On Sunday, San Juan awoke under an overcast sky, the air thick with humidity and heavy with anticipation. Across the city, everyone seemed to be talking about one thing: where to watch the Super Bowl. But no one was focused on the football game. Instead, Bad Bunny loomed large over his island.
In conversation, almost everyone on the island refers to the artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio by his first name, underlining boricuas' deep emotional ties to the local Soundcloud rapper turned global superstar. Hours before kickoff, with patriotic playlists blaring from their car windows, crowds wearing t-shirts printed with Bad Bunny iconography, started gathering near El Escambrón Beach for the official halftime viewing party. On their way toward the ticketed event, sisters Mirelis and Arelis Piñeiro Rojas stopped for coffee in a nearby park. When asked about their interest in the game, both women laughed.
"We don't know anything about the Super Bowl," Mirelis said. "The Super Bowl belongs to Benito."
In line for the watch party, Bianca Torres and Luis Rivera said they had driven an hour and a half from Aguadilla to San Juan to attend. The trip was worth it, they agreed. "The pride we feel to be Puerto Rican, the pride that generations have instilled — Benito is putting it on display for the entire world," Torres said.
Standing tall as he waited to get inside the gates, Rivera was one of several attendees proudly wearing a pava. It's the traditional woven hat emblematic of the jíbaro, the rural, countryside laborers of the island's past. According to writer and historian Israel Melendez Ayala, the image of the jíbaro was co-opted by both Spanish artists and Puerto Rican political elites for decades. But it remained a mostly marginalized symbol within Puerto Rican society until Bad Bunny made jíbaro imagery a staple of his latest album and 31-concert residency in San Juan.
"Bad Bunny took the jíbaro and reclaimed him in a fashionable way," Melendez Ayala explained. "He made it like, 'No, we don't have to be ashamed of working our land, of our ancestors working the land.' "
Now, people wearing pavas populate the streets of San Juan. That was especially true on the verge of an unprecedented night for boricua culture. At the start of 2025, Bad Bunny released an album showcasing his devotion to Puerto Rico, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. It's a bittersweet yet defiant account of his island's history, folklore and quotidian tragedies, all woven together through the undeniable pride and pulsing rhythms that permeate Puerto Rican identity. The album was the opening shot in a year of record-breaking victories, culminating in a Grammy win for album of the year one week before the Super Bowl performance.
At the singer's official watch party in San Juan, giant screens were positioned on top of a grassy hill, flashing messages and affirmations of the night's significance. Just beyond the gates, palm trees rattled in the wind and waves crashed onto the shore. As word of the party's location spread on social media, people without tickets began showing up and laying picnic blankets on a hill overlooking the scene.
A few miles away, on a mostly residential street in the working class neighborhood of Santurce, people of all ages were piling into a small spot called El Gandul. Instantly recognizable for its neon green walls and yellow twinkle lights, El Gandul is a restaurant that hosts live music almost every night of the week: plena, bomba, salsa and rumba. Carmen W. Osorio Morales, who opened the business with her husband nearly two years ago, said this is the fulfillment of a lifelong vision and their second attempt at creating a cultural hub in the neighborhood.
"We were always clear that we wanted a space that was open for the community, with accessible prices and with music creating a culture around the people we bring here," she explained.
Her husband, Juan C. Seguinot Martínez, grew up in an apartment building just down the block. On Sunday night, as they set up for both a live rumba performance and a screening of what everybody agreed should just be called the Benito Bowl, he wore a shirt with the slogan "Santurce no se vende," or "Santurce's not for sale," a nod to the rapid gentrification overtaking his neighborhood.
The rumba group slated to perform that night, Andy y Su Manana, crafted a fashion statement of their own. Several members wore shirts with an image of their frontman, David Andres Rosado Moya, sitting on a football goal post, inspired by Bad Bunny's halftime promo.
"It was my mom's idea, since we're playing the same day of the Super Bowl," Rosado Moya said. "It's a special edition we're launching for the Benito Bowl."
Inside El Gandul, the football game was projected onto the bar's thick cement walls, but the sound was off and nobody watched. Instead, as Andy y Su Manana took the stage, people sipped Medalla beers and moved to the rhythms of the band's decadent drums.
"There's been a resurgence in the culture," said local musician Luis Rivera (no relation to the Luis Rivera attending the official watch party). "Now Bad Bunny sings plena and salsa. It's given us opportunities, and opened a door for those of us from the neighborhood, from el patio, to keep climbing."
Suddenly, after an animated first set, the rumba stopped. The sound system flipped over to a broadcast feed, and everyone milling out on the street rushed inside to find a good spot in front of the projector.
When Bad Bunny appeared onscreen, the screams in El Gandul were so loud it was difficult to make out his first words. As the 31-year-old zigzagged across a set that featured sugar cane fields and a piragua (shaved ice) stand, then made his way onto a dancefloor at a wedding, people clapped and hugged one another. Seguinot Martínez climbed onto the bar's stage and began waving his arms, encouraging the crowd to get louder and louder. The lyrics to songs like "Tití Me Preguntó," "Yo Perreo Sola" and "VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR" boomed throughout El Gandul, everyone relishing each word and reference.
"Don't dress this up as anything else. This is Black music," Jose Francisco Valdez, one of the musicians, said. "Who would've known that from the marquesinas, from the neighborhood parties, that this would go all the way to the Super Bowl. We won a Grammy!"
A few blocks away on Calle Cerra, which was a haven of salsa music and record labels in the 1970s and is now a popular and increasingly rowdy hangout spot, TV screens lit up the sidewalks. Around the corner from a giant mural of salsa singer Andy Montañez, young people huddled together in the middle of the street and inside several bars, their eyes glued to the halftime show. When Ricky Martin emerged on stage, singing the anti-colonial anthem "LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii," from Bad Bunny's latest album, some began to tear up. One group of college students said the themes Bad Bunny addressed on DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — a weakened Puerto Rican economy and the threat of having to leave their homes in search of better opportunities — are all too real for their generation. But they said they felt grateful to see their reality acknowledged on a global stage.
Back at El Gandul, Carmen Osorio Morales did, too. For her, the performance struck a myriad of emotions. She said her chest tightened as she recognized certain faces flashing across the screen. Many of the musicians who performed with Bad Bunny during the halftime show are regulars at El Gandul. Some of them she's known since they were children. But it wasn't just the people that felt familiar.
During the performance, a scene in which Bad Bunny climbed atop a broken utility pole — a reference to the island's struggling electrical grid — hit close to home. Osorio Morales explained that El Gandul suffered three power outages on Saturday, leaving her unsure if they'd be able to screen the halftime show the next day. This, she explained, is the lived reality of Puerto Ricans.
"There's no middle class — you either have money or you don't," she said. "For us in particular, we weren't born in a golden cradle. Everything we have, we have through so much sacrifice. But we keep moving forward through our faith. That's all we can do."
For the 13 minutes that Bad Bunny sang his way through more than a dozen of his songs, breezing through layers upon layers of historical references and cultural touchstones, it felt like the island of Puerto Rico came to a complete stop. Afterwards, Angelina Villapiano, a local comedian and artist who performs as Miss Angelina, took a few minutes to reflect on the show before heading home. She said what she appreciated most about the performance was Bad Bunny's nuanced, unsanitized depiction of both the triumphs and difficulties of life on the archipelago.
"It's not just cool to be Puerto Rican. It's tough to be Puerto Rican," she said. "We have a difficult history, we have a difficult present day, and the future is also uncertain."
Back inside El Gandul, the lights turned back on. The sound on the football game was muted once again, and the musicians got ready to start their second set — this time, it seemed, with an energy that reflected a renewed admiration for the sounds of their island and their people.
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