How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance

P FKN R, the book by scholars Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau, makes the argument that Bad Bunny’s commercial dominance is inseparable from his political function. His music — rooted in reggaeton, a genre that itself emerged from Afro-Caribbean traditions and has faced consistent marginalization by cultural gatekeepers — channels a specific Puerto Rican experience of colonial subjugation and survival. When hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Puerto Rico in 2019 to force the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló, Bad Bunny was there performing. That moment was not incidental to his music; it was continuous with it.

Díaz, a media studies scholar, and Rivera-Rideau, who has written extensively on Afro-Latino identity and popular culture, bring academic rigor to a subject that often gets reduced to streaming numbers and crossover appeal. Their analysis situates Bad Bunny within a longer history of Puerto Rican cultural expression as political act — from the Nuyorican poets to salsa to the present — and asks what it means that a reggaeton artist is now one of the most listened-to musicians on earth while performing almost entirely in Spanish.

Julyssa Lopez, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor and one of the most attentive writers on Latin music in mainstream American media, moderates the conversation. Her presence connects the academic argument to the practical question of how popular music criticism has or hasn’t kept pace with the cultural weight of what artists like Bad Bunny are doing. The event is free and held at the Center for Brooklyn History, a borough with its own deep Puerto Rican history.