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The UW-Madison professor accompanies the singer’s new album with rich political context.
On Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an explosive new album by Bad Bunny, the singer offers political critique and a celebration of Puerto Rican culture refracted through reggaeton, salsa, and plena—genres local to the island that he calls home. The album opens with “NuevaYol,” a song that samples the 1975 salsa hit “Un Verano en Nueva York,” before giving way to dembow and reggaeton in an homage to Puerto Ricans on the US mainland.
The album features commentary on the island’s history, its current status as a quasi-colony of the U.S., and the gentrification that seized the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. And thanks to UW-Madison professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo—a historian who grew up in Puerto Rico and produced educational materials released in tandem with Debí Tirar Más Fotos—the album gives listeners a wealth of jumping-off points for further exploring the work’s political and historical context.
On “Turista,” Bad Bunny laments a fleeting relationship with a lover who he likens to a tourist—staying for a fun time but never really knowing him. On “Lo Que Le Pasó A Hawaii,” a sparse and haunting song, he issues a warning about the colonization and Americanization of Hawaii: it could happen to Puerto Rico, too. “Se oye al jíbaro llorando,” (“Hear the campesino crying”), sings Bad Bunny, narrating the story of a man who reluctantly leaves the island for Orlando, Florida. “No suelte la bandera, ni olvide el le-lo-lai / que no quiero que hagan contigo que le pasó a Hawaii” (“Don’t let go of the flag, don’t forget the le-lo-lai / I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawaii”), he warns.
On the official YouTube release of the album, each song is accompanied by a written lesson—in Spanish—on defining eras and inflection points in Puerto Rican history, from the Spanish conquest to the present. The short narratives, written by Meléndez-Badillo, author of the 2024 book Puerto Rico: A National History, touch on agricultural workers’ strikes, women’s suffrage, and threatened species of animals endemic to Puerto Rico, among other topics. The album, and its corresponding Spanish-language educational materials, offer a history lesson “for those that were denied the opportunity to learn that history through the schools, either because they were not taught those histories or because their schools were shut down,” says Meléndez-Badillo, referring to the more than 600 schools that have closed in Puerto Rico since 2007 amid the Commonwealth’s ongoing fiscal crisis.
Tone Madison spoke with Meléndez-Badillo on January 9 about his collaboration with Bad Bunny on Debí Tirar Más Fotos and the political context of the album’s release.
Tone Madison: Can you tell me how this collaboration came about? You posted on social media recently, saying that you couldn’t have imagined this happening just a few weeks ago.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: I was on vacation with my family, and I’m a bit of a workaholic, so I promised my family and my therapist that I was going to leave my computer behind. I was not going to do any work while I was on vacation.
And in the midst of the vacation, I got a message—someone had added me on Instagram. We had friends in common, so I decided to accept them. It turned out that it was someone from Bad Bunny’s team, and they messaged me, saying, “Would you be interested in having a conversation?” And so from there on, we started collaborating—they told me about Bad Bunny’s idea of incorporating history into his new album, they described the ethos of the new project, which is a project very much rooted in Puerto Rican culture and history, and they gave me, sort of, the gist of the album.
Since I didn’t have my computer, I had to write everything by hand. It was about 74 or 75 pages worth of handwritten notes about the history of Puerto Rico, and so those ended up being the text that accompanies the visualizer. It was a very collaborative process from the start, but it was completely unplanned for—it just happened.
I’m a huge fan of Bad Bunny. I’ve seen him multiple times—my partner, who is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UW-Madison, and I have collaborated on a chapter for a Bad Bunny book. So we are very much Bad Bunny fans. I was over the moon when this happened.
Tone Madison: That’s awesome, I can’t even imagine. I’m a big fan. I lived in Florida when Un Verano Sin Ti came out in 2022, and it was, like, inescapable—I think it’s been one of my top played albums on Spotify, literally every year since then.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: I totally get it. Same. It was, like, on repeat—I didn’t know he was going to be able to top that album ever, and he just did.
Tone Madison: How did you land on the idea to feature the historical narratives visually on each YouTube track?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: Bad Bunny wanted historical narratives to accompany the visualizer. So when we started talking, that was what his team wanted. One of the things that he has said publicly on Puerto Rican television in the last couple of days, is how Puerto Rican history is unknown to many here in Puerto Rico. And so although it is amplifying Puerto Rico’s history for those outside of Puerto Rico and for non-Puerto Ricans, he really wanted Puerto Ricans to read about their own history. So from the get-go, that was the mandate.
Tone Madison: I wanted to ask you about the idea of Puerto Rican identity and nationalism, which figure heavily in your book and in the histories featured in the album art. Can you tell me about your relationship with the anti-colonial nationalism that you write about in your book and in this collaboration with Bad Bunny, and whether you consider this album to be a Puerto Rican nationalist project?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: When I talk about Puerto Rican nationalism, it can be quite a shock, because the reference that non-Puerto Ricans have is in the context of the United States or Europe, with this right-wing nationalism.
But in Puerto Rico through the 20th century, there’s been this sort of left-wing nationalist movement that is basically a national liberation, struggle-centered movement that seeks the independence of Puerto Rico. And so it’s different in that way, in that it’s fighting for self-determination. In a way, it’s still highly problematic, right? If we look at its history, it is patriarchal. Some of its figures have been deeply Catholic. But it’s completely different to the right-wing nationalism, or white evangelical nationalism in the United States, in that it’s anti-colonial in its core. So it’s an anti-colonial movement that seeks to create a nation-state.
One of the things that I do in my book is that I trace the idea of the nation and how it has been negotiated throughout Puerto Rico’s history, because in places that lack a sovereign nation-state, or places that are colonized like Puerto Rico or Palestine, the idea of the nation becomes a terrain of struggle where different social groups articulate different visions of the future. It’s a future-oriented project of a decolonial and decolonized future for Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico, we have this phenomenon called cultural nationalism, which was a state-led project in the 1940s and 50s, in which the state articulated this idea in which you can have a nation without its political status changing. And so that’s why Puerto Ricans are very proud when we have a Miss Universe or when our team is at the finals in, you know, the Olympics—but they don’t talk much in Puerto Rican mainstream media about the political status of Puerto Rico, and about independence.
We are at a moment with the multiple ongoing fiscal crises in Puerto Rico, where there’s a massive process of displacement. Bad Bunny produced and wrote a short film that was released two days ago, in which he’s thinking about displacement and about how we’re losing our Puerto Rican culture. And I think it’s very clear in the song about Hawaii, about how there was this “Americanizing” process that was really fast and really successful before turning Hawaii into a state. A lot of people fear that that’s what’s happening in Puerto Rico, with the displacement of Puerto Ricans.
In this album, I think that Bad Bunny is also thinking about the importance of preserving Puerto Rican culture, of preserving national symbols. And in that way, I think it plays into this sort of nationalist narrative, but I don’t think it’s a nationalist record. I think it is nation-affirming, but I think that in Puerto Rico, nationalism is a particular brand of pro-independence political ideology, and I don’t think the record is doing that, but I do think that it’s affirming the nation in the face of this massive displacement that we have.
Tone Madison: During the November elections in Puerto Rico, a pro-independence opposition coalition came in second place—it didn’t quite make it over the edge to win the elections, but still, it was this historical moment. What was the significance of that election? And what does this mean for Puerto Ricans going forward? Do you see this push to oust the traditional parties continuing?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: I think that the elections that we had in November were of crucial importance. I think they were probably the most important elections in my lifetime, because for the first time in my lifetime, there was a real challenge to the bipartisan system that we’ve had in Puerto Rico since the foundation of modern Puerto Rico in the 1940s, and so it was part of this grassroots movement that emerged out of those 2019 protests. The pro-Independence party has been a political party for decades, but it usually just accrued 1%, 2%, 3% of the vote, and now they were on the verge of winning the elections.
Part of the reason the pro-independence movement was so weakened, or was so weak, was because it was weakened by the state, through repression, through imprisonment and surveillance. My grandfather, when I was growing up, was afraid that I would get hurt if I carried the Puerto Rican flag, because he lived through those moments. And so now, in the last election cycle, it was a moment when people were able to go beyond that fear.
Another very common trope in Puerto Rican households is the idea that if we become independent, we’re going to become another Cuba, another Haiti, another Dominican Republic. And I think that beyond the xenophobic dimensions of that idea, there was a real fear about lack of infrastructure, about lack of political liberties, etcetera. Since Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, people started changing the tone of their conversations about our relationship with the United States.
This election was important, because it signaled that Puerto Ricans were already thinking about other options outside of the bipartisan system—and actually, Bad Bunny was crucial this election cycle as well. He paid for ads and billboards throughout Puerto Rico talking about the conservative right wing party. And I think ultimately, you know, this record is a product of this sort of political moment that we’re living in Puerto Rico. And what I’ve told other people is that I don’t think that Bad Bunny is articulating a new discourse, or setting the tone of the conversation. I think that he’s amplifying the conversations that are happening in Puerto Rico, on the electoral front, but also in terms of politics writ large.
Tone Madison: Can you talk about the fiscal crisis, the protests of 2019, the fact that the power is always going out on the island, and how all of these secondary crises can be traced, at least partly, back to how the Obama administration came to collect the national debt?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: It’s all tied to colonialism. That’s the root cause of this ongoing crisis. But just to make a very long answer, somewhat short, I think we have to go back to the early 20th century. Puerto Rico was occupied by the United States in 1898, and it’s not until 1917 that Puerto Ricans became US citizens.
With the creation of the Commonwealth, Puerto Rico has designed its economic plan around foreign investment.
The Jones law, which made Puerto Ricans US citizens, also made municipal bonds in Puerto Rico, triple-tax exempt, meaning that if you buy bonds from the government of Puerto Rico, you don’t pay taxes at the municipal, at the state, or the federal level. One of the things that we have in the Constitution is that Puerto Rico needs to repay its debt over public services, and so those are two pieces of information that are crucial to understand the current debt now. When Puerto Rico became industrialized in the 1950s it was all rooted in attracting foreign companies to Puerto Rico. That was exacerbated in the ’70s. In 1976 the US Congress passed tax revenue code 936, which basically made Puerto Rico a tax haven for foreign corporations. That was phased out in 1996 and it ended in 2006.
Why am I saying all of these historical facts? Because when it ended on May 1, 2006, the Puerto Rican government shut down for two weeks. Puerto Rico has always depended on foreign investment. And while they were doing that, they were also accruing high amounts of debt in order to operate. And so that kept ballooning and blowing up until it was unpayable.
The government passed austerity measures to sort of combat the debt crisis, and in 2015 the Governor announced what everyone knew: that the debt was unpayable.
And so when the credit was downgraded to junk, vulture funds from Wall Street started coming in, arriving in Puerto Rico and buying bonds for pennies on the dollar, knowing, one, that the 1917 Jones law made it tax-exempt and two, that Puerto Rico, constitutionally needed to repay that at 100%, and so that kept happening.
Then, a Republican-originated bill that got traction among Democrats and was signed by Obama, created the PROMESA law, and established a fiscal oversight board of seven unelected members appointed by the President of the United States that are tasked with repaying the debt, or refinancing the debt and imposing austerity measures in Puerto Rico, and they have more power than the executive and the legislative branches in Puerto Rico, thus highlighting the colonial dimension of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States.
And all of this got exacerbated with Hurricane Maria.
Tone Madison: How did you feel listening to the album for the first time and seeing the way some of this history was presented on YouTube for millions to read?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: It was surreal. I think the album is incredible. I enjoyed that the album begins not in Puerto Rico, but in New York, and then arrives in Puerto Rico, and it’s this sort of mixture of Puerto Rican sounds. It’s also a telling and retelling of the island’s history, through its music, through its sounds, through la bomba, la plena, salsa, all these elements.
I’ve seen videos, reels, and TikToks of older folks reading the history texts from the album. I’ve gotten messages from teachers saying, “we’re incorporating your slides into our classroom teaching.” I became a historian because I wanted to amplify Puerto Rican history, to sort of bring Puerto Rican history outside of the ivory tower. And so this is doing it massively. It’s surreal for me and I still cannot believe that I’m having this conversation with you and with other folks, and that this is happening.
Tone Madison: Something that comes up in your historical narratives is an example of a Puerto Rican song whose lyrics have to do with revolutionary armed struggle. And obviously Bad Bunny is not calling for revolutionary armed struggle, but he has created basically a political project. Can you talk a little bit about where he’s situated in the history of the music of Puerto Rico?
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: That revolutionary song is actually our anthem—the original lyrics were written by Lola Rodríguez de Tió and those were the lyrics about the insurrection of 1868 that declared the Republic of Puerto Rico for two days. Even Puerto Ricans don’t know a lot about how our anthem came to be from a revolutionary struggle and then it was whitewashed and re-written.
But to your question, I think that there has not been anything like Bad Bunny in Puerto Rican music, ever. I think Bad Bunny represents a turning point. We’ve had people like Marc Anthony in salsa, Ricky Martin in pop, J. Lo, these people that have become sort of household names, not only in Puerto Rico, but in the United States and in the Americas, in Europe, and across the world.
But nothing, I don’t think, compares with the level of fame that Bad Bunny has accrued. And in terms of, you know, Puerto Rican music, he comes from the world of reggaeton, a particular genre that comes from an Afro-descendant tradition. It’s a musical style that is rooted in Afro-Puerto Rican practices and sounds. And that’s why he pays homage to bomba and plena, which are also Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms and sounds. I have never seen an artist, a Puerto Rican artist, blending so many sounds and so many rhythms. He’s not simply a reggaeton artist anymore. In this album, he’s singing boleros, which is sort of a Puerto Rican ballad. He’s singing salsa. He’s singing plena. You know, in one of his previous albums, he says something along the lines of, “my flow was given to me by God and Tego Calderón,” who is an early, important figure in reggaeton.
I think part of what really drew me to Bad Bunny is that in his first album, and before his first album, he was queering reggaeton music. It’s this sort of hyper-macho, hetero-patriarchal sort of space, and he was queering it with his aesthetics, painting his nails, and the topics that he was touching in his songs. And I think that that ethos has remained.
And so he’s still producing music that is gender-bending, that is genre-bending—in Spanish género is the same for genre and gender, and he’s bending those things.
All that to say, I think there is no comparison to what Bad Bunny is doing in our musical history in Puerto Rico.
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