The Reggaeton star’s halftime show included countless nods to his homeland, including a reference to the island’s ongoing power crisis.
A moment during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime performance is an allusion to Puerto Rico’s frequent and devastating power outages, which the artist references in his song “El Apagón” — “The Blackout.”
Alex Nguyen explains in Mother Jones:
According to the US Energy Information Administration, Puerto Rico residents lost about 27 hours of power each year from 2021 to 2024—all without accounting for electricity failures from hurricanes or other major disasters. Over the past ten years, four hurricanes have dealt damage exceeding $1 billion in Puerto Rico. In comparison, residents in the mainland US experience about two hours of power loss each year.
Puerto Rico began to privatize power after a nearly year-long blackout in 2017 revealed corruption in the publicly-owned utility. But power outages continued to worsen while costs rose. Meanwhile, “The Trump administration has taken back federal funding designated to modernize the territory’s electrical grid. In January, the Department of Energy canceled $450 million for grid resilience programs, according to Latitude Media.”
According to an article by Keaton Peters for Straight Arrow News, “For the public that might have forgotten, Bad Bunny climbing the poles gave voice and visibility to an unforgettable instance of being powerless in Puerto Rico in a very literal sense,” said said Diana Hernandez, a professor and co-director of the Energy Opportunity Lab at the Columbia Center for Global Energy Policy.
Read the full story: Here’s the Thing About Bad Bunny’s Light Poles
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