One way to consider the importance of Bad Bunny’s halftime extravaganza is to place it in relation to another global sensation from a son of Puerto Rico: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. That play, coming in the last years of Obama’s restoration of the neoliberal order, was hailed for celebrating diversity—a vision of multicultural harmony that many thought, even as Trump lurked in the wings, had gained a permanent place in US culture. Then came Trumpism, which turned Hamilton into an autumnal yearning for a nation that could have been.
In contrast to Miranda’s inadvertent elegy for the Obama era, Bad Bunny is not mourning. He’s fighting. His vision of multiculturalism, as mentioned above, is founded on labor, and, by implication, a demand for a more equitable distribution of the wealth it produces. If Hamilton was a paean to an idealized version of America, Bad Bunny’s narrative effectively declared war against the America that actually exists under Trump—as well as the deeper currents that made Trumpism possible.
And Martínez Ocasio is waging that war by celebrating America in its broadest sense, reminding his massive audience that what makes the United States “exceptional” isn’t its sense of singular uniqueness but that it shares a hemisphere with hundreds of millions of other people who also are Americanos. This vision, of nationalism not as hunkering down but opening up to the world, was on full display in the halftime show’s raucous finale, where, after yelling out “God Bless América,” Bad Bunny loudly roll called all the nations of the Western Hemisphere (including Canada, which really doesn’t really consider itself “American”…), spiked the football, and led his fellow performers off the field in victory.
America, América, a book I published last year, argues that, at its best, Latin America knows how to reconcile nationalism and internationalism, diversity and universalism. Other countries dealing with the dire consequences of corporate globalization and US militarism (which produced tens of millions of refugees) have retreated into a nasty, authoritarian, or tribal nationalism, like the United States, but also India, Turkey, Israel, Hungary, and Russia.
Latin American nations mostly haven’t. Their reaction to corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic, or conspiratorial tropes about a struggle against “globalists.” True, the region isn’t immune to the world’s new demonology of the desperate millions on the move, and in some countries, there does exist, ominously creeping anti-migrant xenophobia.
Still, for many in Latin America, among the most peaceful continents in the world in terms of state-to-state relations, nationalism is a gateway not toward tribalism but universalism.
