‘How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance’ book debuts at Wellesley College

 

On Monday March 2, Wellesley College Professor Petra Rivera-Rideau and Loyola Marymount University Professor Vanessa Díaz debuted their book P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance in Wellesley College’s Alumnae Ballroom.

The authors developed the first and second courses about Bad Bunny in the United States respectively. In 2023, they created the Bad Bunny syllabus, a website with resources that contextualize Bad Bunny success in relation to Puerto Rican politics. They selected a few chapters from their book to talk about how Puerto Rican resistance has shown up in every stage of Bad Bunny’s career, with each chapter assigned to a Bad Bunny song that represents that theme.

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They shared a clip of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where Bad Bunny reacts to himself being a subject of college courses. Professor Díaz shared how one of her student’s connections in LA is how Bad Bunny learned about the courses being taught about him. 

“‘Send me your syllabus right now. I’m about to meet Bad Bunny.’ I was so weirded out, and I was like, ‘Do you mean the website or the PDF, but are you joking?’ I think to myself, it’s April 1, this is an April Fool’s joke. Students are playing a practical joke on me. She wrote back to me ‘No, I’m serious.’ And then the next thing you know, I get a video of her having Bad Bunny scroll through the Bad Bunny syllabus website and going, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”

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Díaz and Rivera-Rideau were inspired to use Bad Bunny as a vehicle for teaching the subject because they believe you can’t understand his evolution as an artist at all if you don’t understand Puerto Rican history. Their book “P FKN R” is a tool to motivate people to learn more about Puerto Rican history, and the role of youth and art in resistance movements on the island.

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The first chapter they highlight is called “Soy Peor,” a song from his early career days as a SoundCloud rapper. The authors highlight that while it’s a bitter breakup song, there’s political history behind the rise in Latin trap in 2016. They interviewed De La Ghetto, another Latin trap artist, about the growth of Latin trap in the context of a debt crisis Puerto Rico inherited. 

Chapter two is called “Estamos Bien” and touches on Bad Bunny’s mainstream rise to fame and how it relates to Hurricane Maria. For Bad Bunny’s first time on American TV on Jimmy Fallon, he made an effort to speak English, which he doesn’t do often, and called out Trump for his negligence of Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria, all before performing “Estamos Bien.” The song title roughly means “we will be alright,” focused on community resilience post-Hurricane Maria. The authors elaborated on the significance of this moment at this point in his career.

“He’s not a superstar at this point. The risks he’s willing to take as a new artist really show he is going to be showing up for his homeland,” Rivera-Rideau shared.

Bad Bunny has also made a lot of statements around gender identity and advocating for LGBTQ communities, particularly in Puerto Rico. Following the brutal murder of a Puerto Rican trans woman named Alexa Negron, he shows up on Jimmy Fallon with a T-shirt that says “they killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt,” but in Spanish, cementing his reputation for advocating for LGBTQ communities on the island. 

His music video for his 2018 song “Caro” is one of the reasons Rivera-Rideau made her Bad Bunny class, because about 75% of her students wrote a paper about this music video for her Latin music class. This music video starts with him getting his nails painted, a reference to when he was denied entrance into a nail salon in Spain. He swaps places with a model and the pair appear to be an androgynous couple, and the viewer sometimes can’t tell who’s who, on purpose. Later in the video, he gets kissed by a man and by a woman. For a genre like reggaeton that’s hyper masculine, it was a profound moment. 

These were just some of the fruitful discussions which concluded with a book signing and celebratory cake eating.