I want to offer a single, integrated reflection on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance and the broader conversation it has triggered about Latino representation in the United States.

Some weeks ago, I wrote about how moments of state violence reveal the internal ordering of power within the category “Latino.” The same structure is visible here—less violently, but no less consequentially—in how representation is curated and circulated.

This is not a critique of individual intention, artistry, or cultural pride. It is a structural analysis of meaning, power, and responsibility—of how representation is curated, who benefits from that curation, and who absorbs the consequences when unity is performed rather than built.

CULTuRE AS MEANING INTERVENTION — AND ITS LIMITS

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was widely read as a cultural intervention: Spanish-language performance on a global stage, Puerto Rican symbols foregrounded, and a rejection of a narrow U.S.-centric notion of “America.” At the level of culture, this mattered. It disrupted default narratives and asserted presence where absence is often assumed.

But culture does not operate in a vacuum. When cultural gestures are elevated to stand in for political representation, their limits become consequential.

LATINO HAS NOT UNITED US — IT HAS BEEN CURATED

The category Latino is often described as a unifying political identity. In practice, it has functioned more as a curated abstraction, shaped and stabilized by a superclass of funders, strategists, consultants, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and political operatives who require legibility, manageability, and narrative coherence.

Latino appears unified not because unity exists on the ground, but because unity is narratively useful to those operating above our communities.

A Basic Demographic Reality

It is worth naming the scale clearly.

In the United States, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or Chicanos make up roughly 60 % of the Latino population and electorate. Puerto Ricans make up about 9 %. The remaining 30 % or so consists of people of Central American, South American, Caribbean, and other Latin American origins—Salvadoran, Dominican, Cuban, Guatemalan, Colombian, Honduran, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, among others—none of whom individually approach the size of the Mexican-origin population, but who together represent tens of millions of people.

These proportions matter. Representation that consistently centers a demographic minority while treating the majority and the rest as symbolic is not neutral—it produces predictable political effects.

How the Puerto Rican–Mexican Wedge Is Produced

Within this curated field, Puerto Ricans are frequently elevated as the representative face of Latino politics. This is not accidental.

For the superclass of change makers, Puerto Ricans are often perceived as:

• More reliably Democratic

• More fluent in U.S. political and philanthropic language

• More easily positioned within existing liberal racial and civil-rights narratives

Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or Chicanos—despite being the numerical majority of Latino voters—are treated differently:

• Fragmented across parties

• More closely tied to labor, land, migration, and sovereignty questions that disrupt consensus politics

• Mobilized during elections but deprioritized in leadership, agenda-setting, and long-term investment

Rather than engaging this reality directly, political infrastructure tends to sidestep it. The resulting split is then misread as a community failure, rather than as an outcome of elite strategy.

The Rest of Us as Symbolic Material

Those of us who are neither Puerto Rican nor Mexican, Mexican American, or Chicano—Central American, South American, Caribbean, Afro-Indigenous, mixed Black–Indigenous, and others—occupy an even more precarious position.

We are rarely treated as constituencies.
We are rarely prioritized structurally.
We are rarely part of decision-making power.

Instead, we become:

• The roll call of countries

• The cultural references

• The diversity signaling

• The symbolic proof that “Latin America” is present

The embrace of national flags within this roll call is not neutral. Nation-states use flags to constitute identity—to bind people to national belonging in ways that obscure internal racial hierarchies, normalize Indigenous genocide, and mask the ongoing conditions of dispossession on which those states were built. In this way, the celebration of national flags often endorses the very histories of enslavement, racial domination, and Indigenous erasure that Latin American social movements have long rebelled against and continue to contest.

This is representation without protection, visibility without accountability.

Culture, Exclusion, and the Making of Terrenales

It is important to be precise about where much of what we call “Latin” or “national” culture actually comes from.

What I call Terrenales refers to communities shaped by enslavement, genocide, and forced continuity in place—communities excluded from power, protection, and institutional belonging across the Americas. Cultural specificity within these communities did not emerge from celebration or inclusion. It emerged from lived exclusion.

Music, food, clothing, and vernacular expression became ways to hold coherence, memory, and dignity under conditions of dispossession. Over time, these forms were gathered up and reorganized under the banner of nationality—a colonial apparatus that converted Terrenal cultural survival into symbols of national identity, while leaving the underlying conditions of exclusion intact.

This is why cultural recognition so often feels powerful and hollow at the same time. The culture is visible; the responsibility for the conditions that produced it is not.

Why the Bad Bunny Moment Added Insult to Injury

This context is what made Bad Bunny’s elevation during a period of intensified ICE raids add insult to injury.

At the very moment when millions of people across our communities were living under the threat of detention and deportation, the figure presented as “representing us” was someone who cannot be deported. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. That legal reality matters.

This is not a personal critique. It is a structural asymmetry.

When someone shielded from deportation is asked to stand in for communities that live with constant exposure to raids, enforcement, and family separation, representation becomes distortion. The symbolic gesture masks a real and deadly difference in vulnerability to state violence.

For many Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, Central Americans, Caribbean migrants, and others whose lives are shaped by immigration enforcement, this was not affirmation. It was erasure.

Why This Is Difficult for the Superclass of Change Makers

The realities named here are deeply inconvenient for the superclass of change makers.

They cannot be managed through messaging.
They cannot be resolved through coalition rhetoric.
They cannot be addressed through symbolic inclusion.

Naming who absorbs consequence—and who is protected from it—forces a reckoning with responsibility that curated unity is designed to avoid.

What This Means for Philanthropy

For philanthropic institutions, this moment calls for more than reflection. It calls for structural correction.

• Stop funding representation as a proxy for accountability.

• Disaggregate “Latino” in funding strategy rather than treating it as a single constituency.

• Shift resources toward communities under enforcement pressure and material exposure.

• Examine who holds decision-making power and whose lives are being discussed without presence.

• Resist urgency cycles that demand unity at the expense of truth.

Philanthropy has helped stabilize the illusion of unity. It can also help dismantle it—if it is willing to align funding with responsibility rather than optics.

What Needs to Be Said Plainly

Latino politics has not failed because our communities are inherently divided.

It has failed because division is actively managed from above while unity is performed from below to meet the demands of the superclass.

Introducing Terrenales is not about fragmenting coalition.
It is about confronting a structural reality that representation has been used to obscure.

Until political and philanthropic infrastructure is willing to face where vulnerability, exposure, and consequence actually sit—rather than relying on cultural figures or symbolic gestures to stand in for everyone—the category Latino will continue to look coherent externally and feel hollow internally.

This is not a call for better messaging.
It is a call for structural honesty.