The Pedagogy of Reggaetón
Bad Bunny, Paulo Freire, and Anti-Colonialism
A few weeks ago, Bad Bunny performed the first almost entirely Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show. He didn’t translate a word. He didn’t soften the politics. He played “El Apagón,” a song about blackouts, gentrification, and colonial displacement in Puerto Rico, for 128 million viewers and dared them to keep watching.
Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator who was jailed and exiled after the 1964 military coup for teaching peasants to read and write, wrote the book on what Bad Bunny just performed.
Not the spectacle. Not the pyrotechnics or the branded content. What Freire would have recognized is the pedagogy: a man from a colonized territory using the culture and language of his people to name the conditions of their oppression before the largest audience his oppressors could assemble. That is conscientização, critical consciousness, with a reggaetón beat.
Freire spent his career arguing that education is never neutral. It either domesticates or liberates. The banking model, in which the teacher deposits knowledge and the student receives it passively, reproduces the social order without questioning it. Problem-posing education, by contrast, starts with the lived experience of the learner, names the political conditions that shape that experience, and invites collective action to transform them. For Freire, literacy itself was not about decoding words on a page. It was about reading the world, understanding the structures of power that determine who eats and who starves, who speaks and who is silenced.
Bad Bunny does this in four minutes and thirty seconds.
Consider “El Apagón.” The title refers to the rolling blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico since Hurricane María devastated the island’s electrical grid in 2017. Those blackouts worsened after the Puerto Rican government privatized its power utility. But the song is also a celebration: of beaches, of community, of refusing to leave. He sings that “the sun is taíno,” a line that sounds like a casual beach lyric but is an indigenous reclamation of the land itself, an assertion of pre-colonial sovereignty embedded inside a party song.
The music video, directed by Kacho López Mari, interrupts itself midway to become a twenty-minute documentary by journalist Bianca Graulau titled Aquí Vive Gente (People Live Here). The documentary exposes how Act 60, a set of tax incentives, has lured wealthy mainland Americans to the island, driving up housing costs and displacing Puerto Rican families from neighborhoods they have occupied for generations. One moment you are dancing. The next you are watching a family explain that they cannot afford to live in their own country.
That fusion of celebration and exposé is what Freire called praxis, the union of critical reflection and action. Bad Bunny embeds his critique inside a cultural form, reggaetón, that belongs to the communities most affected by the crisis. Reggaetón was born in the caseríos, the public housing projects of Puerto Rico, and was dismissed for decades by cultural elites as vulgar, criminal, and unworthy of serious attention. That the genre now serves as a vehicle for anti-colonial education is a Freirean act.
Freire insisted that liberation must emerge from the culture and language of the oppressed, not from the imposed frameworks of the oppressor. When Bad Bunny sings in Spanish on a stage built for English, he is refusing the terms of the banking model, the assumption that knowledge must be deposited in the dominant language to count as legitimate. When he opened the 2023 Grammys with “El Apagón,” CBS captioned his entire performance as “[SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH].” The dominant culture could not even name his language. It could only define it by what it was not.
The Super Bowl confirmed it. On Fox News, radio host Sid Rosenberg called it “the worst halftime show” in NFL history, repeating “not one word of English” as though repetition might constitute an argument. Brian Kilmeade said the NFL should have thought “red, white, and blue” for the nation’s 250th anniversary. President Trump called the show “an affront to the Greatness of America” and wrote that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Bad Bunny had already answered all of them. Months earlier, hosting Saturday Night Live, he delivered part of his monologue in Spanish and told the audience: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”
Donaldo Macedo and Henry Giroux have long argued that imposing a colonizer’s language is an act of domination, and that pedagogy operates wherever knowledge and power intersect, including in popular culture. Bad Bunny’s refusal to translate is that thesis performed live before millions.
Universities have begun to notice. Wellesley College pioneered the first Bad Bunny course in 2022, taught by American Studies professor Petra Rivera-Rideau. Yale, Loyola Marymount, and San Diego State now offer their own versions. Rivera-Rideau and her colleague Vanessa Díaz at LMU created the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an open-access resource that contextualizes his music within the history of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. Their published course materials include annotated translations of his lyrics, pairing songs like “El Apagón” with readings on debt crises, environmental racism, and LGBTQ rights on the island.
A student at LMU, Carolina Acosta, who grew up in Puerto Rico, described the experience this way: she expected a class about Bad Bunny and his album, but discovered it was a gateway into political realities she had never been taught, even as someone who lived them. Problem-posing education: the student’s own experience becomes the curriculum. The popular culture she already knows becomes the text through which she reads the world.
Bad Bunny makes an unlikely liberator. He is a global brand with corporate partnerships, from Adidas to Amazon, that exist within the very capitalist structures Freire sought to dismantle. His contradictions are those of any artist operating inside the system he critiques. Yet his career remains a constant assault on the “culture of silence,” the internalized passivity that colonialism produces in the oppressed.
Whatever compromises he makes with global capital, his pedagogy remains grounded in direct action. After leaked Telegram messages exposed the racist, sexist, and homophobic language of Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, in 2019, Bad Bunny joined hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the streets. He released a protest track within days. The governor resigned.
More recently, his 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS has been widely read as an endorsement of Puerto Rican independence, not through explicit sloganeering, but through the color of a flag. The original Puerto Rican flag, designed before U.S. annexation, featured a light blue triangle. The darker blue version became associated with U.S. rule. In the album’s music video, Bad Bunny runs with the light blue flag. The gesture speaks for itself, and invites anyone watching to learn why.
Freire drew a hard line between propaganda and dialogue. He believed in creating the conditions for people to discover, through their own investigation, the political realities that shape their lives. Bad Bunny’s music operates the same way. The politics are there for those ready to see them. For everyone else, the beat is still good. But the invitation remains open.
In “Estamos Bien,” released in the aftermath of Hurricane María, he puts it plainly: the electricity still hasn’t come back, but he has his health. The blackout is stated as fact, not grievance. That is Freire’s literacy in action: naming your material conditions in your own language, on your own terms.
Why does a thirty-one-year-old reggaetón artist from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, enact Freirean pedagogy more effectively than most of our classrooms? Bad Bunny starts with the lived experience of his community. He uses the language and cultural forms his audience already possesses. He names oppressive conditions without condescension. He fuses reflection with action. He invites participation rather than passive consumption. And his album, streamed two billion times in its first month, reaches more people than every critical pedagogy syllabus ever written, combined.
Freire himself never drew those boundaries so neatly. He worked with peasants in the fields of northeastern Brazil, not in lecture halls. He understood that pedagogy happens wherever people gather to name their world and imagine it differently.
A tunnel full of Puerto Ricans dancing to “El Apagón” while waving protest flags in the dark is as Freirean as anything in Chapter Two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Bad Bunny is a pedagogue. The classroom is just bigger now, and the syllabus has a reggaetón beat.
Further Reading
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
Donaldo Macedo and Paulo Freire, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987)
Henry Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (2011)
Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke University Press, 2026)
The Bad Bunny Syllabus (badbunnysyllabus.com), open-access teaching resource by Rivera-Rideau and Díaz
Bianca Graulau, Aquí Vive Gente (2022), documentary embedded in Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón”