The United States was buzzing with discussion regarding the Super Bowl halftime show back in February. The name at the center of all this was Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican artist whose performance at the biggest American football game of the year drew more than 128 million live U.S. viewers andmore than 4 billion global views within 24 hours.
But despite the success of this performance and the earworminess of songs like “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” there was a particularly vocal segment of people who expressed discontent with Bad Bunny’s presence on the Super Bowl’s halftime stage.
Major voices on the political right spoke out against Bad Bunny’s performance. Conservative commentator Tomi Lahrenclaimed he is not an American artist, despite Bad Bunny being born a U.S. citizen, and now-former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem threatened to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Super Bowl.
Even President Donald Trump quipped ina Truth Social post that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” which is ironic given the U.S. has thesecond-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world.
Despite frustrations so strong they spawnedan alternative halftime show, much of this backlash to a Spanish-speaking artist forgets one thing: Spanish isn’t new to the U.S.
Decades before the more famous settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, the earliest permanent European settlement in the U.S. was actually in St. Augustine, Florida,founded by a Spanish soldier named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565.
Another piece of history we tend to forget is that Spaniards began tocolonize the Southwest centuries before the U.S. even existed. This land was later owned by Mexico, and the territory from Texas to Californiawas ceded to the U.S. in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. Thus, Spanish has deep historical roots in the Southwest that are often forgotten.
University of Minnesota Spanish graduate instructor Leiry Warren said we have a tendency to remember aspects of history that fit our narratives instead of seeing both sides of the coin.
“You remember the part of history that is more convenient to your beliefs,” Warren said. “What is different, or what you don’t agree with, or what you don’t like or what doesn’t create an impact on you, that’s something that’s disregarded.”
University Spanish lecturer Eva Palma Zúñiga said she was surprised by the amount of Spanish still spoken in the U.S. when she emigrated from Chile, as the image of the U.S. abroad focused largely on English.
“That’s how I kind of started to be intrigued by the language, by my own language spoken in this country,” Palma said. “Before, I had no idea that they would speak it like that, not even in California, because that’s the image that’s portrayed abroad.”
But this narrative of a monolingual English-speaking U.S. overlooks the numerous languages that have a large impact on our society and culture. Spanish is chief among them, having been preserved in states like New Mexico forlonger than the U.S. has existed and retaining its status asan official language in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.
Warren said the prevalence of artists like Bad Bunny can help expose people to the linguistic and cultural diversity of our inherently multicultural society. Still, that prominence can prompt backlash from those unaccustomed to seeing that diversity.
“Sometimes people are in their bubbles, as they are maybe in an environment where it’s just English,” Warren said. “That’s where they grew up, and that’s what they know, so they think that’s just how their country works.”
For Palma, other factors driving the controversy around Spanish-speaking artists include continued anti-immigrant rhetoric and racism, which have seen a particular surge under the Trump administration.
“The meaning of being an immigrant has been so diminished nowadays,” Palma said. “To be an immigrant is mostly like, ‘You’re a criminal,’ ‘You eat cats and dogs.’”
As seen through rhetoric like Lahren’s, the increasingly negative view of Spanish takes on a strangely nationalistic tone, despite the U.S.not having an official language until 2025. Even the alternative halftime show was labeled the “All-American Halftime Show,” suggesting the main halftime show was somehow not American.
Palma said the view that Spanish is a threat to English in the U.S. is flawed because English has become a standard language internationally.
“It sounds like, after the Super Bowl halftime show, that Spanish is a threat to the English language,” Palma said. “From my perspective, I don’t think English is in danger at all. I think they can coexist, as they always have been, and they’re trying to cover up the fact that there is a coexistence of both languages as well as other languages.”
So, at the end of the day, Spanish is not some scary language that emerged suddenly within the past few decades. It is a language with deep historical and cultural roots in this country and we can’t overlook that fact any longer.
If you can’t understand what someone is singing, you should look up the lyrics and learn instead of splitting hairs about what is American and what isn’t, because, as Bad Bunny reminded us, there is no single way to be American.
And that’s precisely what’s so great about being American.