Jessica Santoni cannot remember the last time she watched an American football game. But for the past week, she has been preparing to host a big Super Bowl party on Sunday.
She’s among the fans throwing a “Bad Bunny Bowl” or “Benito Bowl,” because for them, celebrating the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny — who is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show — comes first, and the game is a mere afterthought. What teams are playing? They don’t even know.
Ms. Santoni, a 38-year-old makeup artist in Meriden, Conn., has decorated her home with Puerto Rican flags, tropical plants and garlands. Other party-throwers have transformed their kitchen islands into football fields using decorative turf, covering them with platters of empanadas and tres leches cupcakes. Living room walls are plastered with pictures of a cartoon Sapo Concho — the endangered Puerto Rican native toad — now a mascot for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” the most recent album by Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. Ms. Santoni even considered festooning her home with cardboard cutouts of the artist.
“I keep forgetting that there’s a freaking football game,” she said.
Every year, there is always a group of fanatics who seem to be far more excited about the Super Bowl halftime performance than the football game itself. But this year, the fervor feels different — more urgent and energized. That may be, in part, because just a week ago, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” — Bad Bunny’s love letter to Puerto Rico — became the first Spanish-language L.P. to win the Grammy for album of the year.
“Bad Bunny is showing the world our culture, how beautiful and welcoming it is, and I feel like it’s just going to be really emotional,” said Ms. Santoni, who has taken her 8- and 19-year-old sons to Puerto Rican Day parades and helped instill in them a sense of cultural pride.
Alyssa Gonzalez, a 29-year-old content creator, is also throwing a Benito Bowl party for which dozens of family and friends will gather at her home in Marlboro, N.J. She is helping cook Puerto Rican twists on typical Super Bowl dishes: beef sliders with plátano buns, tostones nachos and spicy guava-glazed wings. She and her family are also serving passion fruit and coconut mojitos — Bacardi only — and Medalla, a popular Puerto Rican beer, which they obtained from local bodegas.
Ms. Gonzalez, who lives with her Puerto Rican mother and her Dominican stepfather, said that baseball was the sport of choice in her Caribbean household.
“The concert is really what we’re tapped in for,” she said.
She started listening to Bad Bunny’s unique blend of reggaeton and Latin trap in 2018, not long after he had come onto the music scene. At the time, she was a senior at Rutgers University and was hearing his songs, like “La Romana,” creeping into campus parties.
And now, they will be performed on one of the world’s largest stages. “It’s been historic, the changes he’s made,” Ms. Gonzalez said. “Back in 2018, that was mind-blowing to see super authentic reggaeton at those parties.”
Her stepfather, Ramon Estevez, said he appreciated the way Bad Bunny had unified Latinos from different countries. While Latino artists have taken the stage before — like Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, who brought out Bad Bunny and J Balvin during their halftime show in 2020 — this may be the first to be performed entirely in Spanish.
“Music is exciting and fun, and people can enjoy it even if they don’t understand the language,” said Mr. Estevez, 63, the C.E.O. of a consulting firm. “Even though he gave them four months to learn Spanish,” he added jokingly.
Carlos Emmanuel Calderón, who lives in San Juan, said that “it feels like Christmas — we’re taking it very seriously in the island.” Mr. Calderón admitted that this was the first time he and many of his neighbors would be watching the Super Bowl.
Mr. Calderón, 32, recalled seeing Bad Bunny perform for the first time in 2017 in a San Juan club, Brava.
“I was looking at this guy, and he was bald at that point,” Mr. Calderón said. “I was like, ‘Who’s this guy called Bad Bunny, and why is he called Bad Bunny?’ Nobody knew that he was going to be the biggest star in the world.”
Mr. Calderón is looking forward to any political statements the artist might make at the Super Bowl halftime show, which is generally the world’s most-viewed concert each year. A record 133.5 million watched Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show last year.
The artist has not shied away from politics in his music and on public platforms — several prominent Republicans were upset that Bad Bunny had been selected as the halftime show artist. He has spoken about issues including his support of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, colonialism on the island and Puerto Rico’s persistent power grid failures, and he declared “ICE out” during an acceptance speech at the Grammys.
But for Mike Alfaro, the 37-year-old author of a bilingual children’s book series, “Sí Sabo Kids,” “him speaking Spanish is a message enough.”
Mr. Alfaro, who is from Los Angeles, added, “The United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico, and it’s just really important to show that the United States has a multitude of languages.”
Mr. Calderón said, “I feel like we’re going to be crying from beginning to end.”
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
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