“I feel like my culture was so represented on the field,” Berkeley High School sophomore Viola Ortiz Glickman, who identifies as Puerto Rican, said, “It was so colorful. All the dancers, all the people, and all the flags in the end.” On Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026, 128.2 million viewers tuned in to watch Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny, deliver a historic halftime show at the 60th Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California.
At the show’s climax, flanked by a parade of performers waving flags and beating drums, Bad Bunny strode down the field with a football tucked under his arm, listing twenty-six countries included in the Americas, from Chile to Guyana to Canada. He raised up the football, displaying its white-printed message: “TOGETHER, WE ARE AMERICA” and triumphantly spiked the ball, before the whole stage broke into a jubilant rendition of one of his most popular songs, “DtMF.” Ortiz Glickman recalls watching this moment with her friends, one of whom was Costa Rican. “She got super excited when he said Costa Rica and it just made me so happy. It made me feel like we’re all just one big family,” Ortiz Glickman said.
Bad Bunny seamlessly stitched together 18 songs for the performance, including a brief interlude of one-line snippets from other 2000s reggaeton hits, including Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina.” The stage was transformed into a varied Puerto Rican landscape; there was a sugar cane field made up of leaf-bedecked extras, a cluster of utility poles, as well as the pink La Casita — a small home that was also featured in Bad Bunny’s residency — with painted marqueta and barber shop signs. On the porch of this “casita,” celebrity guests such as Young Miko, Karol G, Cardi B, Jessica Alba, and Pedro Pascal danced. Ricky Martin gave a heartfelt rendition of Bad Bunny’s song “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” from a platform made up to mimic the monobloc chair setup of the cover of Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS album.
“I think it was a good choice to bring in Lady Gaga to showcase how cultures are mixed in the United States,” BHS freshman Kenji Tachibana said on Lady Gaga’s surprise appearance, “America is called a melting pot, and I think changing her song to salsa kind of showcased that.”
Dancers, costumes, landscapes, and the whirlwind of cameos and references all contributed to the prevalent theme of diversity. Constantly action-packed and changing, camera angles continuously displayed new, different visuals. A real-life marriage, that of a couple who optimistically invited Bad Bunny to their wedding, unfolded. Bad Bunny interacted with nail techs, jewelry vendors, the owner of New York’s famous Caribbean Social Club, abuelos playing dominoes, and countless other symbols of Puerto Rican life. Ortiz Glickman said, “When I go to Puerto Rico, I see that and it’s exactly like that.”
One notable moment was Bad Bunny’s presentation of his Grammy Award to a little boy, presumably meant to represent the artist’s younger self. Another occurred after Ricky Martin performed, when a shower of sparks erupted from the utility poles and power lines. This referenced the post-Hurricane-Maria power outages in Puerto Rico that lasted for close to a year. Bad Bunny delivered his song “El Apagón” from one of the rickety poles, after standing resolutely in front of the camera waving a Puerto Rican flag. However, this was not the red, navy and white flag that is today’s official Puerto Rican flag, but the light blue Puerto Rican independence flag. “That is just a statement that had to be made … he has to represent his culture, fight for it, and not let it die,” Ortiz Glickman said.
“It was a message geared for the United States,” Raquel L’Esperance Feldman, a BHS junior, said. She attended Bad Bunny’s recent Argentina concert and observed that, while the Argentinian audiences had all seen his Super Bowl performance, it seemed to have reverberated much more in the United States. She also particularly noticed the concert’s impact at BHS. “From my impression, (the concert) brought his music to a lot more people, especially in our school.”
Over the past few years, Bad Bunny’s platform has been growing exponentially, with him winning Album of the Year in the most recent Grammy Awards, a clear marker of his surge in popularity. But with a large platform comes responsibility, and amidst ICE raids and a storm of anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx sentiment in the U.S., it was clear that Bad Bunny’s performance had to send a message — but nobody knew how he would do it. Bad Bunny chose joy.
“His message overall, the spreading love over hate, was very powerful,” L’ Esperance Feldman said.
There are any number of things he could have criticized in past or present-day America — some of which, subtly, he did. But as the billboard behind him pronounced boldly at the end of his concert: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” And, so, Bad Bunny turned his show into an expression of cultural pride, and a declaration of unification and shared love across all of America.