Locals weigh in on Bad Bunny’s halftime performance

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Bad Bunny was the topic of conversation across social media and at RW Latin Dance in South Charlotte. His halftime performance put Latino culture on full display.

Salsa was one of the dances on display at the Super Bowl 60 halftime show, where Puerto Rican native Bad Bunny performed. Dance studio owners Wendy and Rodrigo Jiménez say they were proud to see Latin culture on a huge stage Sunday.

“You didn’t have to know Spanish in order to feel the message. There was messages in English,” Wendy said. “The music allows you to understand that if you want to dance, you can dance. It gives you the freedom to do that.”

Bad Bunny used his performance to highlight culture while sharing his own journey to success. His show featured the sugar cane fields of PR, electrical poles to represent the persistent outages on the islands, and he even included a real wedding where a child was sleeping across three chairs.

“That’s such the most Latino thing that you can imagine is us dancing in the, I mean, sleeping in the chair because our families are partying,” Wendy said.

He sang in Spanish the whole time, except for when he said, “God bless America” in English before naming every Latin country in Central and South America.

“The part that I love the most is that all of us together, we’re all American, even we come from different countries, but we are all part of America,” Rodrigo said.

Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative organization, hosted its own halftime show on Youtube. Kid Rock was the headliner.
President Trump took to Truth Social to criticize Bad Bunny’s performance, saying it was “one of the worst in history.”

“I think a lot of the hate, that we see is caused by division and unfortunately, division is called caused by ignorance and by not knowing about the culture,” Rodrigo said.

The message on the jumbotron during Bad Bunny’s performance read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” The Jiménez’ hope the culture displayed at the big game gets people more interested in their neighbors and maybe even Latin dance.

“It’s just having artists like him in our generation keep pushing it forward. So more and more people are gonna get you know, more curious about it, and hopefully they’ll come in and dance and learn some of those steps,” Wendy said.

After his performance, Bad Bunny cleared his Instagram and deleted his profile picture. His 53 million followers are watching closely to see what happens next.