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Bad Bunny & My Puerto Rico

  • Writer: bino realuyo
    bino realuyo
  • 2 days ago
  • 6 min read

I was one of those who claimed he had never heard of Bad Bunny's songs. Or if I had, for sheer luck, I couldn't connect it to a human. I did know him, the way knew Taylor Swift's works, as both possessed a fierce sense of self on social media, except Bad Bunny had the MET Gala outfits. I was also never a fan of Reggaeton, and would not be convinced that it could evolve into something that didn't conjure sexist images of gyrating women. I always thought of the videos offensive. I even saw an African music video spawn in an Ethiopian restaurant, with the same rapping masochistic men ogling over women's shaking nalgas. Not really calling for admiration and fandom. But then I am an aging Generation Xer from the era of post-Boomer activism (the women-equal-righters taught me well!). I have also been to Puerto Rico, and I understood the sifting political elements there. There was always something bigger and deeper than what artists provoke on the surface level.


To wit: a pro-Queer Bad Bunny and his Reggaeton updates. In one of his videos, he was the woman. Queerness and Reggaeton didn't seem to be the love team plunged in my mind. Then 2025 came and immigration moved back to the forefront of American ascerbic politics, except this time, a public spectacle of violence. And the brave Bad Bunny took his space, in the front, making one public statement in our Republic of Memes. No doubt, post-Minnesota public murders, I was one of the millions who awaited his 2026's Superbowl's Half-time Show, with hopes for more public statements with Bad Bunny sticking his middle finger at a country that was beginning to look more and more like 1933 Germany at the outset of authoritarianism.



Thirty Years Ago


The 90s was my decade of activism.   Reclaiming both ethnic and Queer identities in pages of poetry and street protests against anti-Asian activism and AIDS consumed much of those turbulent years.  It would culminate at the end of the decade in the publication of one novel, one anthology and one literary journal special edition.  All in one year.   Asian America would claim me as one of its own.  So did the Philippines after my publication. But this Latinizado, what my Latino friends referred to me then, was always missing something.  I studied partly in South America after all. Having a Chavacano mother only added to the mystery. Also, Filipinos never quite cleanly fit in Asian American spaces, being both a product of Spanish and American colonizations. No-Speak-English didn't apply to us. Hispanidad, as tragic as the messages of the anti-colonialism academics, always called my name. There was always much to uncover there, especially for me, who was always in love with world history, and whose ancestry, again, was Chavacano.


Interestingly enough, the next phase of my literary works would be written in San Juan.    My rented apartment in Condado overlooked the ocean.  From the open balcony, the night wind and rolling waves were music.  Being surrounded by the most beautiful humans didn’t hurt either.  History called. Old San Juan could very well be Old Manila or Intramuros, except it was not bombed to dust. Filipinos always claimed Hispanidad through its evangelization, perhaps because they had not lived in former Spanish colonies where the architecture had not changed for 500 years. If you went to Manila, you would never know it was once Spain's capital in Asia.


The Brown Years


Being an immigrant from the Philippines doesn’t mean we know our Hispanidad.  When I came to this country in my teens and people asked me if I were Portorican, I kept mum from incomprehension.  It would take many more years for a better context of microagression in the shape of ethnic categorization. It was always easy to bully someone if they could box you in as either Kung Fu Chink or Spic.  Some of us simply didn't match the stereotypes in their minds. Even when I studied in Argentina, I didn’t know about the Caribbean.   My first trip to Puerto Rico would happen in ther early 90s, after a disappointing trip to Europe and a complete rejection of everything Euro. It was also the era when my political mind would take shape, my Brown Years.


Everything I had missed in my childhood I found in San Juan.  The air, the sand, the food were an ecosystem of familiarity. The mestizos looked like my mother.  I would finally begin to understand why Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish and Filipinos didn’t if we were under Spain the same number of centuries, and why Puerto Rico took another route from independence and became a territory.    Post colonialism never had a clear path out of darkness.   In New York City, I would meet Puerto Ricans who become very dear friends.   Our lives as immigrants intersected from the same bosom of history, and there was much to learn from each other.   They had a longer history in NYC.  They had Alphabet City.   We had tiny Jersey City.   They inspired the West Side Story, the biggest clue that we Filipinos always knew who the Puerto Ricans were.


My very first tattoo--the one on my chest, a flying serpent--was done in Puerto Rico.
My very first tattoo--the one on my chest, a flying serpent--was done in Puerto Rico.

El Encanto


I penned the beginnings of two of my three manuscripts in San Juan, Puerto Rico. #TheRebelSonnets still has poems written from the time when I traveled there for a month every year for ten years, and then finally moved there in 2003 after the death of my father. Writing in Condado in San Juan was natural. It was my tropical Philippines, only three hours away, without the stretches of Philippine politics. I saved all my vacation days for a month of writing on the island. I used to tell people that I had lived in one of the 7,500 or so Philippine Islands but never saw water growing up in Manila. The memory of the Belly of Beast was salty nonetheless. San Juan was my way of making up for loss, but it was also an opportunity to connect to 1898, when Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. for a $20 million payment for the Philippines. I thought then, in my 20s, when my mind was young yet politicizing, that Puerto Rico held the answers to mysteries of Philippine history.


A decade was a long time to dedicate to one place. I had been to Puerto Rico more than any other country in the world. I only took a break and went to the Philippines in 2000 for a family reunion and book tour for my first novel. I went back to Puerto Rico immediately after. My decade-long relationship with the island would see its end. The circumstances in 2003 around the death of my father, a Bataan Death March survivor, were a tragedy I had written about many times. From the lawsuit against the U.S. Army to his body being put in the freezer while we awaited results. After the burial, months later, in the summer of 2003, I decided to quit my full-time job and move to Puerto Rico to find peace.


My mother knew I was grieving. She wasn't convinced that Puerto Rico was for me. She and my brother came to San Juan to bring me back to New York City.
My mother knew I was grieving. She wasn't convinced that Puerto Rico was for me. She and my brother came to San Juan to bring me back to New York City.

In 2003, Puerto Rico was having some Evangelical shift. Fridays saw regular religious processions in Condado of people proselytizing anyone who looked lost. With that, homophobia. My island of free thought. I was also slowly healing. My mother, brother Albert, and Paul would fly from Jersey City to visit. My mother came to convince me to return. She would neatly fit in the island's Hispanidad, and her presence in San Juan created even more curiosity about the nature of Filipino mestizaje. She became one with the island. In the Philippines, she always stood out, the privilege mestizaje we never fully understood. In Latin America, where the mestizaje was in full bloom, it was easier to see my mother's Hispanidad. It was perhaps el punto in very long sentence. What I waited for. What brought me to Puerto Rico. A few months after they left, I went back to Manhattan. I would never go back again.


I am grateful to Bad Bunny. For the stage of memories. For the political reminder. For the music and Art.


I did confirm that I did not know his top five songs, but I was one of those who didn't have to learn Spanish to enjoy his performance. My good memories of the island was all there in 15 minutes, even the Apagon. It was never easy to understand exploding electric posts that could plunge a whole city into darkness, and trap residents in high rises. The elevator stops and the water no longer runs. New York was on stage: bodegas were originally Boricua after all. These days, there are only a million Nuyoricans left and many have moved elsewhere in America. Bad Bunny reminds me of the years when every latino I met was Boricua. And how each of them quietly convinced me to go to La Isla del Encanto and find my Philippines there. Last year, the mystery surrounding my mother's ancestry would also resolve itself via DNA. I am of the mestizaje and the Hispanided. Long long ago there was a Spanish soldier who went to Zamboanga and started a lineage of Chavacanos that eventually brought me here.


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