TOYA! Defiance, the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny
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Why does he speak Spanish? Why do Jamaicans and Trinidadians speak English? Why do those in Martinique speak French? Why do Haytians speak Kreyòl with some French layered over it?
It’s the tangled web of European colonialism and slavery across the Americas for nearly four centuries.
Languages were imposed. Nations were fractured. People were scattered, renamed, and forced into new identities under violence.
But beneath those imposed tongues, more than wisps of the forbidden memory remained.
At the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny didn't speak elite Castilian Spanish. He spoke a Puerto Rican Spanish shaped by resistance, survival and with the cultural substance of a people who didn't altogether forget. He elevated what the people added and didn't lose during the colonization that continues.
A reckoning. A remembrance. A defiance. A memory.
If you want to see the root of that history, from where slavery and colonization started in the Americas, the reality and the violence that worked to prevent Bad Bunny from existing the way he showed up for his culture at the Super Bowl, watch my latest video excerpt for TOYA! on Substack: "Disembarking Under Lashes of Agony."
It shows where the breaking began, and what survived against the odds.
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