Here is What Bad Bunny Meant to Me: It’s Beautifully Complicated

As a second generation Cuban and Puerto Rican American, watching Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Bad Bunny) take the stage was the first time in my life I felt a real, unexpected sense of American pride. A sense of pride that felt honest. Personal. Like a quiet recognition instead of a performance.

We moved a lot when I was a kid. I was born in California, where some of my earliest memories are the seal bridge and salty air. I grew up in Miami, in a world of fast Spanish, Cuban cafecito, and loud family parties that went late into the night. Yes, like in the Superbowl half-time show, kids falling asleep on chairs, couches, or right in the middle of the living room was normal. The noise did not disrupt us. 

The music, the laughter, the shouting that was our lullaby. That was family. That was love. That was safety.

Then came Maine, my first experience in rural America. Then Wisconsin, where I wildly ran through (and got lost in) cornfields. Vivid memories of bright green stalks and yellow heads fill my mind. There, I learned two things at once: The beauty of hardworking farmers and the reality of racism. I was ten when my neighbors told their daughters they could not play with my sister and I because we were the “n-word”. I heard their mother say it. Right in front of me. I didn’t know what that meant and had to ask my parents. 

I was ten years old when I learned what hate was.

I was 10 years old when I learned that the color of my skin, and the wavy texture of my hair was a signal that I did not belong to the group of blonde-hired, feral children happily running through the maze of corn. 

We moved to Texas after that. Texas is beautiful and deeply complicated. It is diverse but not always united. I spent many of my teen and young adult years in mostly white spaces, which came with a constant feeling of not belonging. Texas Latino culture is largely Mexican. Still Latino, yes, but different from the Caribbean culture I grew up with. Because I had lived all over the country, I did not have a clear accent. To some Hispanic peers, I was whitewashed and not Hispanic enough. To white people, I was too brown and too different. I stood out on both sides and grew up feeling like I did not fully belong anywhere. That does something to a person. It plants a quiet, stubborn kind of imposter syndrome.

How many of us know that feeling?

My own background is layered and messy. A lot of my ancestry traces back to Spain and Portugal, the colonizers. There is a kind of guilt that comes with that, especially now that I spend so much of my time studying Indigenous communities and working toward decolonizing the way we tell history. My mom is Cuban American. I have Puerto Rican roots too, including a whole branch of family I do not know. That absence sits with me. It is a quiet ache.

And still, I grew up dancing salsa. Trumpets, drums, rhythm that lives in the body. I hear those sounds and I move without thinking. It is instinct. It is muscle memory. It is home. That pull toward rhythm, toward story, toward the way culture lives in our bodies, is what led me to study people, traditions, and the ways cultures evolve and survive. It is what made me want to tell stories. To remind people that what makes this place beautiful is not one version of America, but all of us. The good, the bad, the joyful, the complicated. The messy. 

This country is not just a melting pot. It is a land shaped by Indigenous peoples, scarred by colonization, built by enslaved labor, carried forward by immigrants chasing something better. It holds pain and possibility at the same time. We cannot rewrite the past, but we can face it. We can work toward repair through truth, through care, through policy, through the way we treat each other in daily life.

• There is room here. Room for immigrant families who come with nothing but hope and work until their hands ache. 
• Room for queer families raising kind, thoughtful kids. 
• Room for Indigenous communities to be heard, respected, and given real say over their own histories and futures. 
• Room for Black families whose roots in this soil go back generations. 
• Room for mixed kids, third culture kids, kids who translate for their parents, kids who do not fit neatly into any one box. 
• Room for people still figuring out where they land.

There is room. That is why seeing Bad Bunny on that stage hit me the way it did. A Puerto Rican artist, fully himself, unapologetic, global, not shrinking, not translating, not sanding down his edges. He made space without asking permission. Watching him, I felt that same quiet voice again. 

You belong here too. 

Not in spite of all your layers and contradictions, but because of them. For the first time, pride did not feel like a costume I had to try on. It felt like recognition.