On a sun soaked, 78-degree evening in April, a mix of students and faculty huddled on blue blankets and concrete steps near the School of Education Building while a large, portable JBL speaker played music from one of the most popular artists in the world right now: Bad Bunny.  

The Bad Bunny Picnic was thought up by a group of professors in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis who realized the significant impact the musician has been having on their students as well as Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.  

In the weeks leading up to the picnic, Bad Bunny won the Grammy for Album of the Year for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — the first Spanish language album to receive the prize. He was also the star of the Super Bowl Halftime Show and, that Monday after the game, Bad Bunny’s performance was all anyone in the department wanted to talk about. 

“It feels like there's a historical moment of visibility of the language in the U.S.,” said Daniela Gutiérrez Flores, assistant professor of Spanish at UC Davis. “The feel in the classroom was so ecstatic — the students felt very seen." 

Through his message of love, his use of symbolism and language, and his overt cultural pride, Bad Bunny is standing up for his beliefs, values, the greater Hispanic community, the Spanish language and his native Puerto Rico.  

“It's not just an album,” said Charlie Hankin, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese. “It's a whole phenomenon.” 

Cultural pride expressed through music, symbols 

Samuel Assael Aguilar Loera, who grew up in San Diego and Tijuana, was in eighth grade when his older brother turned him onto Bad Bunny’s songs.   

“His music was different in a way that I can’t explain — there is just something about it that, no matter how many times you play his songs, they are just great every time,” said Aguilar Loera, a third-year student double majoring in psychology and Spanish at UC Davis. “Seeing him in this position now, breaking records and barriers with his music, putting the Latino people on the map, it makes me even more proud of my roots and my culture.” 

In recent music videos and performances, Bad Bunny not only celebrates his Puerto Rican roots and culture, he educates people on Puerto Rican history. The teaser for last year’s album is a critique of gentrification and American presence and influence in Puerto Rico. 

That narrative thread continued during his Super Bowl Halftime Show in February.  

From the opening scene in the cane field to the fruit stand, nail salon and taco grill to the pickup truck and images of “Concho,” an animated character modeled after the ‘Sapo Concho,’ an endangered toad native to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the show was a celebration of Puerto Rico, its roots, music, culture and language. Using symbolism, Bad Bunny, going by his given name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, also acknowledged the Puerto Rican independence movement, waving its light blue version of the Puerto Rican flag.  

The performance culminated with people running with flags representing different countries within the Americas. Viewers at home saw Bad Bunny holding a football that read, in English, “Together, we are America.” 

Projected during the entirety of the 13-minute half time show was one other message written in English: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” 

Bad Bunny shares message of love 

On stage at the Super Bowl, Lady Gaga performed a salsa rendition of “Die with a Smile,” originally written and performed with Bruno Mars, punctuated by a dance with Bad Bunny and followed by his song, BAILE INoLVIDABLE.  

“By the end, it seems to be a song about a kind of lost love, a classic trope in a love song, but it's really a love song to salsa,” Hankin said. “When he says ‘You were my unforgettable dance,’ he's addressing salsa because it's, of course, this original salsa tune recorded with folks from the music school in Puerto Rico and so that's where I see this clear shift from the personal.” 

Salsa, Hankin continued, is an “index of Puerto Rican-ness" born out of New York City. He described it as a collaboration of Afro Caribbean styles, with a Cuban base and popularized by Puerto Ricans.  

Alain Roel Peña-Garcia, who is writing his Spanish honors thesis on the theme of love in Bad Bunny’s music with Hankin as his advisor, said that the artist uses messages of love as a creative form of protest.  

“When he talks about a relationship — whether it's a fractured relationship, whether it's a relationship he's aspiring to have — there's a message between his relationship with perhaps the United States, perhaps with Puerto Rico or even between Puerto Rico and the United States,” said Peña-Garcia. 

It can be taken romantically or, not infrequently, can be put into the larger context of U.S.–Puerto Rican relations. So, Peña-Garcia, said, when Bad Bunny is singing about a fractured relationship or a potential romantic relationship, he may simultaneously be referring to the relationship between the U.S. government and Puerto Rico (a U.S. territory since 1898).  

“He plays around with it,” Peña-Garcia said. “He gives his audience what they want to hear but, in a sense, he's doing it in a way where he's expressing his own desires, his own kind of public discontent with some things that are happening.” 

One of his more explicitly political songs is "Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii," in which Bad Bunny compares Hawaii to Puerto Rico, stating how he doesn’t want what happened to those islands — colonization and gentrification — to happen to his home island. In other songs, however, Peña-Garcia said, the message is often more nuanced. 

Bad Bunny might use the English word “sunset” in one song, "another beautiful sunset that I see in San Juan” and in another, the Spanish word ”atardecer,” which, Peña-Garcia said, feels more intimate. It is as if he’s pointing out the difference between the transient beauty a tourist might see in a Puerto Rican sunset versus how Puerto Ricans themselves experience the reliable beauty of a sunset at home and among family.  

The power of language  

The way Bad Bunny uses language — the choices he makes like when to use one language and when to use another — is deliberate, thoughtful and powerful.  

He doesn’t release English versions of his songs and stood his ground refusing to have English translations during the halftime show despite from President Trump. He performs in the language he grew up with: Spanish.    

But Bad Bunny isn’t singing the Spanish taught in U.S. mainland textbooks — his lyrics include words and phrases from local dialects across Puerto Rico, which, at times, include English, and a combination of both languages, often referred to as Spanglish. 

This back and forth is called “code -switching,” said Agustina Carando, associate professor of Spanish and director of the Heritage Spanish Program at UC Davis, and, despite often being mischaracterized as portraying ignorance or a lack of education, it is actually a sophisticated, rule-governed practice that requires high proficiency in at least two languages.  

“For many bilingual Hispanics in the U.S. whose language has often been marginalized in schools, workplaces and public spaces, this visibility is affirming. Seeing Bad Bunny’s performance signals that their linguistic practices are not private or inferior but culturally powerful and socially relevant,” Carando said. “It reflects people’s story of migration, of a diaspora from all Spanish-speaking regions of the world, and of their everyday negotiation of a bicultural identity, even leading them to reclaim the term Spanglish as their own.” 

The majority of U.S. Latinos use Spanglish at least some of the time, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Of that group, 40% reported speaking it often.  

“Bad Bunny transmits a great sense of pride in his linguistic heritage, resisting translation into English as well as editing into prescriptive forms of Spanish,” Carando said. “Over 40 million speakers in the U.S., including those on our own campus, saw themselves reflected in that arena.” 

Bad Bunny’s big dance party 

Bad Bunny’s music is easy to dance to and, just like he did on stage during his Super Bowl performance, Bad Bunny brings that lively, fun energy to his shows. Understanding the lyrics isn’t necessary to having a great time — Bad Bunny said so himself and, it seems likely, that the more than 128 million viewers who watched the show might agree.  

Though he told the American public they had “four months to learn” Spanish while hosting the comedy show Saturday Night Live last October, Bad Bunny added later: "It's better if they learn to dance. That's the only thing they need to worry about."   

At the end of the day, Bad Bunny gave the audience a big party. 

“Even if you didn't know the lyrics, or even if you were alone at a bar, or watching YouTube by yourself, there was that joy of just music and dancing,” Gutiérrez Flores said. “It felt like such an important moment of community.” 

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