Puerto Ricans in Seattle shed ‘tears of pride’ during Bad Bunny’s show

Yes, the Seahawks won the biggest prize in U.S. professional sports and sparked a week of giddy celebration in the city, but for many in the region, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s Super Bowl halftime show was just as significant. 

A week after winning album of the year at the Grammy’s, Ocasio, famously known as Bad Bunny, delivered a fiercely unapologetic love letter to Puerto Rico on one of the world’s largest platforms entirely in Spanish, a performance that President Trump called “disgusting” and led Turning Point USA to air an alternative “All-American” halftime show.

But try as they might, the day belonged to Bad Bunny, whose set was a cornucopia of visual and cultural signifiers, from Puerto Rico’s sugar cane fields and frail electrical systems to the rich Nuyorican culture of New York City.

After saying “God bless America,” he shouted out countries from across the Western Hemisphere, leaving the U.S. and Canada for last, pointedly decentering what is too often centered.

The Seattle metro area is home to just 24,000 people of Puerto Rican descent, according to 2021 census numbers; they make up about 5% of the region’s Latino population. While the area may not have the Boricua community of places like New York or Orlando, Fla., the pride in Bad Bunny’s performance was felt here as well. 

Meralys Rosario Lopez came to the Seattle area about a year ago from Puerto Rico. Born and raised in the central eastern city of Caguas, Rosario Lopez was a union organizer with the Service Employees International Union in Puerto Rico and now lives in Burien and works as an organizer for an SEIU health care local here.

She has long been impressed by Bad Bunny’s fearlessness in speaking out politically and said that through the Super Bowl he was able to present a lot of the reality of Puerto Rico in just a couple of minutes.

The section of the performance where dancers were climbing telephone poles and then the poles exploded represented the energy crisis the territory faces, she said. The recognition of that experience brought her to tears because she was there after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and its related power issues and said her mom died in the aftermath of the hurricane. 

Rosario Lopez said the choice to perform in Spanish was also powerful, “because this means resistance for me.” The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898, she said, meant pressure to move from Spanish to English, “and we really resist that, and we speak Spanish as the first language.”

Spanish became the primary language of Puerto Rico after its colonization by Spain in 1493 and four centuries of Spanish rule, a period where the Spanish brutally repressed the Indigenous Taíno people and brought enslaved African people to the islands to exploit their labor.

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens but are not allowed to vote in presidential elections. As Rosario Lopez put it, “we are a colony, actually, from the United States. So many people don’t like to say that word, but it’s real.”

There are a wide range of viewpoints in Puerto Rico on its future, with some advocating for statehood, others for independence, as well as other paths.

The resource extraction and labor exploitation from centuries of colonization have created a host of structural issues that continue to impact Puerto Rico today. 

“The economy is not good. The salaries are low. The houses are very, very, expensive. It’s a very difficult situation for many people,” Rosario Lopez said.

Jhonny Reyes, the chef and owner of Belltown’s Afro-Latino, Nuyorican restaurant Lenox, said he had tears of pride when he watched Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the venue’s special watch party. 

Born in NYC’s Spanish Harlem, Reyes was raised in Seattle and brought the warmth and flavors of his Puerto Rican family and community to the Northwest through Lenox.

Reyes said the Super Bowl party was something special.

“Once that halftime show started, it was out of this world,” he said. “There’s people waving Puerto Rican flags, like everybody is singing along, everybody salsa dancing.” And to have the Seahawks win, on top of that, was just “exponential,” he said. 

Like at my own Super Bowl party, he noted that after the halftime show ended, a “good amount” of people ended up leaving. We were not alone on that front, as The New York Times reported that while the game itself garnered 125 million viewers, the halftime show drew 128 million. (Turning Point USA’s “alternative” halftime show attracted about 6 million concurrent viewers.)

The most-streamed artist on Spotify in 2025, Bad Bunny’s meteoric rise has brought renewed attention to Puerto Rican culture, Reyes said. “Just being able to have somebody literally on the biggest stage would just be like, Puerto Rico is here,” he said. “It just really made us feel like, this is our time, and we need to keep on building.”

Reyes said that when he opened his restaurant there was often not a lot of familiarity with Puerto Rican cuisine. Instead of Puerto Rican dishes like mofongo or alcapurrias, people would ask for tortillas, not understanding the vast geographic and cultural diversity of Latin American food. 

But despite not knowing at first if Puerto Rican and Cuban food would be embraced in Seattle, he said he was pleasantly surprised by how many people were receptive and wanted more. He said now Lenox has become a cultural touchstone for people from the diaspora, some coming from many miles away to have a taste of home.

As Rosario Lopez said, “(Puerto Rico is) small. We know that we are small, and we are struggling with a lot of things. When we see (Bad Bunny) … being recognized by all these people from around the world, I feel hope. I feel that we have a chance and we have opportunities to come.”

Columnist Gene Balk provided census data included in this report.