Love Stronger Than Hate: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Moment

There’s a reason they tried so hard to stop it from happening.

Last night, Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage and reminded us what it feels like when someone refuses to shrink themselves. Thirteen minutes. All in Spanish. Sugar cane fields, domino games, a real wedding, Lady Gaga in a powder blue dress, Ricky Martin delivering “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” like a prayer.

And love. So much love it made the noise irrelevant.

I knew this show mattered the moment they announced him. Not just because Benito became the first Latino solo artist to headline halftime. Not even because he’d be performing almost entirely in Spanish on one of the biggest stages in the world.

It mattered because of what happened next.

The backlash. The alternative halftime shows. The people who didn’t think he belonged. The ones who said we needed someone who could “unite” America — as if unity meant erasing everyone who doesn’t fit their narrow vision of what American sounds like.

But here’s the thing they don’t get: Bad Bunny was never asking for permission.

He opened with “Tití Me Preguntó” — walking through sugar cane fields while men played dominoes in the background. Every image intentional. Every detail rooted in Puerto Rican history, culture, memory. The sugar cane wasn’t just aesthetic. It was legacy. It was “remember where you come from even when the world tells you to forget.”

Then Lady Gaga appeared at a wedding scene — yes, an actual wedding ceremony happening mid-halftime — and sang a salsa-soaked version of “Die With a Smile” that felt less like a guest spot and more like a communion. The joy on that stage was electric. Gaga and Benito dancing together, the couple cutting their cake, a little kid asleep on a chair while the party raged on around him.

It felt like home.

Then Ricky Martin. Sitting beneath a plantain tree, channeling the album cover of Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Singing about gentrification, about displacement, about what it means to hold onto culture when forces far bigger than you are trying to pave over it. The empty chair next to him. The 3,000 lives lost after Hurricane Maria. The eleven months without power.

It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t supposed to be.

This wasn’t a halftime show designed to make everyone comfortable. This was Benito saying: This is who I am. This is where I’m from. This is what we sound like when we refuse to be quiet.

And god, it was beautiful.

I think about the moments that hit hardest. The flags from every Latin American country raised high. Benito shouting “God bless America” — but meaning the continent, not just the country that’s spent centuries treating Puerto Rico like an afterthought. The football he spiked at the end with “Together We Are America” etched on it.

The message was clear: America doesn’t belong to one language. One sound. One story.

We’ve always been here. We’re not going anywhere.

Music has always been the place where I find refuge. Where the world makes sense when nothing else does. And watching Bad Bunny last night — watching him celebrate plena and bomba, watching him bring La Casita to Levi’s Stadium, watching him make space for Karol G and Cardi B and Pedro Pascal and Jessica Alba to dance alongside him — I felt that refuge expand.

This is what it looks like when someone carries their people with them. When they don’t code-switch or dilute or apologize. When they trust that the culture they come from is enough.

More than enough.

There will be people who didn’t get it. Who couldn’t understand the words or didn’t want to try. Who saw this show as divisive or political or too much.

Let them.

Because for the rest of us — for everyone who’s ever been told to speak English, to assimilate, to make ourselves smaller so others feel bigger — this show was proof that we don’t have to.

Bad Bunny stood on that stage and said: You don’t need to understand every word to feel what this means.

Dance without fear. Speak without fear.

Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor.

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

He’s right.

And last night, love won.