Baila sin miedo,ama sin miedo: Bad Bunny’s courageous act of love at the Super Bowl Half Time Show

On the 8th February 2026, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—the 32-year-old Puerto Rican singer and rapper known worldwide as Bad Bunny—, ¹ headlined the Super Bowl Half Time Show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California (NFL, 2026). The 13-minute performance was delivered almost entirely in Spanish and broadcast to hundreds of millions of viewers globally. Widely received as aesthetically powerful and politically charged, it has been read in the media as a ‘love letter’ to Puerto Rico (Myers, 2026; Rackham, 2026) and to Latin America, particularly amid the intensifying polarisation and racialised violence against immigrants in the United States and beyond. Despite the hyper-commercial setting, Bad Bunny offered a subtle yet resonant moment of anti-colonial expression (Zakrzewska et al., 2026), foregrounded in love rather than overt confrontation. Rooted in a proud affirmation of his Puerto Rican identity and attentive to the island’s colonial history and ongoing struggles, the performance also resonated across broader Latina/o experiences.

Drawing on hooks’ (2018) conception of love in her book All About Love, this media and artefacts review explores Bad Bunny’s performance as a courageous act of love that operates as resistance within a post-colonial condition structured by global capitalism. More specifically, I argue that Bad Bunny mobilised self-love, communal joy, and political truth-telling as interrelated practices that enable connection within and between communities, turning love into a form of political resistance against oppression. My engagement with this artefact is both scholarly and personal. As a Latina woman myself, navigating displacement within the so-called ‘global’ academia (Barros and Alcadipani, 2023), the performance deeply resonated with me. It reminded me of Home and of the love I have learned within my community, to which I return wherever I am. This positionality informed my reading of the performance as a site where love and political resistance were shown to intersect.

Bad Bunny’s performance brought into life hooks’ (2018) understanding of love as a transformative force grounded in action—a relational ethic that enables us not only to survive acts of lovelessness in our personal lives, but also in the face of broader structures of oppression in our societies. In order to organise resistance, love is mobilised in a variety of foundational ways, several of which unfolded on stage that evening. Self-love was one of them. For hooks’ (2018), self-love is not merely a narcissistic celebration, but a necessary act to refuse internalised devaluation. This was evident when Bad Bunny addressed his audience in Spanish: ‘Si hoy estoy aquí es porque nunca dejé de creer en mí. Tú también deberías de creer en ti. Vale más de lo que piensas’ (which translates as, ‘if I am here today, it is because I never stopped believing in myself. You should believe in yourself too. You are worth more than you think’). ² In a symbolic gesture, he presented a Grammy to a younger version of himself. By affirming his own worth, Bad Bunny rendered visible a form of humanity that is often denied to post-colonial subjects. In doing so, he shared what hooks (2018: 16) call ‘life-affirming thoughts’ through his art, making self-love the necessary foundation for resisting oppression.

If self-love grounds the possibility of resistance, it is through communal joy that love expands relationally. As hooks (2018: 44) suggests, being self-actualised in love enables us to ‘engage in communion with the world around us’, and, in doing so, live fully and well. Across the performance, scenes of elders playing dominoes in public spaces, children asleep on an improvised bed during family celebrations, the party in Bad Bunny’s casita, the entrepreneurial spirit of street vendors selling coconut water and tacos, and the informal trade of gold and silver, brought to the stage everyday practices recognisable from the Caribbean to Central and South America, evidencing the centrality of community in our identities.

The presence of Maria Antonia ‘Toñita’ Cay, Puerto Rican matriarch and owner of the Caribbean Social Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, further shifted the focus of the performance towards the Latin American diasporic community. Within contexts shaped by post-colonial displacement that so many of us live in, willingly or not, and the continuous oppression of post-colonial subjects, Toñita’s presence foregrounded interdependence. It is the understanding that ‘our fates [are] intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet’ (hooks, 2018: 119)—to celebrate this communality was itself an act of love.

This was further reinforced in another politically charged sequence near the end of Bad Bunny’s performance, when the phrase ‘God bless America’ was followed by the naming of countries across the Americas. Following that, Bad Bunny exhibited a ball in which viewers could read a unifying message that asserted connection in the face of exclusion: ‘together, we are America’. Theoretically, these two gestures push against the conventional boundaries of ‘inclusion’, by questioning who is ‘legitimately’ included as American by former colonial agents, and what it means to be American. Through this, Bad Bunny implicitly underscored the racists acts of exclusion, particularly as a response to ‘mainstream’ criticism that categorised him as not American enough for the Super Bowl, despite Puerto Rico’s political status as a U.S. territory (Román and Ernesto, 2025).

Throughout these various demonstrations of love in the performance—to oneself and to the community—, there was also the politicisation of love, in the sense that it demands political truth-telling: ‘seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be’ (hooks, 2018: 65). This became visible in moments where Bad Bunny confronted the intertwined colonial histories that continue to shape the Americas, most strikingly through the imagery of the forced labour in sugar cane fields. Similarly, he directly addressed Puerto Rico’s post-colonial condition, climbing a powerline pole while he sang El Apagón—a critique of infrastructure neglect following the privatisation of electricity, which has resulted in frequent power outages. Yet, these acts of truth-telling did not culminate in despair. Instead, alongside other symbolic or affective responses to racial and social injustices, love emerged here as a constructive strategy of resistance.

In the performance, for example, El Apagón transitioned into the celebratory call-and-response of CAFé CON RON, circling back to communal joy as a way of both exposing and resisting oppression. It is here that love operated most clearly as resistance, as Bad Bunny refused to let injustices define our existence. As hooks (2018: 89) reminds us, while injustice may shape the conditions of our lives, ‘we can choose how we respond (. . .) and cope with realities we cannot easily change’. These choices, foregrounding love and communal joy as resistance, contrary to individual or collective descent into hate, anger and despair, are particularly significant in times marked by fear that fuels and intensifies polarisation across the world.

Against this backdrop, the performance called for courage. ‘When we choose to love’, hooks (2018: 125) writes, ‘we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other’. Bad Bunny’s intervention—‘Baila, baila, baila sin miedo. Ama sin miedo’ (which translates as, ‘Dance, dance, dance without fear. Love without fear’)—articulated this more explicitly. Hence, love becomes a response to despair about the enchantment of power and terror over the world; a despair rooted, as hooks (2018) suggests, in the fear that love does not exist. To choose love, as Bad Bunny did, is to cultivate courage to stand up for what we believe in and to be accountable.

Yet, this relational ethic unfolded within one of the largest commercial stages in the world—conditions under which the contradictions of global capitalism were impossible to ignore. For hooks (2018: 106), a return to love is inseparable from a critique of ‘capitalism, materialism, and the violence used to enforce exploitation and dehumanization’, which are deeply entangled. These forces disproportionately affect post-colonial and racialised communities, while often rendering their cultures profitable (see, e.g. Zakrzewska, 2025). That Bad Bunny’s counter-narrative reached hundreds of millions of viewers is inseparable from this dynamic. At the same time, the decision to platform him on this stage was not without consequence for those who made it. Facing significant conservative backlash (Román and Ernesto, 2025), the Super Bowl organisers created a space that ran against powerful interests—and this form of allyship from within the system is worth acknowledging.

More significantly for post-colonial subjects, survival often requires the navigation of such tensions. As such, and as a former colonial subject myself, I read Bad Bunny’s performance as an anti-colonial expression from within these tensions. Bad Bunny’s performance highlighted how former colonial subjects, upon gaining access to spaces that historically exclude and marginalise racialised bodies, can leverage those platforms on behalf of their communities. In doing so, Bad Bunny turned the Super Bowl into a platform through which narratives of self-love, communal joy, and political truth-telling were staged, and allowed to circulate at scale.

For critical organisation scholars, this performance illustrated how resistance is often organised from within, rather than outside, dominant infrastructures of global capitalism. Love operates as a distinct mode of organising resistance, insofar as it builds a connection in ways that overt confrontation alone cannot sustain. However, love emerges here not as an uncontested alternative organising principle, but as a situated practice shaped by truth-telling, self-love, and communal joy. Tensions may remain unresolved, but Bad Bunny’s performance showed how they can be navigated in ways that sustain this connection. I believe this represents a significant takeaway for critical organisation scholars as we navigate current global tensions, inviting us to reflect on our roles and impact—and to recommit ourselves, with renewed purpose, to our work as researchers and educators.

Bad Bunny’s performance can be read as a courageous act of love for Puerto Rico and Latin America, and as solidarity with both immigrant communities and former colonial subjects across the world.

‘Seguimos aquí’: We are still here.