A jumping-off point
A Wellesley course on Bad Bunny teaches Puerto Rican history and culture through the superstar’s music
Look up to the TD Garden rafters on April 17, and you may see a class of 15 Wellesley students and their professor closely analyzing their course’s main subject: Bad Bunny.
In “Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón,” the undergraduates are studying Puerto Rican history, cultural politics, and more through the lens of the Latin trap superstar, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. It’s a class that’s gained notoriety, even getting a mention during a recent “Tonight Show” interview, but don’t get it twisted: it isn’t merely a fan club.
“It’s about Bad Bunny, but it’s about a lot more than Bad Bunny,” said Petra Rivera-Rideau, the scholar of race, ethnic identity, and popular culture who co-developed and teaches the course. “We’re definitely not sitting around watching music videos all day and fawning over him, these kids are doing a lot of work.”
Their studies include parsing legal theory, analyzing the causes of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, and examining the island’s tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community. Even the concert itself, which the whole class is attending, comes with an assignment. Rivera-Rideau has asked students to write a reflection afterward incorporating some of the points discussed in class, worth 15 percent of their final grade.
She’s expecting to see responses relating to gender expression, hypermasculinity in performances, and Bad Bunny’s use of Spanish when communicating with English-speaking audiences.
“I show up to concerts with this tiny little notebook in my fanny pack and a pen, and I probably look like a complete weirdo, but that’s how I do a lot of my research,” she said. “The questions I’m asking them to ponder are questions I’m going to be pondering and notating too.”
Rivera-Rideau’s previous research in Latin music centered around the increased commercialization of reggaeton, culminating in her 2015 book “Remixing Reggaetón.” In it, she traces the dancehall/rap genre from its working class roots in Panama and Puerto Rico to “‘Gasolina’ times,” when Daddy Yankee’s 2004 single helped open the door for other Spanish-speaking artists to break through to global audiences.
“I have always been drawn to the mass consumption stuff because I think it’s really interesting to think about why people like these things,” she said. “Clearly, it has an impact on the world if everybody’s listening to it.”
Since her book came out, Latin music has become even more ingrained in the American psyche, from Luis Fonsi’s 2017 hit “Despacito” to Karol G and especially Bad Bunny, an artist that kept coming up again and again in a separate Latin music course Rivera-Rideau teaches at Wellesley. As she began getting into his music, she realized she could fuse her pop culture research with a pre-existing Puerto Rican history seminar she taught. After her first semester teaching the class, she began collaborating with Vanessa Diaz, an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University who also developed a Bad Bunny-centric course, and the online Bad Bunny Syllabus was born.
Oftentimes, Bad Bunny is the hook that lures students in, and they end up both surprised by and engaged in the course’s depth. Ceci Rao, a Wellesley junior double majoring in peace and justice, and education studies, said she jumped at the chance to take the class. A massive Bad Bunny fan born and raised in San Juan, she expected the material to focus mostly on his music and artistic profile, but appreciates the spotlight put on Puerto Rican history, and how those discussions tie into popular music.
“I just think that in general, classes about artists help students realize that these more serious topics have a place within pop culture,” said Rao.
One discussion that stuck with her — and one that is prominently featured on the Bad Bunny Syllabus website — centers around his song “El Apagón” (or “The Blackout”). The class analyzed the song’s lyrics, which touch on failing infrastructure and government corruption, as well as its video, which features an 18minute long documentary about gentrification and displacement across the island. They then delved deeper into how Puerto Rico’s historical economic dependency on the United States birthed these current conditions.
“I grew up in a community surrounded by mainlanders that moved to the island for tax incentives,” she said. “I know a lot about the topic, and connecting it to Bad Bunny was really cool.”
Deyra Aguilar, a senior majoring in American studies, took the class during its first semester at Wellesley. Aguilar researches pop culture, advised by Rivera-Rideau, and focuses mainly on the portrayal of masculinity and fashion in hip-hop. Her interest in the topic was already strong, and the class has fueled it.
“For one of the presentations I had to do on Bad Bunny, I did take a small moment to talk about the fashion that he uses and what that could signify,” she said. “With her class, it really helped me develop my own ideas about fashion in rap.”
Doubters of the course’s validity exist, but Rivera-Rideau said that her strongest defense is pointing to the work her students do. She also noted that Bad Bunny himself is constantly speaking out on deeper issues in a highly visible way, whether it’s the
“El Apagón” music video or when he performed on “The Tonight Show” in 2020 wearing a shirt honoring Alexa Negrón Luciano, a Puerto Rican transgender woman who was assaulted and murdered.
“He involves himself in all these different topics,” she said, “and for a teacher, that’s great. It’s like, today, Bad Bunny talked about the debt crisis. Tomorrow, Bad Bunny talked about the roots of Tego Calderón, one of the most famous Black Puerto Rican musicians. Every day is a new thing.”
The class she teaches is not always positive toward the artist or how he represents Puerto Rican culture, but there will always be something to talk about, she said.
“He still comes across to me as a genuine artist who’s very committed to the place he comes from and making that place better,” she said. “I really admire that about him.”