In the lead-up to the Super Bowl LX halftime show, Bad Bunny fans placed bets on which Puerto Rican star would appear beside the singer. Would it be reggaeton legends like Daddy Yankee and Don Omar? Or even Tego Calderón?
But as the halftime show went underway, Ricky Martin appeared.
Nine minutes into the performance, musician José Eduardo Santana cut through the atmosphere with his cuatro, a 10-string instrument considered the national instrument of the island. The camera shifted its focus to Martin, who was seated on a white plastic chair — in a scene inspired by the cover of “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which evoked a familiar nostalgia among Latino communities upon its debut last year.
Mic in hand, the pop singer belted out a rendition of “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” a ballad that implores islanders to resist the same compromises for U.S. statehood that the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii made in 1959. Like Puerto Rico, Hawaii became a U.S. colony in 1898 — and both islands have struggled against increasing gentrification and the displacement of local communities by wealthy outsiders.
Though it only lasted about 30 seconds, Martin’s moment was a rare act of protest from the singer; and a symbolic demonstration of how far Latin music has come in the United States.
Martin started his career in the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, then stunned global audiences with his 1998 FIFA World Cup anthem, “La Copa de Vida,” which fans know in English as “The Cup of Life.” After performing the song to much fanfare at the 1999 Grammy Awards, he chased his success with the surf pop jam “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” The song swiftly took over Top 40 radio and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart weeks later; but most importantly, it helped usher in pop’s Latin explosion, also known as “the Latin boom,” a phenomenon in which Latin pop stars like Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony and Shakira “crossed over,” or found commercial success in the anglophone corner of the music industry.
Yet many of these so-called crossover artists were already established in their careers before they each got their seal of approval in the States. Both Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony were treated like foreign acts despite being born in New York; Lopez enjoyed a robust film career in the ‘90s before releasing her first album “On the 6,” while Anthony had won a Billboard Award and opened for Tito Puente at Madison Square Garden. By the time Shakira released her first English LP in 2001, “Laundry Service,” she had reached major success across Latin America and Spain with 1995’s “Pies Descalzos” and 1998’s “Dónde Están los Ladrones?” Martin sold millions of copies of his four Spanish-language albums before the world got a taste of “Livin’ la Vida Loca.”
Still, on the day Martin released his 1999 album “Ricky Martin” — which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — American talk show host Rosie O’Donnell reminded the superstar that she had no idea who he was prior to his English-language earlier hit that year:
“I said, ‘Who’s Ricky Martin?’ No offense, but I didn’t know,” O’Donnell said, recalling when she first learned of the star’s name from Tommy Mottola, Sony Music Entertainment’s then-chief executive, who had predicted Martin would be the biggest star in the world.
While Martin reigned supreme on the top charts — and as his hypnotic music video circulated across the popular MTV channel — the mainstream media would zero in on more than his music. Every part of Martin’s image was dissected by the public, which often invoked outdated tropes of the hot-blooded Latin lover.
In 1999, former Times reporter Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote about the cliché adjectives used to describe the artist, whose ethnicity became a central part of the coverage (despite him singing lyrics in English) and often bordered a freakish, feral territory:
“Speaking of hot: According to Billboard magazine, Ricky Martin is a ‘hot tamale,’” wrote Valdes-Rodriguez in 1999. “This phrase appears several times, and is ridiculous because Martin hails from Puerto Rico, where the local cuisine includes neither chili peppers nor tamales, both of which come from Mexico.”
At the time, the idea of crossing into the domineering English mainstream was often just a one-way deal, Times music columnist Agustin Gurza argued.
“The American pop mainstream finds it hard to accept other cultures on their own terms,” Gurza wrote in 1999. “The outside artist must almost always conform to American tastes or be marginalized. Music must pass through a mass-market blender, filtering out ethnic character and foreign meanings.”
At the time, the singer was also often questioned about his sexuality, including by Barbara Walters, who he later said traumatized him.
“When she dropped the question, I felt violated because I was just not ready to come out,” said Martin in a 2021 interview with People. (He officially came out as gay in 2010.)
While Martin was still able to gain attention through his 2000 album “Sound Loaded,” which featured hit tracks like the upbeat tropic salsa “She Bangs” and the Christina Aguilera-assisted “Nobody Wants to Be Lonely,” the commercial gains from the Latin boom would eventually fizzle out. The Puerto Rican pop star returned to his Hispanic base with the release of his Spanish-language 2003 LP, “Almas del Silencio.”
In a 2003 interview with the New York Times, Martin was already sounding the alarm that the industry narrative surrounding him, and other Latino artists, was inherently racist.
“Latin music has always been here,” said Martin in the 2003 interview. “You just have to open your eyes.”
His decision to return to his Spanish-speaking base was not received well by his record label at the time, then Columbia Records, which was distributing his English-language work. Martin would still go on to release his third and final English-language album, “Life,” in 2005.
“My record label went berserk,” said Martin in a 2003 interview with the New York Times. “I needed to go back to the beginning. I needed to go back to Puerto Rico.”
While there are parallels between Martin and Bad Bunny — who both returned to the island at the height of their career to reconnect with their roots after being lost in the U.S. media frenzy — there are still key differences in their careers that underline the changing landscape for Latin music. In 2026, Latin music no longer needs to comfort English speakers to make an impact in the U.S.
Notably, Bad Bunny has never released an English-language album throughout his 10-year career. The swing of his Caribbean Spanish, which has often been maligned across Latin America and Spain, has never wavered, and his ascent to stardom has been thanks to reggaeton, a genre that until recently had been overlooked by organizations like the Latin Recording Academy.
Bad Bunny’s success seems to have had a profound effect on Martin, who wrote an open letter in El Nuevo Día to the singer following Bad Bunny’s win at the 68th Grammy Awards for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” noting how proud he was of the 31-year-old’s career.
“You won without changing the color of your voice. You won without erasing your roots. You won by staying true to Puerto Rico,” Martin wrote. “You stayed true to your language, your rhythms and your authentic narrative.”
But that authenticity was also palpable in Martin’s performance on Sunday — a vindication for all the years his mother tongue was manipulated in the mainstream. Just as he spoke to Puerto Ricans in his song, Martin also seemed to extend his message to the young Latino artists coming up: Do not let history repeat itself.
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