As I always say, the discourse on race/ethnicity stinks to high heaven. I'm not necessarily complaining, mind you: it's also hilarious.
The racist Right's freakout is entirely predictable, from promises to boycott the NFL to Kristi Noem's threat to send ICE to the 2026 Superbowl. Liberals on social media get to point out that Puerto Ricans are US citizens, though that won't slow ICE down much, though many of them are evidently unaware that racist panic over Spanish language is no new thing. I remember for example, during Dubya's second term, a similar freakout over Spanish translations of "The Star Spangled Banner." That was before I was even on Facebook, but it was covered by the corporate media. Then, a few years later, social media blew up when an eleven-year-old Mexican-American sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" (in English) at a pro basketball game in Texas. The kid was a US citizen, son of a US naval veteran, but that cuts no ice with racists. And such cases are just the most visible.
Just remember that Spanish is also a colonialist language. It's hilarious when Spanish-speaking Americans claim that they've been colonized by the gringos; it's like when the English colonial slaveowners said they were being enslaved by the Crown. When Bad Bunny appeared on Saturday Night Live last weekend,
...the artist included some words in Spanish that he devoted to “all the Latinos and Latinas in the entire world and here in the United States”.
“More than being an accomplishment of mine, it’s an accomplishment for everybody, demonstrating that our mark and our contribution to this country will never be able to be removed or erased by anybody,” he said in Spanish. Afterwards, he said in English: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”
It's certainly important to remember the accomplishments of Latinos and Latinas in the Americas, including the US, but it's just as important to remember that their heritage includes horrible oppression of the people who were living here when the Spanish invaded. If I, as an Anglo, need to be aware of the crimes of the English colonists (and I am), Bad Bunny needs to remember his heritage of invasion, colonization, and racism. That heritage continued almost unquestioned until the end of the 20th century. I've had numerous occasions in this blog to notice the way that the Spanish-speaking descendants of Africans slaves are considered "non-Western" by academics, and the American Indians simply folded into the supposedly non-Western "Hispanic" category. (One example I haven't written about, but should: US academics writing on Mexican homosexuality classified European-trained Mexican doctors in the early 20th century as resisting colonialist Freudian theory on sexuality. This jibes with South Asian antigay bigots who cite European antigay bigots as authority for resisting changes in Indian law and society.) Indigenous activists throughout Latin America have more and more to say about that.
I couldn't care much less about the half-time shows at the Superbowl, nor am I a fan of Bad Bunny. (I watched a few of his music videos on YouTube and realized that I'd heard some of his music before in Mexican restaurants. Boooooring, my dears - but my personal taste isn't the issue, I'm not a fan of Taylor Swift either, and it doesn't make me more sympathetic to MAGA.) It's worth noticing that white players are evidently a minority in the NFL now, and that Latins are a rapidly growing part of the fanbase. That's good for the capitalists who own the sport, not so good for most of us. Bad Bunny is immensely popular around the world, and this controversy isn't going to hurt him - probably the opposite. The frothing of racist malcontents in the US is going to contribute to our growing polarization, and I don't know what can constructively be done about that. The muddling of race/ethnicity on all sides is a side issue by comparison, but it still contributes nothing to clarity.
