DTMF: Bad Bunny and Sounds of Resistance in Puerto Rico

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable centers on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, the 2025 blockbuster album by Puerto Rican musical artist Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny is one of the top musicians in the world, having earned several industry awards (Grammys, Billboards) and dominating global streaming and charts. His album Un Verano Sin Ti is the most streamed album of all time, and the first Spanish-language album to earn a nomination for Album of the Year at the Grammys. Debí Tirar Más Fotos (DTMF) is the artist’s seventh studio album, and, like his previous work, has quickly come to dominate 2025.

In addition to his musical accomplishments, Bad Bunny is also known for advocating for Puerto Rico. In the lead up to DTMF, he also participated actively in Puerto Rican gubernatorial elections, taking out advertisements and participating in a campaign event in support of Juan Dalmau of the coalition La Alianza (the alliance of Puerto Rican independence parties). While Bad Bunny had previously created political anthems, most notably “El Apagón,” DTMF is his most politicized work yet. It addresses issues like migration, gentrification and Puerto Rican nationalism. The album’s roll out also included a short film, several free performances, and a media campaign that focused on Puerto Rican culture. DTMF differs from some of Bad Bunny’s previous work, and from reggaetón more broadly, with its incorporation of bomba, plena, salsa, bolero, and other more traditional Puerto Rican music into his signature sound as part of his expression of Puerto Rican pride in the album. Perhaps most notably, with songs like "Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii," Bad Bunny makes some of his most virulent criticisms of US colonialism in Puerto Rico to date.

This roundtable will analyze the songs and media surrounding DTMF to consider the role of Bad Bunny in the global music industry as an artist who has increased his political commitments and statements in some unexpected ways. We will also explore how Bad Bunny utilizes his work to educate the broader community about Puerto Rican histories as well as the urgent issues that face people living on the archipelago. The roundtable will also consider the relationship between politics, popular culture, and academia, featuring three academics who have worked with Bad Bunny’s team on his projects as well as professors who use his work in their classes. Through our close examination of DTMF, this panel will address Bad Bunny’s work, contemporary issues facing Puerto Rico, and the intersection of popular music and politics.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Aurora Santiago Ortiz, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists

• Petra Rivera-Rideau, Wellesley College

• Vanessa Díaz, Loyola Marymount University

• Luis E Rivera-Figueroa, Arizona State University-Tempe

Comments

• Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Jade Power Sotomayor, University of California-San Diego

Biographical Information

Petra Rivera-Rideau, panelist:
Petra Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke, 2015) and Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (Duke, 2024). She is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Dr. Rivera-Rideau co-founded the Bad Bunny Syllabus with Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount), an online resource that contextualizes the cultural, social, and political impact of the reggaetón artist Bad Bunny. Petra and Vanessa’s new book, P FKN R: Bad Bunny and the Sounds of Resistance in Puerto Rico will be published by Duke University Press in 2026. Petra has published articles in journals such as Latino Studies, Identities, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderon’s Diasporic Interventions” published in Small Axe in 2018 won the inaugural Blanca Silvestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Latin American Studies Association. Petra frequently appears in popular media such as NPR, Al Jazeera +, and The Atlantic, among others, and she has written for The Washington Post and PBS’s American Experience. She has served as a consultant on several reggaetón-related projects, including on Bad Bunny’s historic 2023 Coachella headlining performance.


2. Vanessa Díaz, panelist
Vanessa Díaz is an interdisciplinary ethnographer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles. She earned a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her first book Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood was published and 2020 and is the recipient of several book awards. Grounded in her experience as a red carpet reporter for People magazine, Díaz’s book focuses on hierarchies of labor as well as racial and gender politics in the production of celebrity-focused media. She is also currently producing a documentary and podcast about paparazzi work. She is a co-author of UCLA’s 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report. In addition to her research on celebrity culture and media in the US, she has also done extensive research on media and popular culture in Cuba. In 2006, she completed her independent feature-length documentary Cuban HipHop: Desde el Principio, which recounts the history of the Cuban HipHop movement while exploring how Afro-Cuban youth use HipHop to defy misconceptions about censorship in Cuba by delivering social critiques of racism and poverty on the island. Díaz is co-founder of the Bad Bunny Syllabus project with Petra Rivera-Rideau, and their book P FKN R: Bad Bunny and the Sounds of Resistance comes out with Duke University Press in 2026.


3. Luis Rivera-Figueroa, panelist
Luis Rivera-Figueroa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Radio-Television-Film department at The University of Texas at Austin. Luis's research focuses on the transnational production networks of Latin Music in the United States, Latin America, and the Hispanic Caribbean. His dissertation project, “Reggaetón on the Global Stage: Race, Place, and Mainstream Latinidad,” studies the cultural politics of place and race in crossover processes of Latin(x) American stars like Bad Bunny, Karol G, and Eladio Carrión. His work can be found in Caribbean Studies, The Journal of Latin American Communication Research, and in the edited collection The Bad Bunny Enigma: Culture, Resistance, and Uncertainty. In addition, Rivera-Figueroa has worked on the leadership team for the Latinx Caucus at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies as well as the editorial team of journals such as the Journal of Latin American Communication Research and The Velvet Light Trap.



4. Aurora Santiago Ortiz, chair
Aurora Santiago Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chicane/Latine Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on antiracist feminisms, decolonial perspectives, and participatory action research. Her work has been published in CENTRO Journal: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Chicana/Latina Studies Journal among others. She has also contributed to Society and Space, NACLA, The Abusable Past blog of the Radical History Review, Caliban's Readings, Electric Marronage, Open Democracy, and Zora magazine. She is also a co-founder of the community organization Colectivo Casco Urbano de Cayey (2020-2022). Santiago Ortiz is currently working on a book project titled Circuits of Self-Determination: Mapping Solidarities and Infrastructures of Resistance in Twenty-First Century Puerto Rico, which focuses on anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist organizing in Puerto Rico.


5. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, comment
Dr. Meléndez-Badillo a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His most recent book is Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024). His work has appeared in several peer-reviewed publications and media outlets, and is the Vice-President and President-Elect of the Puerto Rican Studies Association. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He recently wrote the text for the YouTube visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF.


6. Jade Power-Sotomayor, commentator
Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Her forthcoming monograph from NYU Press ¡Habla!:Speaking Bodies Dancing Our América theorizes the concept of "embodied code-switching" across distinct social dance spaces, examining how relationships between dancing and sounding indexes counter-histories rooted in Latinidad’s blackness that continue to challenge the violent afterlives of the colonial encounter. She has published in Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, TDR, Theatre Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Theatre and Dance, Latino Studies Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, and Performance Matters. Her articles “Moving Borders and Dancing in Place: Son jarocho’s Speaking Bodies at the Fandango Fronterizo,” “Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs,” and “Un Llanto Colectivo: A PerformaProtesta” have each been recognized with “best essay” awards from the Dance Studies Association (DSA), American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS), as well as ASA’s Sound Studies Caucus. She is also a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego-based group Bomba Liberté. She is currently developing a bomba-based work for young Boricua women in Oakland inspired by Taína cacique and poet Anacaona. Jade performed as a dancer during Bad Bunny’s 2023 Grammy Awards performance.