on Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio), since his performance at Super Bowl LX is still in the news, and I think it is worthwhile to read Alisa Valdes Rodriguez's post from Facebook:
"I haven’t written about Bad Bunny because I’m tired. Tired of saying the same things for 30 years. Tired of screaming things like “Puerto Rico is part of the United States” for thirty [effing[ years. First, as a reporter at the Boston Globe, where my editor, Nick King, a Harvard graduate, did not realize Puerto Rico was part of the United States nor that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth. Then again at the LA Times, where I was the first mainstream US reporter to cover the Latin music industry, and the first to cover the Latin Grammys, back when Ricky Martin was “exploding” and I had to explain, yet again, to millions of readers, that Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
Then again as a novelist, where I wrote the Nick King incident into fiction in my bestselling novel THE DIRTY GIRLS SOCIAL CLUB, a book that was optioned by Jennifer Lopez but for which I would have to explain over and over in Hollywood meetings that, yes, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. And again, and again, and again, in book after book after book, in meeting after meeting after meeting. To now live in a country where public insight and discourse has not only NOT progressed, but regressed to absolute idiocy, is exhausting. I’m exhausted.
I’ve been screaming into the same well, but most of the nation remains stupid. Even those who shouldn’t be stupid about Puerto Rico are stupid about Puerto Rico. I love Josh Johnson. I do. But his bit, which went viral, about racists being mad about Bad Bunny while eating guacamole was stupid, because guacamole is not from Puerto Rico. Guacamole is Mexican. I am exhausted by the endless conflations of these distinct and different cultures by Americans who should not be this [effing] stupid.
Arroz con gandules, cuchifritos, habichuela, tostones, cocquito, pernil — Puerto Rican food. New York is a Puerto Rican city. So is Boston. Hartford. New Haven. There is no excuse for the nation to be so clueless, except the gatekeeping done by Hollywood.
Americans only know what they’ve seen in a movie or TV show. And for 25 years voices like mine have been systematically shut out. So, I’m tired of saying this. I’m tired of writing books about it that sell well to American Latinos, only to have my voice silenced beyond a certain group. Tired of the lies. Tired of the racism. The racism.
The United States colonized Puerto Rico and forcibly sterilized its women, dropped nuclear bombs on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for practice, took all the natural resources, hurt the Puerto Rican people in every way imaginable, only to have the conman felon racist piece of shit president posting insults about Bad Bunny, who is more American than Trump is.
I’m effing exhausted. Tired of people forgetting Lolita Lebron. Tired of MAGA celebrating Colombus and never realizing the first place he effing landed was Puerto Rico, where he was met by the Taino people, who welcomed him and fed him and were kind, and Columbus, who landed there FOR SPAIN, enslaved and murdered most of the native people of that island.
Tired of the ignorance. Tired of the ahistorical nonsense. Tired of Kid Rock’s ass crack and all their noses stuck in it for a whiff of “freedom.” Tired. Tired of being told every 20 or 30 years that Latinos have finally made it, only to have them trample us again.
Before Bad Bunny, it was Ricky Martin. Before Ricky Martin, it was Jose Feliciano. Before that, it was Iris Chacon. Hector Lavoe. Ismael Rivera. Tito Puente. How quickly this United States forgets its own geniuses. How easily it squeezes the lifeblood out of Puerto Rico yet erases its people. Its culture. The Puerto Rican culture is incredible. It tells the entire story of the Americas, if you listen.
Tired of you not listening. Tired of the way this country erases us all, all Latinos, over and over and over again, perpetually portrayed as outsiders in our own nation. Tired of having my song stolen from me the moment it leaves my mouth. Tired of singing."
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