PMA/LSP Associate Professor Karen Jaime has completed a set of media appearances discussing Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance. Jaime was featured in a televised broadcast on WNYW’s local Fox 5 News station, during a segment titled "Halftime Show Audience Estimated to be More Than 135 Million Viewers."
“We spoke about the politics of Bad Bunny's performance and how in terms of content, aesthetics, and sound he worked to create a space for joy as resistance while celebrating Puerto Rico, and its relationship to the larger Americas,” said Jaime. “In terms of the audience, I hope that folks watching understand that this was a sonic love letter to community, kinship, and diaspora. Bad Bunny foregrounded joy as resistance.”
Jaime was also quoted in the article “Bad Bunny's Ford pickup a nod to automaker's relevance in Puerto Rico” by Jamie L. LaReau, originally published in the Detroit Free Press. During Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, he stood “atop a vintage cream and green colored Ford F-100 pickup. He sang and danced on the cab's roof,” wrote LaReau.
"Everything in the video and performance had meaning and purpose," said Jaime. "Throughout his Super Bowl performance, Benito aka Bad Bunny intentionally wove imagery that spoke to his Puerto Rican roots, cross-cultural exchange and solidarity, and the U.S. relationship with Puerto Rico…. His usage of a late 1960s/1970s model Ford F-100, an iconic U.S. brand and car, reflects how he sought to bring people together through familiar symbols/products rooted in the U.S. that had deep ties and connections with Puerto Rico."
Read the article, republished in USA Today.
