Television production: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX performance as a political act
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65598/rps.6291Keywords:
Bad Bunny, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, cultural resistance, Latin identityAbstract
On February 9, 2026, before more than 125 million viewers, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show in a sociopolitical context marked by the Trump administration's immigration policies and the systematic persecution of undocumented Latino populations in the United States. This paper analyzes the performance as an audiovisual discourse of symbolic resistance through the combined application of Critical Discourse Analysis in its historical-discursive approach (Wodak, 2001) and multimodal analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). The object of analysis is the set of resources deployed in the show, including verbal, musical, scenographic, sartorial and gestural elements. The paper examines the extent to which these resources construct a narrative of pan-Latin identity affirmation and symbolic reconfiguration of the concept of "America", and the extent to which this narrative operates as genuine resistance or as a form of controlled integration within the entertainment industry. Preliminary results point to a productive tension between both readings, deliberately activated by the performance itself. It is concluded that the performance constitutes a paradigmatic case of counter-hegemonic discourse, with implications for the study of audiovisual communication as political practice.
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