For twenty years, I taught a course on Latin American political thought. Bad Bunny may have taught many of the same ideas in ten minutes to millions of people in Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.

To the untrained ear or eye, the show may have appeared as incongruous gibberish, especially to those of us over 50 who don’t really listen to contemporary urban latin music, especially reggaeton.

But that is besides the point. What really matters are the ideas behind the spectacle.

The show took place in the middle of the United States’ best-known yearly bellicose event, the Super Bowl. Every year, a miniature war takes place between two teams in a sport that even president Trump called a misnomer, “American football,” when comparing it to “football” — or fútbol, in Spanish — which is played with feet and a round ball.

An egg-shaped ball is thrown around or carried with the hands to gain territory with brutal force. This show of violence was interrupted by someone who just wants to dance.

Right now, winter is roaring in the Northern Hemisphere. In Washington, DC, the Potomac river is gelid. In northern Italy, the winter Olympics are taking place after mass protests, while cold winds blow over upheavals in Minneapolis.

Maybe Hell has frozen over. But the singer, real name Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, who had already protested the U.S.’ immigration crackdown at the Grammys, once again said no to ice — in more ways than one — and chose the sun of his native Puerto Rico.

What is the significance of Bad Bunny’s show? It is a break, literally and figuratively, from this long political winter.

For Mexican political philosopher José Vasconcelos, who lived many years as an immigrant in Texas, aesthetics trumps politics. His posited that Latin people, from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Northern California, are united by a common essential rhythm.

Latin culture is fundamentally an artistic sensibility. We may not all share Benito’s particular kind of beat, but we recognize it as ours when we see it and feel it.

For Vasconcelos, this sensibility is not just for enjoyment. It is something Latin people can teach to others around the globe.

The English-speaking world world, mired in materialism and rigid logic, could particularly benefit from absorbing this sensibility: a different kind of aesthetic judgment that yields a more complete form of humanity. Vasconcelos thought it could lead us past the overly rational and bellicose periods of human history.

Bad Bunny’s show began with images of what may have been his barrio in Puerto Rico — or what, based on nostalgia, he may think it was. This idea echoes the work of another famous Caribbean immigrant, Cuba’s Jose Martí.

Martí was also an immigrant — and exile. In New York, he wrote his seminal essay Nuestra América (Our America) in 1891. For him, the word America is all of the Western Hemisphere, especially the Spanish-speaking areas. It is not synonymous with the United States, which is more of a description than a proper name.

In Bad Bunny’s show, the choice to define America as the variegated flags of the American continent’s nations is almost a direct reference to Martí.

Vasconcelos and Martí were not only national figures in their own countries. As immigrants in the U.S. — the former in Texas, the latter in New York — they became part of a transnational notion of identity.

A panethnic Latinidad

As such, they shaped U.S. identity through Chicano culture and Cuban-American sensibilities. They are as American as Emerson or Thoreau.

Many may deride Bad Bunny’s style of singing, but this is beside the point. He wants to meld language into musical rhythm, just as reggaeton is a mix of Jamaican beats and Latin pounding. Reason takes a back seat to pure aesthetic sensation, emotion, and form. All he wants to do is dance. And make romance.

In all the countries he mentioned, from Argentina and Bolivia to the U.S. and his native Puerto Rico, the ludic culture that he presented in the halftime show is in stark contrast to the martial gridiron. His all-white uniform is replicated in the show’s wedding scene, where love takes center stage.

Vasconcelos and Martí would easily recognize this sensibility as their own.

All Right Reserved.  Buenos Aires Herald