Media event and Latin performance: Bad Bunny at Super Bowl LX and the symbolic reconfiguration of "America" (2026)

This paper examines Bad Bunny’s (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) televised halftime performance at Super Bowl LX, broadcast on 8 February 2026. Drawing on the theoretical framework of media events, media rituals and the culture of spectacle, it interprets the performance as a device of visibility and memory that reorganises the ritual of the major sporting event. The staging unfolds a symbolic grammar centred on Puerto Rico and the Latin diaspora: the opening amid sugarcane fields activates a colonial memory; the little house condenses home, community and cultural pride; the live wedding and the neighbourhood party advance a politics of affect; and the sequence focused on electrical infrastructure positions the island’s material precarity within the global public sphere. In its closing movement, the re-signification of the formula “God bless America”, through the enumeration of countries across the continent and the display of flags, constructs an inclusive pan-Americanism that challenges the appropriation of the term “America” as an exclusive synonym for the United States. The analysis argues that the spectacle offers a counter-narrative of citizenship: against contemporary discourses of fear, criminalisation and exclusion directed at Latin migration, Bad Bunny articulates recognition, self-esteem and continental fraternity without resorting to belligerent rhetoric.