Christmas Special: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio - with Julia Tilton

Breaking down the global phenomenon that is Bad Bunny, as remarkable as much for his political activism as he is for his music. 

Live in Mexico, in conversation with Julia Tilton, from The Daily Yonder, the US's only national newspaper for rural people and places. 

Transcript

Jon Bonfiglio: 0:01

Hi everyone, welcome back to Latin America Correspondent, where today we have a Christmas special and also that isn't the only thing that's remarkable, but Julia Tilton, uh journalist with a Daily Honda, the US's only national paper, newspaper for people and places, and I are both in the same spot in the north of uh Mexico. We're gonna be recording a couple of um of features over the Christmas period. One of these is uh as regards the big stories of 2025 and what we think is going to come up in 2026, the unavoidable narratives, and the second one is as regards today's podcast, um, with the feature being the focus being Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio. For those of you who didn't know his full name, I certainly didn't know all of his names uh just prior to this. Uh, we are talking, of course, about Bad Bunny. Um, and the the sort of the the reason behind this uh uh this recording is because probably we should have done it anyway, but actually in the last few days, a friend in the in England, uh loyal listener, she tells me, our most loyal listener, she insists, although I'm not sure that I fully believe her, uh Jimena, was listening to some previous shows and said and wrote to me and said, What's this thing about bad money? Because she bad bunny, because she uh historically has not been a fan. So I explained that uh Benito is actually a prominent activist. He uses uh his global platform increasingly to champion um Puerto Rican uh identity, LGBT, LGBTQ rights, anti-colonialism. He speaks on issues like gentrification, again, specifically in Puerto Rico, but but also further afield, femicide and US territorial neglect. Um of course we're seeing a sort of a new wave of that, of course, with with military present in presence in and around Puerto Rico. Um and the discourse happens through music videos and increasingly direct political statements, challenging McCismo and promoting uh Puerto Rican self-determination. He's a figure who supports local movements, again uh on the island, but further afield, criticizes political figures and highlights systemic historic injustices turning the music uh towards cultural resistance and uh social change. And the other reason, or maybe I'll say I'll be frank and say that the main reason actually that uh the Julia is in Mexico is not for us to be able to record in the same place, but is because she is uh 48 hours out of attending Bad Bunny's concert in uh or series of concerts, residency, as is increasingly the term, in Mexico City.

SPEAKER_00: 2:40

Hi John, it's uh good to be here. Yes, I attended Bad Bunny's concert uh for his latest album, Debbie Tirar más Fotos. I should have taken more photos. Uh he did eight shows in Mexico City at Estadio GNP. I was there for the penultimate night, and it was a concert unlike anything that I have ever been to before. Of course, part of this tour uh and part of the reason why I traveled to Mexico uh to see Bad Bunny, he did not perform in the United States uh for this world tour. Uh he will travel to uh close to a dozen Latin American countries and Spain, I believe. I don't know if he has already been there or if he will continue on. Um, but he spent eight nights in Mexico, uh, Mexico City. Uh and so for myself and and many of my fellow uh US Bad Bunny fans, this was the sort of closest opportunity to see Bad Bunny. Um, of course, his decision not to uh perform in the United States is one of, as we've spoken about before, resistance and protest. Uh there was a clip earlier this year where he was asked by a reporter why he was not going to tour debitos in the United States. And his response was that there would be uh fucking ICE agents outside uh his stadiums, and he didn't want um members of the Latino community that might come to see his tour to feel vulnerable to, of course, ICE's extremely aggressive immigration raids that have dominated the news cycle uh in the United States this past year. However, the news broke in October or maybe sometime slightly before that, um, that Bad Bunny will perform at the United States American Football Super Bowl, which happens traditionally the uh early in February. I don't know the exact date this year, but he will be the headliner for what is often the most watched uh television live event in the United States every year.

Jon Bonfiglio: 4:48

Juliet, you were saying before that you have some misgivings about um Bad Bunny's presence uh or agreeing, accepting this uh this is the highest profile concert on earth in any given year. Can you just sort of break those uh down for us if you can?

SPEAKER_00: 5:10

Yeah, so this is one of those things where I believe two things can be true, right? So we can hold that on the one hand, Bad Bunny is uh a figure of Latin American music, of success, of celebration, and in the United States he is certainly viewed that way among his fans. And then on the other hand, we can hold that the NFL is a capitalist enterprise that has already saturated the market in the United States in terms of fan base, right? There are um major teams in almost every major city. Uh, and so as the NFL looks to expand its jurisdiction, its potential audience, it is looking toward Latin America to expand its horizons beyond the US borders alone. And so it turns to, of course, global top artist Bad Bunny. He was named Spotify's top artist this year in 2025 for the fourth time overall, making him the only artist to ever hold that uh honor. He's a Billboard Top 100 artist. He has global fame and accolades, and so it feels in some way like this is the NFL turning to Bad Bunny as a window to open up uh a fan base in Latin America, to open up marketing and ability to host NFL games in cities like Mexico City, like Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. Um, but on the other hand, it has given Bad Bunny this platform, or perhaps a better way to phrase that, Bad Bunny has taken this platform as a way to use uh his identity, uh, who he is as a person, as a Puerto Rican, to again perform in front of millions of Americans that we that we'll be watching in February. And I, for one, will be very interested to see what he makes of that. This is not only a highly attended event, the American Football Super Bowl, but it's also, again, highly streamed, highly watched. No doubt there will be clips that go viral that are replayed on social media, and so what Bad Bunny does with that maybe 15 or 20 minutes of time, um, the world will certainly be watching.

Jon Bonfiglio: 7:26

Yeah, I think you're right. The proof will be in the pudding of this one. Of course, at the moment we're speaking something in a in the context of hypotheticals because we don't know what that show is going to be. But certainly, if you look at the his track record, and we'll get onto it this in a second, his track record of recent concerts, they are um uniquely political events, and and actually not just political in terms of statements being made, but but all aspects of the ways in which that there is a sort of a subversive um centralized component to the sort of discourse that he he manages um around that. Maybe we can just go back to that your experience of this particular concert in Mexico City on on Saturday night. How did that feel to you as though it was sort of especially small pea political? And also um specifically the his residency in uh Puerto Rico as well recently in in which um it was sort of tickets were exclusively for for local residents, and it he made a specific point about the fact that these concerts should be for the people who can generally least access them or least afford them, and they should have access to their own stars, to the stars of their the sort of heritage stars rather than being sort of isolated in the in the in the Anglo-Saxon model of consumerism. So big question, Julia, but yeah, so could maybe you can just break down a little bit how tangibly these shows um are driven by a resistance, are driven by a sort of a pushback in the eyes of Benito.

SPEAKER_00: 9:11

Yeah, so I think what Benito has done with his debut más fotos tour and and his smaller residence residency in Mexico City, again eight nights, is he has kind of inverted the traditional concert model whereby the highest paying ticket holders are granted the most access to the star, to the artist. And he's really flipped that on his head. So halfway through the show, or maybe a third of the way through the show, the sort of main stage goes dark, and there's just some music, there's an interlude, um, El Concho, which is sort of the symbol, the figure of the album cover, uh gets on the main screen and waves and talks a bit about La Ciudad Mexico, uh, Bad Bunny's experiences in Mexico, and then all of a sudden, uh at the back of the stadium, there is a little casita, which is emblematic of a casita in Puerto Rico, where Bad Bunny, of course, is from. And Bad Bunny emerges in this casita in the middle of the cheapest section of ticket holders, right? So those who have paid the least to see Bad Bunny are now in literally the front row to see him perform. And this isn't just you know one or two songs, this is a good 30-40% of the show that Bad Bunny is here in La Casita. At one point, uh, again, between songs, he you know has a sip of water and then he actually leaves La Casita and he goes out into the section where the fans are, and he is hugging them, embracing them, um, you know, spending time with them. And again, these are the the ones who have paid the least amount to see him. He actually chooses a fan from the audience um to come up and and and give the opening line of one of his songs to sort of kick off. And of course, the you know, the rest of the stadium is going wild, um, and it's it's kind of a it's become a thing on social media, like who is he going to pick Greece show? And so this engagement with fans um is is unlike anything that I have seen before in in sort of the level of Bad Bunny as a global superstar, and yet the humility, and it's clear that this is not um just an act, it's not just a mask, like this is a genuine um thing of importance to him, that he's not just far away on the main stage with those who have paid the most to see him, but that he actually is engaging um with sort of everyone, and and that everyone gets to enjoy the music, enjoy the celebration um not just of Bad Bunny, but really of Latin culture and music.

Jon Bonfiglio: 11:54

It's interesting because I I sort of referenced this in a in a piece about Gvetmiorga um a couple of months ago, that generally speaking, as artists of any genre become more famous, they become blurred, they become less distinct. Um there's less I mean, maybe there's more that you know about them in terms of the gossip magazines and the like, but actually the sort of humanity around the individual disappears. But there is there are some um counterbalances to that, and again, I think the reason I reference it with Yvette Mayor is the artist from um Latina Latinx artist based in Chicago is because I think she's a clear example of this. But I would say it's the same with Benito as well. That actually, and maybe it's uh subliminally why I keep mentioning him, referring to him as Benito and not bad bunny, because it seems to me that his humanity um is actually emerging from the fame in a pretty unique way, and and what you reference, Julia, is also fascinating because of course in stadium concerts there is an existential difficulty because what everybody wants is you, but the size and the scale of the place makes the you impossible, largely speaking, impossible to achieve. What people seek desperate for is intimacy, uh is a closeness, but actually that sort of the scale of the of the location of the venue and the tour resists that. So it's interesting what you say about the casita and bringing it back to sort of a Puerto Rican cultural roots. Um and increasingly statements, I I also um I'm not saying this is empirically true, but my gauging of Benito in the in the last few months is that prior to that, I probably couldn't have picked him out of a crowd. I couldn't have told you who he was, I wouldn't have recognized him facially, but increasingly the sort of the accoutrements, the sort of the disguises around um Bad Bunny, he seems to be shedding though that skin and shedding those layers and becoming more comfortable in his own skin, slash potentially recognizing that the message, the messages that he wants to convey have to be conveyed by a human and not specifically uh a sort of a musical figurehead.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

Yeah, I think this past year and this album, which is a celebration of Puerto Rico, is Bad Bunny coming into his own. He had already reached international fame, international success, and with that comes this platform. And to me, this album, this tour, the stops that he's making on this tour, the way that he's approached the tour, it's all very deliberate. It's all very intentional, and that he's realizing that he can use his platform to exactly, as you just said, John, convey the messages that he wants to convey. And this again brings me back to some of the qualms that I have with the NFL Super Bowl performance. Um, it remains to be seen what exactly Bad Bunny will do with that platform. But given the resistance and the level to which Benito has been vocal against the Trump administration, against the aggression toward the Latino community, against the it'll be oftentimes illegal roundup of migrants in the United States. It's curious to me that this is the event which in many ways could be viewed as sort of the pinnacle of US culture, right? It's this big loud tailgating beer drinking event that everyone is tuning in for, everyone is making their buffalo wings and their chips and their dips for their Super Bowl watch parties, that now he has found himself at the center of that.

Jon Bonfiglio: 15:50

I think it brings us right back to the Daily Yonder because something we've spoken about many times is the fact that there is no such thing as a as a sort of a you um uh as a single unitary rural culture in the US. And so why would we assume that there is a single unitary culture which represents the United States per se? And of course, there's a difference between aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture, but of course that diff that differentiates as well between different urban spaces, different rural spaces, uh, and the like. And of course, one of the things which I think which Latino activists have been particularly at the forefront of uh indicating in the last 12 months or so is how Latinos since forever, and I mean literally forever, because there were Latinos in place in the USA before the Anglo-Saxon arrived, that that border didn't exist, it was it was porous. There were indigenous um groups and Latinos that were in play, especially in the southwest, prior to the arrival of the um of the of the Mayflower, that the the weight that Latinos have carried in the prior to the foundation of the United States, but also in the in the formation, the literal formation of the country and the continuing construction of the country too. Um Julia, just as a I'm just interested, as a point of inception, like when did you first come across Benito? How did that all begin for you?

SPEAKER_00: 17:22

That's an interesting question. So he has been in the US cultural discourse for some time. His album uh, which I believe came out in 2022, so a number of years ago now, was really a a sort of breakthrough hit for him in the sense that there were a number of songs off of that album that you know you would hear in bars and restaurants and clubs in the United States. Um, but I became more of a bad bunny fan actually during the time I spent in Argentina, um, because you could not enter a bar or a club without hearing uh a song off of Unvarano Santi, Ojitos Lindos. I remember that was like the first Spanish song that I learned all of the lyrics to, so holds a special place in my heart. Um, and of course, the um my Argentinian friends were just super fans of Bad Bunny. Um and so I was sort of immersed into the Bad Bunny fandom there, and then continued it when I returned to the United States. I I think the the the most recent album um has has captured even more attention in the United States because obviously you can enjoy Latin music without speaking Spanish, without understanding the language. Um and you know, perhaps we should have started the conversation with this, but the music is really good. Like it's really, really, really good. Um, and you know, it's no wonder that he had that that Benito has received so many accolades. He's won, of course, a number of Latin Grammys. Um, and and so you know, has been recognized by the you know Capital M music industry, um, as well as by you know popular culture in the United States, um to a sense that transcends, I think, the sort of uh maybe limits that that previous um you know Latin hits or Latin artists have reached, because not only is the music really good, but he's also um, as we've talked about during this conversation, aware of his um symbolism. And I think with this album and maybe this era of music, he has done an intentional job of crafting himself um in that image. And so he's a recognizable symbol now.

Jon Bonfiglio: 19:44

Julia, for some of our listeners who may have had uh some prejudices around Benito or who maybe don't know uh a good point of entry to his music. Do you have any specific recommendations for places to begin?

SPEAKER_00: 20:00

So I would begin with Un Verano Cinti. Um it's recognizable. The album has a a heart on the cover and a beautiful sunset behind. Um Callaita is one of my favorites, it's a bit slower. Um and so from there you can kind of immerse yourself, see what what kinds of music you like. The other thing um with the most recent album, the Be Tierarmas Photos, is that he he he travels across different genres of music. So if you don't like um, you know, reggaeton, which why wouldn't you? But if you don't, you can find you can find other um other kinds of music, other kinds of of experiments with genre, um, mixing of genres. Um his his previous album um that came out in 2023 or 2024, I want to say, Naye sabe lo que va pasar manana, nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, um, has more trap music. So if you are looking for something to work out to or um go to a club to, I would go there. Um, but really anything that meets your your musical desires, I think Bad Bunny has to offer.

Jon Bonfiglio: 21:08

Thanks, Julia. And um so in short, Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, we salute you. Uh we wish you all the best and everybody related to the sort of the messaging that um that uh that you drive forward, all the best in 2026 and uh forward the revolution.