Lowkey Confused? HSS Explains!

Transcript

From Reggaeton to Political Resistance: How Bad Bunny Became a Global Phenomenon
Bad Bunny’s influence goes far beyond music. Dr. Gabriela Nuñez from the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Fullerton explains how the global superstar is using his platform to speak up for his community.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email hssdeansoffice@fullerton.edu with any questions.

Jessica Stern

Hello, welcome back to Lowkey Confused? HSS Explains! We’re here with Chicana and Chicano Studies faculty member and Associate Dean of Student Relations Gabriela Nuñez. She’s going to help us understand the phenomenon that is Bad Bunny — his global significance and his significance to us as academics.

All right, so let’s start with the basics. Who is Bad Bunny?

Gabriela Nuñez

Okay, well, I have to tell you, Jessica, that I’m a little bit obsessed. And my obsession is kind of new, so I’ve been doing a lot of deep dives.

Even though I’m a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Puerto Rico and Bad Bunny have never been my specialization. But I’m committed! Whatever free time I have as associate dean, I’ve been trying to learn here.

So hopefully this is the beginning of a conversation. I have all my notes that I may be referencing.

Bad Bunny — well, his full name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. His name is Bad Bunny because he has this childhood photo where he’s scowling in a rabbit costume, and that name just stuck.

Jessica Stern

Like, since he was a kid?

Gabriela Nuñez

I don’t know if it stuck since he was a kid, but it certainly has stuck now. He still shows that photo, so you can find it out there on the interwebs — a little Benito scowling in his bunny costume.

He is an artist, a singer, a producer, a songwriter — but he’s so much more than that. And this is one of the reasons why I’m obsessed. He’s a comedian, he’s a wrestler, he’s an activist. He’s so many things.

I really think he’s arguably the most important musician in this cultural moment. He’s a household name. He’s a global icon. And that’s why I think it’s important we’re talking about him today.

Jessica Stern

It goes to show that he’s a global icon because our graduates have chosen one of his songs, “DtMF,” as the 2026 commencement song.

So that’s just one of many examples of how he’s become this global phenomenon. What is your assessment of why he’s become a global phenomenon? What’s resonating with people right now?

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah, that’s a big question. Maybe I can start with his roots — where he’s from and why that’s important.

He was born and raised in Puerto Rico. And as we know, Puerto Rico is part of America. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but it’s a very complicated colonial relationship.

Puerto Rico became an unincorporated territory of the United States after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and so it became a possession of the United States. The local government, even though there is a local government, has never been able to be sovereign, has never been able to really make laws that deeply affect the locals in a way that’s beneficial for them.

So even though folks don’t like to use the word “colony” and refer to Puerto Rico as a territory, it’s effectively rendered a colony because of legislation that has been passed for many years.

Part of that legislation makes it difficult for folks in Puerto Rico to make a sustainable living. It’s a very impoverished island, with many people living below the poverty line. They have a crumbling, volatile infrastructure, especially the energy infrastructure, that is vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters.

You may have seen the effects of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022. During these hurricanes, the island completely loses power because the power grid is not fortified in a way that helps keep it on the grid.

When people lose power, many people die. It’s really that plain and simple. Hospitals cannot be powered. Schools close down. People cannot tend to their basic needs.

And this is not just a phenomenon that happens when there’s a huge hurricane. This has become an ongoing, daily problem for people who live on the island.

After Hurricane Maria in 2017, the government hired LUMA, which is a corporation, to take over the grid. They promised to fix everything. The cost of electricity went up, but they’re in a worse situation than they were prior to Hurricane Maria.

So this is an ongoing context of social and political struggle for Puerto Ricans, and Benito grew up in this context.

Jessica Stern

How deliberately or explicitly does he talk about this context in his music? Or maybe this fits under a larger umbrella: How much is he a political artist?

Gabriela Nuñez

First of all, he’s a super political artist, but he didn’t necessarily start that way.

Fewer than 15 years ago, he was bagging groceries at his local supermarket. He grew up middle class. His mother is a schoolteacher. His father is a truck driver. And he just had a natural talent for music.

He put a song online that really caught on. He’s deeply influenced by reggaeton. Again, I’m not a musicologist, but reggaeton is a wildly popular musical genre influenced by Jamaican reggae and dancehall music. It has African roots, and it’s influenced by different migration patterns in the Caribbean.

Reggaeton was highly influential for him, but Bad Bunny is operating in a genre called Latin trap. It’s influenced by reggaeton, but it also has a mixture of hip-hop.

As soon as Bad Bunny started putting music on SoundCloud, he was already unique. He has a deeper voice than some of his predecessors. One of my favorites is Daddy Yankee. His song “Gasolina” is like the apex of reggaeton.

Bad Bunny sounds very different from the folks who influenced him. He has a slower swagger. Early artists of Latin trap were singing about really violent things, like buying guns and committing acts of violence.

When Bad Bunny sings about buying a gun, it’s different because he’s buying a gun to kill Cupid for breaking his heart.

He’s a lot more vulnerable. I like to call him existential and self-reflexive.

Bad Bunny’s style is operating in this genre of Latin trap, but he brings something new to it. One of his more famous songs, “Tití Me Preguntó,” is a good example. He’s singing about kind of typical topics. He’ll talk about having a different girlfriend every single day of the week for the first half of the song.

But then the music slows down, and he starts getting reflexive and existential. He tells women not to fall in love with him because he’s not capable of falling in love, and he doesn’t know why he’s like this.

It ends on that note. I think he’s very endearing because he can be talking about womanizing, but at the end, he seems unaware of why he’s behaving like this.

In a lot of ways, he’s always pushing stereotypes. He’s always pushing genre.

Jessica Stern

Pushing or pushing against?

Gabriela Nuñez

Pushing against. Pushing against, yes.

The way that he represents his masculinity is very unlike his predecessors. It’s very unlike stereotypical definitions of Latino masculinity.

The way that he is unique is part of his popularity. At the same time, he’s always been very political. His songs can be deeply political, and he takes political stances. He uses his platform to advocate.

Jessica Stern

I do want to clarify: He is writing? He is the major writer? How much is he writing all of his material, and how much does he have a team of writers?

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think he writes a lot of his music, but he’s deeply collaborative. He likes to get his friends and other musicians in the studio. He also uses his platform to bring other voices in.

So he’s collaborative in the creation of his music, and he’s also collaborative in the creation of his videos.

For example, his song “Apagón” means “blackout,” and he’s talking about these massive blackouts in Puerto Rico. He’s always representing a lot of cultural pride, and that song is very much about cultural pride. At the same time, it’s about this deeply problematic infrastructure problem they have with the energy infrastructure.

The video shows everyday Puerto Ricans, different neighborhoods in Puerto Rico and young Puerto Ricans partying. But embedded in the video itself is a 20-minute documentary by a journalist who is investigating the displacement and gentrification of particular Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

This is where he opens up space for others to also tell the story of Puerto Rico in a very contemporary way.

What they’re criticizing in this documentary is Act 60, which allows U.S. investors to go in and purchase real estate essentially tax-free. They don’t have to pay tax on capital gains, and so that has caused the immediate eviction of local Puerto Ricans.

For example — and this is where I’m going to refer to my notes — there’s this one historically working-class neighborhood called Puerta de Tierra. It’s right outside the original fortified walls of the main capital of San Juan.

The reason this neighborhood started booming was because folks didn’t want to include formerly enslaved peoples inside the fortified walls. So they were relegated to the outside. This neighborhood became a working-class space where formerly enslaved people could build their communities.

With that history, Puerta de Tierra became the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico to build public housing and the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico to construct a public school.

Until recently, it was a vibrant working-class neighborhood. But with this act, and because of its location and natural resources, investors went in and started buying buildings. Within 30 days, they could evict people.

So there’s this mass eviction of people, the demolishing of dozens of schools and the displacement of entire communities and neighborhoods.

Jessica Stern

And this is relatively recent?

Gabriela Nuñez

Yes. “Apagón” was released in 2022.

Jessica Stern

Wow. So this is a very recent, contemporary problem.

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah.

Jessica Stern

That’s a perfect example of where he is embedding his political activism.

Gabriela Nuñez

Yes. And, you know, he won three Grammys alone this year. I can’t even name all of the Billboard Awards, all the firsts. He’s just incredibly popular.

During his Grammy acceptance speech, he literally said, “ICE out.”

He uses his platform to speak against whatever he thinks is hurting his communities. For example, he will not perform a show in the United States because he doesn’t want his fans to be targeted by ICE. He’s trying to protect his fans.

Jessica Stern

This raises the question of what’s sometimes a tension between commercial aspirations and political aspirations. How do we see him navigating those sometimes contrary goals?

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah. For example — and I do want to talk about the halftime show in a little more depth in a minute — his concerts are very popular.

He held a 30-show residency in Puerto Rico primarily so that local Puerto Ricans would benefit from it. Everything from ticket sales to restaurants to hotels to local artists creating merch outside the show — he created it so that local Puerto Ricans would benefit from his popularity.

He also wanted to show his home to the world. He’s like, “Come visit me. Come see me in Puerto Rico.” And it was, by all accounts, just an incredible experience for everyone.

He had a surprise livestream show of that residency with Amazon.

Jessica Stern

So he’s working with, you know, the biggest corporation.

Gabriela Nuñez

Yes. But that started a relationship that would help support his interests.

He has a foundation called the Good Bunny Foundation that helps support education, technology and infrastructure in Puerto Rico. So he’s working with Amazon to stream this show, and of course the stream itself was incredibly popular.

Yes, he’s working with this corporation, but he’s trying to tie that into a way that’s going to support his foundation, which is supporting local communities.

Jessica Stern

Wow. Amazing.

Gabriela Nuñez

So I think he’s navigating it. He also does things on his terms. He sings only in Spanish. He knows English, but he prefers Spanish. He has his way of doing things, and he tries to stay true and authentic to who he is.

For being such a huge global star, I think he’s navigating that pretty well.

Jessica Stern

Let’s move on to the Super Bowl show and what you noticed about the choices he made there and the audience reaction to the show.

Gabriela Nuñez

There is a lot to unpack. And if you go on the socials, everyone has a close reading and analysis of all the details of the show. But I’ll talk about some aspects of it.

In a lot of ways, the Super Bowl show was meant to reflect what he was doing in the residency.

In his residency in Puerto Rico, he had a very unique stage. Half of the stage was the Puerto Rican countryside, represented by long green stalks of plants and grass. Those are the sugarcane fields.

The other part of the stage is la casita, this pink home that’s meant to represent the typical Puerto Rican Caribbean house. This is where families live, where people have house parties.

The Super Bowl stage is arranged similarly.

One of my favorite parts of the staging is the grass itself. The Super Bowl stage has to be set up very quickly, so the way that the designers managed to create that part of the set was to hire more than 300 people who dressed like the tall grass.

So those were the grass people.

Within those sugarcane fields, Bad Bunny is singing and performing. There are many dancers dancing traditional styles that coincide with the different music that’s occurring. And there are different, almost tableaus that represent cultural pride — parts of Puerto Rico that Bad Bunny wants to share with the world.

That might be getting a little shot of tequila from Toñita, who has run a Puerto Rican social club in New York for the past 50 years. That might be watching elderly gentlemen play dominoes. That might be watching a couple of really fly women get their nails done.

But the part that I wanted to talk about today is the utility poles.

All of a sudden, we see Bad Bunny and a couple of dancers climbing utility poles as he’s singing the song. We see explosions coming out from the top of the utility poles all along Levi’s Stadium. There are flickering lights, and all of this is to represent the blackouts and the energy crisis.

The dancers are hanging from the utility poles and dancing, but they’re also dressed in all white and wearing a traditional farmer’s hat called the pava hat. It’s the same one that he’s made popular.

By those dancers climbing the utility poles, he’s representing the everyday people who literally started climbing utility poles during the blackouts because the island wasn’t receiving any external help.

He’s also holding a version of the Puerto Rican flag that’s different from the official version. The official version has a dark blue triangle. The flag he’s holding has a light blue triangle, which represents his stance with Puerto Rican independence.

He is very much pro-independence. That’s his stance, and it’s reflected in the way he’s holding that flag during that song.

There was one part of that performance that wasn’t televised. At the very end of the song, the dancers and Bad Bunny and everyone on stage hold up their left fist as a form of protest.

It’s a protest against LUMA. It’s a protest against current government corruption that is feeding into this ongoing energy crisis in Puerto Rico.

Jessica Stern

What have been reactions to the Super Bowl halftime show?

Gabriela Nuñez

I think there have been pretty strong emotional reactions.

It’s been a very difficult year for Latinx communities. In fact, when we started this academic year, we had a lot of conversations about, okay, what’s going to happen? How do we support our communities?

The reaction to the Super Bowl was a very positive one because the performance really championed love.

At the very end, he has a billboard that says, “The only thing stronger than hate is love.” And he was able to, while presenting very strong political critiques, still send a message of love and unity.

There are a couple of moments that make people quite emotional. One is just the focus on joy and celebration.

There is a full-on marriage that takes place on the Super Bowl stage. One of our CSUF alums got married on the Super Bowl stage. There is dancing. There are families.

There’s one moment during the wedding reception that all Latinos look at and say, “Oh yeah, that is a pivotal moment as you’re growing up Latino.”

Bad Bunny is walking through the reception, and there’s a kid asleep on two chairs. That is an experience that all of us will have because we’re at the reception way too late and we want to take a nap.

There are details like that that are recognizable for many Latino communities.

There’s also the mixture of musical styles that is a signature of his newest album. Whoever wasn’t a Bad Bunny fan prior to his most recent album became a fan because he’s able to mix very traditional folkloric music, such as bomba and plena, even salsa, into Latin trap in new, fresh ways.

He worked with very young musicians who came right out of music schools in Puerto Rico to help create that music.

That was on full display at the Super Bowl, with dancers who were dancing traditional salsa, dancers who were dancing New York-style salsa. The performance, the music and the dance were a call to Latino diasporic communities everywhere.

But Bad Bunny was also calling out to America as a continent. At the very end, he did a shout-out to all of America, especially all of Latin America.

And it made a difference. To literally say the name of every Latin American country really moved people.

How little does it take, right, to really name someone? I think in doing that, it just names dignity. And that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to name dignity.

I was on my phone seeing all these threads come in from friends like, “Oh, he called out Chile!” “Oh, he called out Argentina!”

He calls out all Latin American countries and also calls out the U.S., Canada and my beloved Puerto Rico because he’s trying to send a love letter to all of America and to unite people.

I think people were really moved by that.

Jessica Stern

I’m thinking about storytelling. I’m thinking about the power of storytelling to create a community vision.

There have been threads throughout where you’ve been answering this question, so I know I’m asking you to restate things that you’ve already said, but I would love to really nail down the vision of community that he is choosing to create.

I’m struck by an earlier example you gave. I see him both acknowledging a reality, but then shifting the reality. In the song where you say that he talks about standard masculinity, then he becomes reflective and starts to reframe masculinity.

So I’m thinking about that power as a storyteller.

You said, to get us started, that his vision is one of dignity. I think another thing I’ve heard is that it’s very encompassing. He’s on his stage, he has all these different tableaus, and he’s trying to build as inclusive a community as possible.

What other things have struck you about the type of community he’s creating?

Gabriela Nuñez

Somehow, he’s touched on this global nerve — and I want a different word than “nerve,” because nerve sounds irksome — but this global imperative to come together.

We have so many moments right now where folks are being separated really violently, either emotionally, intellectually, politically or physically.

And what he’s really doing is he’s able to unite people. I think it’s even above his comprehension. I think even he’s trying to process what’s happening in real time.

For example, because 29 of his songs have been streamed a bazillion million times, he had this celebration show called the Billions Club. This was a Spotify show held in Tokyo, Japan. It was invite-only, with 2,000 people.

You can look this up and watch the show right now. What is shocking to me is that you have all of these Japanese folks in the audience dancing salsa and singing all the lyrics to his songs and crying and just having a really good time.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends and family who speak varying degrees of Spanish, and they can’t understand a word he’s saying. He raps and sings in Puerto Rican slang. Even Spanish speakers really have to study his work to be able to sing along.

You would think that would alienate people, right? And it’s not. It’s having the opposite effect.

I think his ability to blend genres is somehow calling people in. He has this very humble affect, even though he’s unapologetic about who he is. He has a very humble affect that is charming.

And he’s able to unite people. I can’t really define how.

Jessica Stern

Are there groups of people who feel — has there been negative backlash against him? Or are there people who don’t feel invited in?

Gabriela Nuñez

I think so. The strongest critiques I saw were when he was announced as a Super Bowl headliner.

Jessica Stern

Right. That’s what I’m looking for.

Gabriela Nuñez

Folks were saying, “Why on earth is someone who sings in Spanish going to represent our all-American game?”

He’s already seen as not American, even though, well, he is American. He is a citizen. America is multilingual.

I think there will always be people who feel alienated by him and what he stands for, and folks who are uncomfortable with the blending of genres. He’s always kind of pushing against boundaries, and I think that can make people uncomfortable.

But in general, I think folks had a really positive response.

It was very important for me to see the Super Bowl performance in public because I wanted to see how people responded. I’m lucky enough to still have my parents on this earth, and so I’m with my parents. My father’s Peruvian, my mother’s Mexican, my partner’s Guatemalan. I was born in Glendale. My son is trying to navigate all these cultural heritages.

It’s really important for me to pull my son into these really big pop cultural moments.

So we went to Las Vegas, and we saw the Super Bowl in this theater that is an all-age theater. When the halftime show started, a bunch of people left. And I thought, oh, they have no interest or they don’t like the idea of the show. I’m not sure.

But then a lot of people stayed.

People were dancing. People were cheering. People were singing along.

At the very end, when Bad Bunny calls out everyone, you could hear different groups of people cheering. Of course, Mexico gets the biggest cheer because we have so many Mexicans in Nevada.

But I think that this call to unity has been an important one for people, especially in this moment.

Jessica Stern

You gave the example — sorry, so now I want to think about whether there are other examples of communities maybe taking his message in places where he may not have intended.

It’s an interesting point you made. Artists lose control of their work when they release it. We always say this about novelists.

Are there other examples beyond the one you gave us about the Japanese community where you’ve seen communities taking his message in ways that may have been unintended?

Gabriela Nuñez

Oh, I’m not sure about unintended uses. I’m going to keep an eye out for that.

I do see him everywhere, or his music everywhere.

There were so many hundreds of participants in the Super Bowl show who described their participation. Even the grass people said that was the opportunity of a lifetime, even though they were carrying these 40-pound costumes and no one saw their faces at the performance.

Everyone felt so lucky to participate and told stories about it on social media.

So social media is a place where I see people taking his message, or taking his music, or taking their experience with him and telling stories about it.

When his new album came out, there was a whole series of videos that came out on TikTok that I saw where people were taking a song from the album and playing it for their mom or dad and saying, “Hey, what do you think about this song?”

It sounds at first like a very traditional salsa song. The parent would be like, “Oh, I love it. You know, it’s salsa.” And then they’d say, “This is Bad Bunny.”

And they’re like, “What? This is Bad Bunny? Okay.”

So it’s allowed people to reconnect with prior generations, to find that middle ground.

I think music has that capability of uniting generations.

Jessica Stern

Such a good point.

Gabriela Nuñez

Uniting people of different cultures, uniting people of distinct political viewpoints.

Jessica Stern

I’m more thinking about how the community has participated and extended his storytelling.

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Jessica Stern

You mentioned earlier that Bad Bunny is not solely a musician. Talk about how he’s navigating other areas of pop culture and art.

Gabriela Nuñez

Yeah, this is really interesting to me, and this is kind of my “in” with Bad Bunny.

I knew that he was a reggaeton artist, but then I started seeing him show up on the cover of Vogue and modeling Chanel handbags, popping up in movies, in cameos.

Bad Bunny has moved into these other realms of popular culture in really significant ways.

Vogue has called him one of the best-dressed people of 2025. He’s been on at least three covers. He’s on the cover of many fashion magazines. He has collaborations with Adidas, with Zara, with Gucci.

He participated in a Spanish-language skit on Saturday Night Live, and he’s hilarious. I think that’s what first really endeared me to him.

He plays a Latina aunt on SNL, and he is so hilarious.

He has a cameo role in Happy Gilmore. He works with Adam Sandler. It’s just a pairing that I never would have thought of.

He’s open to these different collaborations, and I think that really goes to show that he’s just a true artist. He doesn’t take himself so seriously.

He did this whole Shrek skit on Saturday Night Live where he’s literally dressed as Shrek. He’s so funny.

I don’t think we’ve seen the end of him in film and television, that’s for sure.

Jessica Stern

How are Latinx scholars, Chicana and Chicano Studies scholars — how is the academic community engaging with him? Are there major theories that seem most applicable when analyzing his work?

Gabriela Nuñez

I think that his work can be analyzed in so many different ways, but I do want to point to this book. It’s based on a Bad Bunny song, and it’s co-written by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau.

These are two foundational scholars of Bad Bunny, and this is a recent publication. Díaz teaches at LMU, and Rivera-Rideau teaches at Wellesley.

They started by teaching courses on Bad Bunny because his work lends itself so well to talking about the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the very complex history of the island and its current state of being deeply under-resourced.

His work and his advocacy touch upon so many topics: gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, fashion studies and postcolonial studies.

These two scholars started teaching Bad Bunny courses at their respective universities, and they became really popular courses.

There’s this one interview with Bad Bunny and Jimmy Fallon where Fallon says, “Hey, you know they’re teaching your songs in universities. Can you believe it?”

He’s like, “No, I can’t believe it. I want to take those courses. I think I would get an A.”

Since he talked about those courses on Jimmy Fallon, these professors have said in interviews that students will apply to their universities and just show up in their classes because they heard Bad Bunny talking about their courses.

Jessica Stern

Wow.

Gabriela Nuñez

They’ve created this awesome online resource called the Bad Bunny Syllabus. In it, there are different categories for how you could teach Bad Bunny and different topics.

There’s globalization and the media, reggaeton and the genre of Latin music, celebrity and branding, cultural and political commentary, language and identity, gender and masculinity.

Their open-access resources are really — I strongly recommend them for all of our educators and students who are interested in these topics.

Just about a month ago, I went to the Latinx Studies Association conference, which is the biggest interdisciplinary conference in the field. There were individual papers on Bad Bunny, a whole roundtable, and a workshop to bring people together to talk about how they would teach Bad Bunny in their courses and what kind of research they can engage in.

So Bad Bunny’s work is a very vibrant topic in Latinx studies right now.

Jessica Stern

Amazing. How would people find this resource? They could just Google the names of the scholars?

Gabriela Nuñez

Yes, it’s the Bad Bunny Syllabus.

Jessica Stern

Excellent. Am I remembering correctly that Vanessa Díaz used to be a faculty member here?

Gabriela Nuñez

I don’t know. I know she’s given talks here. Let’s look into that.

Jessica Stern

Okay.

Gabriela Nuñez

It’s been a very important topic in LGBTQ+ critical studies as well. There are so many resources on that open-access syllabus.

Jessica Stern

Amazing.

What are some other global social issues that he has addressed that seem to be resonating with people?

Gabriela Nuñez

One big one is gentrification and the displacement of local people who are not benefiting from the economic pluses that rich investors get, like the tax write-offs.

Part of that we see in “Apagón.” Part of it we see in his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos.

There’s a 20-minute accompanying video, or short film, that he released. It shows an elderly man, maybe even Bad Bunny a few moments into the future, trying to navigate his own community and the changes he sees in his own community.

To be transparent, I couldn’t finish watching it because it was so depressing.

He’s trying to walk to his local panadería to get some lunch, and it’s become this corporatized bakery where the menu has changed. The things that he’s ordered his whole life, the owners he’s known — they’re all gone.

He’s not able to pay in cash. He doesn’t have a credit card. It’s just impossible to do basic things like order lunch in this new kind of hipster neighborhood.

At the same time, the elderly man is best friends with a frog. He’s a sapo concho, and he’s also a character in this film called Concho.

Part of what Bad Bunny is getting to here are the environmental devastations that are also happening globally due to overdevelopment, extraction and the refusal to protect natural resources and local wildlife.

As someone who’s really interested in environmentalism, I super appreciate the way that Bad Bunny is not only calling for human dignity — the recognition and joy of a cultural heritage through practices, language and customs — but also biodiversity and how natural resources and wildlife deserve protection and attention globally.

Jessica Stern

Wow. So this frog is the mascot of the new album, and he’s a sapo concho.

Gabriela Nuñez

And he is critically endangered. So Bad Bunny is trying to step in and put him on the world stage.

He’s wearing a little outfit, so we’re all going to care about him a little more. He’s pretty adorable.

And he’s also a character in this film.