How did Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance challenge language hierarchies? Dr. Arturo Victoriano-Martinez, Assistant Professor of Spanish at UBC’s Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS), explains.
Bad Bunny's 2026 Super Bowl performance.
When Bad Bunny stepped onto the Super Bowl stage, it wasn’t just a performance—it was a moment that echoed far beyond the stadium, bridging classroom learning and lived experience.
According to Dr. Arturo Victoriano-Martinez, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance opened up new ways of understanding Spanish—not as a single “correct” form, but as a rich spectrum of dialects shaped by history, culture, and power. Hearing Caribbean Spanish on one of the world’s biggest stages challenged assumptions about which forms of the language are considered standard, prestigious, or even acceptable.
“Like any other language, Spanish has a hierarchy of accents and dialects,” explains Victoriano-Martinez. “Caribbean Spanish is often considered to be on the lower end of a spectrum that puts continental (e.g., Central Colombian, Castilian, Mexican) Spanish on the higher end.”
Yet music has long elevated marginalized forms of language.
“The popularity of reggaeton and other Caribbean rhythms that use vernacular Caribbean, such as dembow, is very important to challenge the aforementioned hierarchies,” he says, pointing to earlier moments like the global rise of tango, which brought Buenos Aires slang of the so-called “lower classes” into mainstream recognition.
Bad Bunny’s performance builds on that tradition—but with a distinctly modern reach. Rather than adjusting his Puerto Rican Spanish for broader audiences, he remains linguistically grounded in his identity. “It affirms the artist as coming from a particular place, which means that particular culture is valid and deserves attention and respect,” Victoriano-Martinez notes. “The performance turns something very local—sounds, phrases, pronunciations, cadences—into something global.”
That shift is already visible in how audiences engage with the language. While it may not completely redefine what speakers consider “correct” Spanish, it is expanding what feels familiar. “It has normalized particular sounds and syntactical constructions for the whole world. No longer is it unusual to hear quedao instead of quedado or amol instead of amor.”
The performance itself—delivered largely in Spanish at one of North America’s most anglophone events—sparked widespread conversation. Victoriano-Martinez describes it as a “watershed moment,” noting that it “brought the culture of a practically unknown and (neo)colonized space into the homes of hundreds of millions of people.” The response was immediate and global, from social media recreations to moments of recognition closer to home—like Canadians delighting in hearing “Canadá” during the performance.
For FHIS, this is exactly the kind of moment that invites students to question assumptions, recognize linguistic diversity, and see how language operates within broader systems of culture and power.
“These kinds of moments highlight the importance of the work we do,” says Victoriano-Martinez. “Language teaching and learning, cultural analysis, and critical thinking—these tools, more than ever, are essential to comprehend the world around us.”
