and hand-powered washing machines to thousands of families.
Climate justice, racism, and collective care
Bad Bunny’s unapologetic political voice has sparked pride and collective belonging in his fans. Although his lyrics are almost entirely in Spanish, his reach spans multilingual audiences; his messages of resilience and people power resonate across marginalized communities worldwide. This is more important now than ever, amid escalating anti-Latino rhetoric and state-sanctioned ICE violence in the United States.
His selection for NFL’s coveted Super Bowl halftime performance was met with xenophobic and racially charged attacks. This backlash exposed widespread ignorance about Puerto Rico and underscored Bad Bunny’s importance in the community as well as the urgent need for education about the island’s colonial history and the systemic challenges of everyday life.
Impacts from Hurricane Maria can’t be explained by geographic susceptibility alone. Puerto Rico’s vulnerability has been shaped by its territorial status, political corruption, and financial constraints. These structural conditions weakened infrastructure and economic resilience long before the storm made landfall. Half of the population already lived under the poverty line.
The injustice couldn’t be clearer in reviews of the failed federal response. A 2022 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that disaster aid for Puerto Rico was negligible compared to the government’s support for Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Harvey that same year. The report concluded that inequitable resource mobilization directly contributed to Puerto Rico’s higher death toll.
Puerto Ricans—both those directly impacted by the storm and those in the diaspora—stepped in where institutions failed. Mutual aid, community networks, and grassroots organizing became central to recovery. Out of the shared trauma, says Puerto Rican psychiatrist Dr. Carissa Caban-Aleman, emerged a renewed sense of dignity and self-worth rooted in what communities were able to achieve together.
In 2018, Bad Bunny released what became an anthem of post-Maria recovery: “Estamos Bien” (“We’re Okay”). He performed it on his Tonight Show debut as images of hurricane devastation played behind him—centering Puerto Rico’s pain and strength on a national stage. Bad Bunny helped boost morale when many felt abandoned.
Culture as education
Bad Bunny doesn’t label himself a climate advocate. Environmental issues are deeply embedded in the stories he tells and the social realities he addresses. Albert Laguna, professor of Yale University’s new course Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics, describes his work as a powerful educational tool for understanding Puerto Rico’s history and contemporary issues.
Laguna highlights Bad Bunny’s “show, don’t tell” approach when it comes to many environmental themes, like how he uses the image of el sapo concho, the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad, in his visuals. Once believed to be extinct until rediscovered in the 1970s, the species symbolizes Puerto Rico’s duality: the island’s fragility and the resilience of its communities. El sapo concho was on display again tonight during the opening moments of the halftime show.
In its fight for self-determination and health, Puerto Rico has much to teach the world about climate vulnerability, climate migration, forced resilience, and collective care. Bad Bunny has consistently used his platform to celebrate Puerto Rico and spotlight its many struggles, climate chaos included. He did so again on tonight’s Super Bowl stage.
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