MEXICO CITY (AP) — When Bad Bunny said “God bless America,” a common English expression for the United States, during the Super Bowl halftime show and then began naming countries across the continent, the phrase functioned as both a play on words and a statement. In Spanish, América usually refers to the entire hemisphere, not a single country, and that difference mattered to millions of people watching from afar.

In a crowded bar in Mexico City, the moment unleashed applause so loud that it overpowered the music.

Plates of beef, shredded beef and macaroni and cheese, classics of American cuisine, circulated among the tables as the beer continued to flow. Fans in NFL jerseys had spent the first half of the game reacting to each play. Several giant foam fingers towered over the crowd. When halftime arrived, the attention did not disappear. Changed focus.

Bad Bunny appeared on stage. People stood up, cell phones raised. Some were dancing between the tables. As he listed the countries of the American continent, the noise grew. When he said “Mexico,” the bar exploded.

“With everything that is happening in the United States about politics and the fact that they don't like Latinos… for a Latino to come and sing in Spanish on the biggest show in the world was incredible,” said Laura Gilda Mejía, a 51-year-old elementary school teacher and NFL fan, who was watching the game with her two children. “It filled me with emotion.”

In Mexico, Puerto Rico and Latino communities in the United States, Bad Bunny's halftime show was received as more than just entertainment. Several people described it as a moment of pride and recognition: an artist who sings in Spanish dominating one of the most viewed stages of American pop culture without being translated, in a context in which, Latinos affirm, cultural visibility coexists with political vulnerability.

Many people in Latin America reject the idea that “American” belongs to a single country. By exclaiming “God bless America” and then expanding the concept to include dozens of nations, Bad Bunny turned that linguistic tension into a statement of inclusion.

US President Donald Trump lashed out at the performance at Truth Social, calling it “absolutely terrible” and “an affront to the greatness of the United States.”

Mexico watched closely

Mexico is one of the largest international markets in the world. NFL, with tens of millions of fans and even regular season games on Mexican soil. The Super Bowl has become a huge social event, with audiences tuning in as much for the game as for the commercials and the halftime show.

That made the performance seem especially meaningful in the country.

Chrystian Plata, a 33-year-old singer and New York Giants fan who watched the game with his parents, in-laws and 2-year-old son, said halftime was the emotional high point of the game for him, because of the way he looked for “unite the traditions of all the people who have migrated there and who have also made the United States rich.”

“Maybe I'm not that fond of Bad Bunny's music, but I think that what he did on a cultural level, he did very well,” he said.

Those reactions reflect what many Mexicans have expressed since it was announced that Bad Bunny would headline the halftime show.

In early December, as many fans walked past street stalls selling the artist's merchandise before the start of his tour in Mexico City, María Fernanda Simón, a 35-year-old psychologist, years, said she felt surprised by the magnitude of his impact.

“I love that people want to speak Spanish for him,” she said. "For a long time... everything Anglo, gringo, güero, English was the 'in', the 'fashion' and now seeing it the other way around makes me feel excited, like being Latin is 'cool'."

Not everyone in Mexico shares that reading. José Manuel Valenzuela, a cultural studies researcher at Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, warns that the idea that cultural value flows only from the United States reflects a long-standing “colonized” perspective, shaped by history, power and the media. In his opinion, Bad Bunny's moment is real, but it does not erase the deepest inequalities that make these types of turns novel.

Puerto Rico in the foreground

In Puerto Rico, the game was just a preamble in the meetings to watch the Super Bowl. In San Juan and nearby communities, neighborhoods came to life as the game faded into the background and all attention focused on Bad Bunny's 13 minutes on stage.

Alexandra Núñez, a resident of Caguas, south of San Juan, wore a pava — a traditional Puerto Rican straw hat — and clothing in the colors of the Puerto Rican flag as she watched the broadcast.

“This is an achievement,” she said. "Bad Bunny is showing that music has no barriers. Language has no barriers. You don't have to speak our language to be able to enjoy our culture and our music. This is something global, it's global."

He also marked a clear difference between Bad Bunny and other Latin stars who reached the American public by adapting their sound or their language.

"There is a difference with what Bad Bunny is doing because what Ricky Martin did was a 'breakthrough' (a step forward), it was crossing the market," he said. But "Bad Bunny didn't have to cross the market... He literally took what already existed and took it to the other side. He made them accept what we had. We didn't have to change, he didn't have to change anything to get to them." that many Latinos received the show.

Carlos Benítez, 29, born in Cali, Colombia, raised in Miami and currently employed in risk management at a bank in New York, described the performance as an achievement, but also as a reminder of his limits.

“For me it is an achievement,” he said, remembering that before artists felt pressure to sing in English to reach the highest levels. “Bad Bunny has been one of the artists who have gone the furthest by saying: 'I'm going to make my music in Spanish and whoever understands it, understood it and whoever doesn't, then no.'”

At the same time, he stressed that visibility does not automatically translate into immediate changes.

“It is not a direct change. It's not that someone, say, an ICE agent who was watching the Super Bowl, saw the show and said, 'Wow! It completely changed the way I think,'” she said, referring to the U.S. immigration agency.

That tension is central to the way many Latinos interpreted the night.

Vanessa Díaz, an associate professor of Chicano and Latino studies at Loyola Marymount University and co-author of the book “P FKN R: Bad Bunny and Music as an Act of Resistance,” said the performance reflects a broader shift in what it means to belong to the mainstream in United States, that is, that which dominates popular taste and reaches majority audiences.

He stated that Bad Bunny is not an alternative artist, but rather a mainstream one, even if the latter no longer focuses on music in English or white audiences.

He added that what has surprised many is not only that a Spanish-language artist has reached the Super Bowl stage, but that Bad Bunny has done so after years of consecutive global successes, even among non-speaking listeners. Spanish art, he said, has always transcended language barriers, but the scale and consistency of its success challenges older ideas about who makes up the majority audience.

Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said Monday that a phrase projected during Bad Bunny's performance — “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” — reinforced, in her opinion, the message of unity he conveyed by singing in Spanish at the Super Bowl.

At the bar in Ciudad. of Mexico, when the game resumed and the fans gathered again on the field, the emotion was still in the air.

For Mejía, the teacher, the night did not resolve the contradictions she perceives between cultural celebration and discrimination. But that the moment happened, and that it happened in Spanish, was something very important.

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The Associated Press journalist Alejandro Granadillo in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to it. dispatch.

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.