Sueña, Mi Nación
Couldn’t understand the words, still the message came through loud and clear. Never have been especially swift at picking up languages, or deciphering lyrics sung in my mother tongue for that matter. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio got his points across in spite of my shortcomings.
The performer known far and wide as Bad Bunny made history as the first artist to perform a Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish. America’s superiority-complex-in-chief was disgusted by the spectacle, insisting “nobody understands a word” coming out of the Puerto Rican rapper’s mouth. Nobody. Or half a billion people worldwide, close to 50 million in this country alone.
I do not count among these masses who speak Spanish, yet Bad Bunny’s performance spoke to me as well, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers through the universal languages of rhythm, harmony and movement. I felt the energy, the unbridled exuberance. I caught the symbolic expressions of pain and frustration, of hope and resilience. The sugarcane, the sparking electrical poles, the wedding ceremony (not a staged one, actual nuptials).
My heart melted along with so many others when Bad Bunny handed his Grammy Award to a 5-year-old boy. Many were on high alert for political statements, many rushed to social media to speculate the boy was none other than Liam Ramos, who was kidnapped by federal agents to use as bait to lure his parents out of their Minneapolis home. It was not Liam, though the actor who shared the moment with Bad Bunny bore a striking resemblance.
If this was a jab at paramilitary goons occupying Liam’s hometown, it was an artfully subtle one. To me, it came across as a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation, a proclamation that anyone can pursue their dreams and achieve great things.
The actor in this scene, half-Argentinian Lincoln Fox, was dressed exactly how a young Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio looked standing in front of his family’s Christmas tree, wearing a striped collared shirt and khaki shorts.
About the only thing Bad Bunny said in English on Sunday was “God bless America,” and I surely noticed when he then named every country in the Americas. I took this not as protest but as celebration and aspiration. My takeaway was that he must be immune to the ailment that afflicts so many across the cultural and ideological landscape on the U.S. mainland.
More of us than not suffer from obstacle fixation, obsessively focusing on a hazard to the point where it narrows our field of vision until all we see is the menace we wish to avoid or escape. We fixate on it so much that we can’t see what’s beyond it, can no longer tell there are clear paths around it.
Couldn’t make out many of the words Sunday, but the lesson embedded in Bad Bunny’s joyous, celebratory art sunk in nevertheless. Pay less attention to the nightmare and more to the dream.