On July 11, Bad Bunny kicked off his three-month residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico. The first nine shows were reserved for locals, but starting this weekend they are open to anyone, and hundreds of thousands of people from around the world will begin pouring into our archipelago. It’s the kind of extended run usually reserved for Las Vegas — not a bankrupt U.S. colony reeling from hurricanes, blackouts and political dysfunction. But that’s precisely the point.
What’s unfolding in San Juan this summer is more than a run of shows. It’s a reminder that you don’t have to assimilate, or leave home to find success, and that staying in Puerto Rico does not have to mean sacrifice. We can do more here than just endure — we can thrive. And we can do it without destroying our natural resources or courting tax exiles, but by investing in our most renewable resource: our cultural genius.
Bad Bunny, or Benito, as he is affectionately known here at home, rose to fame in 2016, which happened to be the same year Congress imposed an unelected fiscal control board to oversee local finances. His music has become the soundtrack of both our trauma and our resistance, echoing through hurricanes, earthquakes, blackouts, mass protests that toppled a governor and the rise of new political coalitions.
He’s become our global ambassador, spotlighting both our challenges and the richness of our culture. It’s a heavy burden for a 31-year-old who just wanted to make music. But, true to his stage name, he carries it with roguish charm. His lyrics, always sung in Spanish, blend the harsh realities of blackouts, potholes, colonialism, corruption and displacement with the emotional weight of love, the pleasures of lust and the messy beauty of community and family. In doing so he has created a new kind of protest music, one that grieves, celebrates and grooves all at once.
His latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” or “I Should Have Taken More Pictures,” is a love letter and a lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.
The album and concert series “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí” (“I Don’t Want to Leave Here”) express both a desire to stay and build, and a fear that doing so may not be possible. Its message has resonated far beyond Puerto Rico. On social media, people from places as near as Cuba and as far as Gaza have paired clips of the title track with images of homelands they were forced to leave. The posts capture a collective longing — not just for what was lost, but also for what might have been. Like them, Puerto Ricans face an agonizing decision: stay and fight, or leave and risk never finding their way back.
I know this firsthand. When I left Puerto Rico in the 1990s for graduate school, my plan was always to return to teach at the local university and build a life near my family. But then in 2015 the government declared its debt unpayable. The years since have brought waves of austerity that gutted the very university I once hoped to return to. What was meant to be a detour became a permanent exile.
But now a new generation is choosing to defend their right to stay. Since the debt crisis, and especially in the aftermath of Hurricane María, Puerto Ricans have responded to austerity with autogestión: installing solar microgrids, reclaiming abandoned schools, starting food sovereignty projects and creating social enterprises intended to end the brain drain and form paths home.
Bad Bunny’s residency is part of this broader movement. In the past, artists like him had to chase fame by catering to the market in the States. This time, he has deemed a U.S. tour “unnecessary,” saying fans there have had ample chances to see him perform, and is instead focusing on building an entire infrastructure around his Puerto Rico shows before touring other countries. An estimated 18,000 people will fill the stadium each night, drawing roughly half a million attendees by the end of the residency in September. Projections suggest it could inject over $200 million into the local economy and bump up Puerto Rico’s G.D.P. by 0.15 percentage point — enough to prompt Moody’s Analytics to raise its economic forecast for the territory.
Tickets for the first nine shows were reserved for local residents and were primarily sold at plazas de mercado, or agricultural markets across the archipelago. Some 80,000 tickets were sold within eight hours.
International fans had to wait for the general online sale and pay premium rates, often bundled with hotel stays. This strategy aimed to direct tourism toward hotels rather than Airbnbs and to ensure high occupancy throughout the summer, which is the off-season.
Cultural tours and events outside of San Juan are trying to channel revenues out to the rest of the territory. In Benito’s hometown, Vega Baja, people can visit the supermarket where he once bagged groceries and the church where he was an altar boy.
I was able to attend a show on opening weekend, thanks to a friend who waited six hours in line to secure tickets. Outside the venue, vendors sold handmade crafts, traditional snacks and staged games of pica de caballos, a local game of chance. Fans wore elaborate outfits inspired by traditional clothing — layered peasant skirts, guayaberas and pavas, used by the rural poor and now reclaimed by Bad Bunny as emblems of pride. I even spotted a teen in the rubber work boots worn by coffee pickers.
The show felt like a family reunion. Grandparents sang along in the crowd, sometimes blushing at the racy lyrics. They have also become a reunion point for the diaspora. A friend of mine has three sets of cousins flying in for shows over the next month, some bringing second-generation children to the island for the first time.
Still, the project navigates a tricky contradiction. It denounces tourism-driven displacement even as it invites visitors to see what’s at stake. Locals welcome the economic boost but are bracing themselves for an influx of visitors straining our infrastructure, crowding our beaches and treating our neighborhoods like their playgrounds. On Wednesday, the mayor of San Juan declared a state of emergency after an outage left thousands of homes without water, and many fear that our energy grid could collapse under the strain of additional tourism. Not to mention that this is all unfolding during hurricane season.
Political groups, community organizations, activists and artists are organizing discussions, teach-ins and exhibits in an attempt to educate fans. But ultimately, it is up to those visiting to decide how they will engage with the reality behind Benito’s lyrics.
No concert series can undo the structural forces that shape life in Puerto Rico. It can’t reverse austerity measures, dismantle the fiscal control board or fix the electric grid. But it hints at what might be possible — not just for an international pop star, but for all of us who long to chase our dreams in our own land, without apology or compromise.
At the show I attended, I was surrounded by friends who, like me, have spent years shuttling between the archipelago and its diaspora. When the chords of the closing song “Debí Tomar Más Fotos” filled the venue, I felt tears welling up — partly with melancholy for the life I might have lived had I known that staying was its own kind of achievement, but also with joy at seeing a new generation no longer bound by the false choices between homeland and ambition, joy and resistance.
Yarimar Bonilla, a professor at Princeton University’s Effron Center for the Study of America, is the author of “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” and an editor of “Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm.”
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