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colonialism
Bad Bunny Turned the Super Bowl Into a Call for Land Sovereignty
Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment.
Mar 09, 2026
On the world’s biggest stage, amid fireworks and spectacle, there stood the crop that enriched empires while eroding Puerto Rico’s land, labor, and sovereignty.
When Bad Bunny opened his halftime performance walking through what looked like a living sugarcane field, millions simply saw a striking stage design. But those of us involved in agricultural communities saw a protest.
The Link Between Land, Culture, and Self-Determination
Sugarcane once powered Puerto Rico’s economy. Under Spanish rule and later as a territory of the United States, vast plantations consumed the island’s most fertile lands. Once diverse farming systems created by Taíno Indigenous communities gave way to monocultures designed for export. As with all colonial systems, wealth made in Puerto Rico has long flowed outward while the ecological and social costs remain for local people to have to bear.
Across colonized lands, colonial agriculture prioritized single crops for distant markets at the expense of ecological and social prosperity and resilience—a historical legacy that today ripples through communities and commodity markets. In Puerto Rico, as in other Latin American and Caribbean countries—including my own home country, Mexico—forests were cleared and watersheds were destabilized to power the colonial economic machine. Soil health declined. Local communities' cultural ties to land were fractured, and, without power over local resources anymore, they could no longer steward landscapes as they once did. In Puerto Rico, US policies favoring industrialization over agriculture from the early 20th century onward were the final straw. Although Puerto Rico once produced most of its own food on the island, it now imports over 80%.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity.
What appear today as “degraded land” and disempowered communities are the ecological and social residue of economic models designed for extraction. So, in a very real sense, Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment and, in doing so, reshapes culture, labor, and identity itself.
For many Puerto Ricans, the performance summoned the figure of the jíbaro—the smallholder farmer of the island’s mountainous interior, living from and with the land during colonial rule. More than a rural archetype, the jíbaro is a cultural touchstone, carried through generations in music, poetry, and oral tradition. They represent resilience and dignity, and an enduring bond between people and place—a vision of land not as commodity, but as home, heritage, and self-determination. Framed within Bad Bunny’s creative vision, land is not an asset class: It is identity and community.
Restoring Nature-Positive Farming Traditions Isn’t a Luxury—It’s Basic Risk-Management
Modern agricultural practices, many rooted in colonialism, have long degraded land by plundering natural ecosystems and extracting their value, often concentrating ownership in a few powerful hands. This has left us in a dire situation: At least 40% of the world’s land is now degraded, driving increasing food and water insecurity, contributing to climate change, and fueling climate migration.
To ensure our future on the planet, we must urgently prioritize land restoration and transitioning to regenerative agricultural practices. But for restoration to work, the governance model colonialism installed must be inverted. Landscapes cannot be regenerated without local decision-making power. Ecological repair and political agency go hand in hand.
As climate pressures intensify and public budgets shrink, we are seeing governments and businesses alike continue to act like ecological and social resilience is a luxury, an add-on after economic profit has been achieved. But safeguarding agricultural and ecological heritage, and placing power in the hands of local communities to be able to do this on their own terms, is a scientifically sound investment in economic resilience.
If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure.
Research shows us that when communities have ownership and governance over local resources, restoration lasts. Yes, this demands real upfront investment—in soil, water, agroforestry, local enterprise, and strong community institutions. But the returns are massive: Every dollar invested in restoration can generate up to $30 in benefits.
If finance continues to channel value outward while communities carry the risk, we simply repackage (neo)colonialism in a greener language. Restoration funding must, therefore, anchor ownership and governance locally, positioning communities as architects of change, not passive recipients. And there are models already demonstrating what this can look like.
In Mexico’s Sierra Gorda, the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda (GESG) has built a system where conservation and livelihoods are inseparable. Working alongside the state government, GESG has designed and implemented a public policy within the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve where "forest owners" are compensated to steward forests, manage grazing responsibly, and protect biodiversity.
In simple terms, communities receive compensation for maintaining ecosystems that provide measurable public benefits—carbon sequestration, clean water, biodiversity conservation. Instead of extracting value from the land, value is generated by caring for it.
In the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, more than 300 people directly benefit from a PES (payment for ecosystem services) program covering over 14,000 hectares. GESG operates through a co-management model between civil society and the federal government, grounded in strong local participation and recognition. The goal is not short-term subsidy, but long-term institutional self-sufficiency through sub-national public policy—creating funding streams that sustain conservation while advancing community-led development.
It is a powerful example of conservation that reinforces, rather than erodes, local sovereignty. But PES alone cannot finance restoration at landscape scale; this requires a different kind of financial architecture. Regenerative blended finance offers one pathway. By combining public funds, philanthropic capital, and private investment, it can reduce risk and unlock larger flows of capital for landscape recovery. When designed well, blended finance mechanisms can accelerate ecological restoration while (and by) giving communities control.
A regeneratively-designed blended finance model treats communities as owners and co-investors, not beneficiaries. It embeds social and ecological returns alongside financial ones. It builds local financial capacity, enabling communities to negotiate, manage, and reinvest capital themselves, and strengthens local institutions so landscapes can ultimately generate their own sustainable revenue.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity. If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure. Only then will restoration break from the patterns of the past.Keep ReadingShow Less
How Deadly Are Dying Animals? Trump, Netanyahu, and War Against Iran
Carnage in Iran can't stop the inevitable decline of the US and Israel.
Mar 03, 2026
When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.
That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.
Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since US and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10:00 a.m. local time.” It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.
Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation. The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.
Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.
This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an Israel Defense Forces soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.
Yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.
Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those timeworn channels Alfred Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone equally hard-lined.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.
Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May they find solidarity in just people around the world.
As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.
But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.
For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”
Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.
Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers.
This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.
The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.
As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."
The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.
Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.
Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers means nothing to creatures such as these.
Here’s silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: May they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.
Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.
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An Invitation to Dance: How Bad Bunny Builds a Movement
Most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that.
Feb 27, 2026
When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, critics predicted backlash. He’d be too Spanish. Too political. Not “American” enough. The assumption was that in a country this polarized, cultural borders were fixed—and he stood on the wrong side of them.
Instead, one of the largest audiences in National Football League history tuned in. Streams surged. Album sales climbed. Millions of viewers who didn’t understand every lyric found themselves moving anyway.
Maybe nothing flipped overnight. Maybe hardened partisans didn’t suddenly renounce their politics. What happened was subtler—and more powerful. The borders didn’t collapse. They became more permeable. How did Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio pull that off?
His Music Is a Joyful Invitation, Not a Grievance
Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico has endured over 400 years of exploitation. And yet his music is uplifting; his community feels resilient, not defeated. Political messaging, especially among progressives, often starts with what communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio describes as, “Boy, have I got a problem for you.” Bad Bunny flips the sequence. He invites us to dance first. To celebrate music and food and love and family. It feels like the greatest party on Earth.
Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization.
When I told my husband to check out Debi Tirar Más Photos, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Album of the Year (the first Spanish language winner ever), he was reluctant. The next day, though, the album was blasting through the house. The music is so accessible because there’s something for everyone. Even within a single song, he moves across genres and generations. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was drawn to the salsa rhythms of “Baile Inolvidable.” But then the dembow pulse of “Tití Me Preguntó” had me moving too—despite years of thinking that I didn’t like reggaeton because it all sounded the same. Bad Bunny’s music loosened assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying.
He Uses Curiosity as a Teacher
Viewers who tuned in for the spectacle of the halftime show noticed people dressed as sugar cane plants, workers climbing electrical poles, empty white plastic chairs scattered across the stage. What did it mean? I know I wasn't the only one burning a hole on the internet that evening. People don’t resist information they discover themselves, especially if they’re being entertained.
Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization: the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy; environmental catastrophes; and gentrification driven by tax breaks for wealthy developers. The result: a diaspora in which 2 out of 3 Puerto Ricans now live off the island.
That’s not persuasion through argument. It’s softening through exposure.
His Call to Connect Counters the Us-Versus-Them Narrative Used to Divide Us
Bad Bunny’s music is more than about Puerto Rico. It’s about countering the fear and anger-mongering being used to pit us against each other. The deliberate cultivation of suspicion that someone else is taking what’s yours—when the real plundering is happening from the top.
His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.
Instead, Bad Bunny’s jumbotron message called on people to view each other through a loving lens instead of a hateful one. Former President Barack Obama praised the performance for conveying a simple message: There is room for everyone here. Contrast that to Turning Point’s All-American Halftime Show, the alternative created for those who preferred a narrower definition of who is an American.
Some observers have compared Bad Bunny to John Lennon who also insisted that love could be politically disruptive. Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t about changing policy; it was a call to picture the world differently. That imaginative shift is what unsettles power. Fear-based politics relies on narrowing who counts, on who gets to define the nation. Benito is all about expansion.
He Doesn’t Shrink to Widen His Audience
The NFL executives may have worried that Americans wouldn’t understand Bad Bunny if he didn’t sing in English, but he refused to change himself to accommodate a fractured country. He made the audience stretch instead. (Duolingo reported a 35% surge in Spanish learners following his show.) Understanding doesn’t always begin with translation. It can begin with proximity.
The anger directed at Bad Bunny, writes journalist Jim Heath, is about losing control over identity. “Latino culture is framed as divisive,” writes Heath, “only because its permanence challenges an older mythology about who America is.”
Changing Heart and Minds
We often assume persuasion begins with argument—that we must win debates before we can win anyone over. But most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that. His work is an invitation: to learn about his culture, to experience joy together, to recognize how much we share. Not to contort ourselves to fit in, but to widen the circle without losing who we are. And before long, we’re dancing beside people we were warned to fear.
His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.
That’s how movements grow.
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