I don’t watch the Super Bowl. Growing up between Harlem and Spanish Harlem, the game never felt like it was for me. My childhood memories of it are defined by the cheerleaders – back then, a very specific, white, thin, artificial version of beauty that sent a clear message: you don’t belong here. So, as an adult, I mostly just opted out.
But this year, I found myself watching the halftime show.
Part of it was the noise. I was tired of the secondhand outrage and the warnings from people in power who seemed genuinely threatened by Bad Bunny taking the stage. I didn’t want a “hot take” or a filtered opinion; I wanted my own experience. Plus, there was something undeniably significant about an unapologetically Spanish-language performance on the biggest stage in the country in the current climate where many of those with structural power have demonized and oppressed Spanish speaking immigrants. It felt like something worth witnessing.
I didn’t expect to be moved, but I was. I came to the performance without knowing Bad Bunny’s music. I wasn’t a fan. I watched this without any preconceptions, and I think that made the experience even more striking, because what moved me wasn’t familiarity, it was presence and intention.
There was a wedding scene with a bride who was full-figured and darker-skinned. The camera didn’t treat her like a punchline or a diversity checkbox; it lingered on her as someone radiant. I felt a literal shift in my chest seeing a body like hers, a beauty like hers, centered in a space that once told me I didn’t exist.
Then there were the moments that honored everyday life. Street vendors, so often treated as invisible or disposable, were centered and acknowledged as part of the fabric of the community. The intergenerational scenes stayed with me too: elders alongside younger people, not as nostalgia, but as continuity, as the threads that make up the fabric of community. Seeing this tapestry was watching the living rebuttal of the idea that culture belongs only to the young, the polished, or the marketable.
And oh, the dancers! They moved in ways that felt like home – Brown, Indigenous, and African-descended bodies doing the same steps I grew up seeing at street parties and family celebrations. Even though I didn’t know the lyrics, I knew the language of the movement. It felt like an offering, a way of saying, “I want you to see all of us.”
What really struck me, though, wasn’t just the “representation”—it was the intentional use of power. Bad Bunny is someone with immense wealth and ego-driven potential, yet he chose to share the stage. He lifted up other artists, spotlighted queer visibility, and forced reminders of Puerto Rico’s power outages and ongoing struggle for representation and autonomy into the living rooms of millions.
Bad Bunny’s performance reminded me again that power itself isn’t the enemy. Avoiding it doesn’t make us more “ethical” or safer from harm. What matters is what we do with the influence we actually have.
Watching the show brought back that complicated mix of pride and fear I felt during Barack Obama’s first inauguration – the realization that visibility is a double-edged sword that can invite as much hatred as it does hope. Many of us are exhausted and disillusioned right now. It’s easy to say these cultural moments don’t matter, but this show quietly pressed a new reality into the collective consciousness: that Spanish isn’t “foreign” here, that Puerto Rico is us, and that beauty doesn’t have one acceptable silhouette.
None of us have a Super Bowl-sized platform, but we all have some pocket of power. We have the power to choose what we amplify at work, the power to make space for a silenced voice in our own families, and the power to form our own opinions instead of outsourcing them to the latest outrage cycle.
I’m left asking myself: Where am I playing small when I could be more courageous? Who is being left out of the spaces I occupy that I can invite in?
If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Don’t do it to agree with the critics or the fans, but to see what moves in you. Even in these heavy, frightening times, it’s a reminder that we can still choose to stand for something.
Postscript
As I sat with these thoughts, I found myself looking for other moments where artists have refused to let the magnitude of the stage swallow their message. I realized that since 2021, Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black National Anthem, has become a staple of the Super Bowl pre-game.
That first year, Alicia Keys1 gave a performance that took my breath away. She didn’t just sing; she invoked the names of those lost to racial violence, a lineage of grief stretching from Emmett Till to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. It’s easy, and often right, to be cynical about the NFL’s motivations, especially given the exile of Colin Kaepernick.
And still. Watching Keys hold space for dignity and memory in a venue that so often demands we forget felt like a masterclass in leveraging visibility. I ended up watching every rendition of that song from the last few years. It’s one of my own personal anthems, a song that insists our voices can be lifted in resistance, resilience, and hope all at once. By the end, I was in tears.
(You can watch Alicia Keys’ 2021 performance here: https://youtu.be/DS60luWpBe0)
There was one other moment from this Super Bowl weekend that moved me, though it happened away from the main cameras. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong used a performance to call on ICE agents to quit their jobs. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t “polite.” It was a raw, punk-rock call to conscience.
It would be easy to dismiss that, too, as mere posturing. But I see a throughline here. From the Spanish-language halftime show speaking against colonialism to the naming of our dead to this blunt refusal to stay silent, something is stirring. It isn’t a newfound faith in institutions – it’s a reminder that power is always being used, one way or another.
The question remains: How will we use ours?
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- Alicia Keys, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
https://youtu.be/DS60luWpBe0?si=Lo-I0PajqKAdhi70 ↩︎