CBH Talk | How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance
Global superstar Bad Bunny—born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—has become far more than a chart-topping artist. For millions, he is a voice of pride, defiance, and cultural power, shaped by a Puerto Rico marked by blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption, and the enduring realities of U.S. colonial rule. In P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, scholars Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau who co-created of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus,” use the musician’s meteoric rise as a lens through which to explore Puerto Rico’s past and present, revealing how music becomes an expression of both joy and protest.
Drawing on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research, Díaz and Rivera-Rideau situate Bad Bunny within a long tradition of Puerto Rican cultural resistance. Their book is not only about the singer’s life and career, but about race, gender, and the layered crises facing the island today that are rooted in colonial rule. It is a cultural analysis of Bad Bunny’s performance of politics, and his politics as performance, showing how popular culture can expose injustice and imagine new futures.
Join Díaz and Rivera-Rideau in conversation with Julyssa Lopez, Deputy Music Editor at Rolling Stone, for an illuminating discussion about Bad Bunny, Puerto Rican history, and the power of art to speak back to empire.
Participants
Vanessa Díaz is an interdisciplinary ethnographer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles. She earned a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her first book Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood was published in 2020 and is the recipient of several book awards. She is also a co-author of UCLA’s 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report. In addition to her research on celebrity culture and media in the US, she has also done extensive research on media and popular culture in Cuba. In 2006, she completed her independent feature-length documentary Cuban HipHop: Desde el Principio, which recounts the history of the Cuban HipHop movement while exploring how Afro-Cuban youth use HipHop to defy misconceptions about censorship in Cuba by delivering social critiques of racism and poverty on the island. With Petra Rivera-Rideau she is the creator of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus,” which explores the cultural significance of Bad Bunny as a way to draw folks into the complex, dynamic historical and contemporary realities of Puerto Rico.
Petra Rivera-Rideau is an associate professor and Chair of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (2015) and Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (2024). She is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. She frequently appears in popular media such as NPR, The Associated Press, and The Atlantic. In 2025, she was named one of the ALX100, a recognition of the top 100 Latinx leaders in Massachusetts. She also received the Harvard Latina/o Alumni Alliance Latinx/e of the Year award for her contributions to studies of Puerto Rican culture and history. With Vanessa Díaz she is the creator of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus,” which explores the cultural significance of Bad Bunny as a way to draw folks into the complex, dynamic historical and contemporary realities of Puerto Rico.
Julyssa Lopez is the Deputy Music Editor at Rolling Stone, where she started as a staff writer. She’s written cover stories on Madonna and Maluma, Rauw Alejandro, and Daddy Yankee. Before joining Rolling Stone, she was a regular contributor at The Nation and Remezcla. Her work has also appeared in Vogue, GQ, Billboard, the Guardian, The Washington Post, and BBC, among other publications.
