The People Who Feed Us

A Super Bowl reflection on the cultures we consume and the people we’ve forgotten to thank

Last night I sat in a living room full of good people. My neighbors, mostly affluent, mostly white, mostly conservative. We were sharing dip, laughing at commercials, doing what Americans do on the first Sunday in February. Then halftime arrived, and Bad Bunny was set to take the stage.

The channel changed fast.

Most of the room wanted the Turning Point USA alternative. Kid Rock, guitars, English lyrics. My wife and I, and maybe a couple of others, would have been happy to watch Bad Bunny. We’re not superfans. We’ve heard a few of his songs. But we were curious, and something about the speed of that channel change stayed with me.

I watched the performance later, online, by myself. And I’m glad I did. If you missed it, I definitely encourage you to find it online!

What Was the Crime, Exactly?
It’s hard to pin down what made the country so uncomfortable with Bad Bunny. Was it that he sang in Spanish, his native language and the second most spoken language in the United States? Was it that he’s Latino, at a moment when being Latino in America feels politically charged in ways it shouldn’t? Was it that he’s been critical of ICE operations? Was it simply that he wasn’t familiar enough?

I don’t think everyone in that living room could have told you exactly which of these sins disqualified him to sing his own songs. And that ambiguity is worth sitting with. When you can’t articulate why something bothers you, it might be worth asking whether the reaction is really about the performer or about something deeper.

Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican. Puerto Rico is a United States territory. Its residents are American citizens. He was the most-streamed (American) artist on Spotify last year. He wasn’t some obscure act chosen to make a political point. He was arguably the biggest musical act on the planet, performing on the biggest stage in American entertainment.

And yet, for millions of viewers, it felt like an intrusion.

I Remember When Crossover Was a Celebration
I grew up loving country music. I also grew up in a time when cultural crossover wasn’t a threat. It was a thrill.

In 1986, Run-DMC and Aerosmith broke through a literal wall in the “Walk This Way” music video, and in doing so, they broke through something in American culture too. A Black hip-hop group from Queens and a white rock band from Boston made something together that neither could have made alone. Author Geoff Edgers called it “the song that changed American music forever,” and he wasn’t exaggerating. Nobody protested. Nobody changed the channel. People just turned it up.

The late ’80s and ’90s were full of moments like that. Santana blending Latin rock with pop and hip-hop. Jimmy Buffett building a whole world around Caribbean sounds. Country artists collaborating freely across genre lines. Culture felt like a potluck, not a battleground.

I wonder if a halftime show celebrating Creole culture from Louisiana, or Native American music and dance, would have gotten the same reaction last night. I suspect it might have. And that tells me the issue isn’t really about any one culture. Something has shifted in how we relate to cultures that aren’t our own.

The Consumerism Paradox
Here’s something I keep coming back to in my own assessment of the times.
For decades, Americans have feasted on the products of globalization. Cheap electronics assembled overseas. Affordable produce picked by immigrant hands. Houses framed by crews who speak Spanish on the job site. Clothes, food, services. An endless buffet of affordable goods made possible by the labor of people from Latin America, Asia, and beyond.

We didn’t just tolerate this arrangement. We loved it. We built our lifestyles around it.
And now it feels like we’re going on a kind of consumerism diet. We’ve decided, quite suddenly, that the very people and cultures who supplied our habits are the problem. Instead of honestly reckoning with our own consumption, our appetite for cheap goods and affordable labor, we’ve turned our suppliers into villains overnight.

It’s easier to blame the people who fed the habit than to admit you had one.
I think the irony showed up in many living rooms last night.
As the channels flipped all over the country and the rooms settled back into comfort, I wonder who else might have been working in houses like ours across America. The caterers. The housekeepers. The nanny sitting with someone else’s kids so the parents can enjoy the party.

Many of the people serving the dip at Super Bowl parties across this country are Latino. Many of them probably would have loved to watch Bad Bunny’s historic moment. Some of them probably missed it because they were working. Their families back home may have watched without them.

I hope they got to see it later, the way I did. I hope they felt the same pride I saw in watch parties from San Juan to Los Angeles. Because it was a beautiful show. Joyful and unapologetically celebratory of a culture that has given this country so much. Unless you see culture as a zero-sum equation, it was not political at all.

What My Friends from Puerto Rico Taught Me
I served in the military with people from Puerto Rico. Brave, generous, funny people who loved their island and loved their country, because for them those aren’t two different things.
Watching that halftime show brought me back to what those friendships taught me. That the richness of America has always come from the layering of cultures, not the flattening of them. That you don’t have to understand every word of a song to feel its heart. That celebrating someone else’s heritage doesn’t take anything away from your own.

Leaving the Channel Where It Is
I’m not writing this to pick a fight with my neighbours. They are wonderful people. We disagree about some things, and we still share a street and a life together. This isn’t about left or right.
But I do think we owe it to each other to separate the policy conversations from the human ones. You can believe in stronger borders and still honor the people and cultures on the other side of them. You can want immigration reform and still let your neighbour’s kid watch a performer who looks like her sing on the world’s biggest stage without treating it as an affront.
Over the last decade, I’ve found myself drifting away from country music, a genre I used to love. Not because the music changed exactly, but because something around it shifted. What once felt like an open-hearted celebration of American life started to feel, in certain corners, more closed off. I mourn that. I want it back.
I want to live in a country where a Puerto Rican artist can perform on the world’s biggest stage in his own language, celebrating his own culture, and the response is simply: “That was a great show.” Isn’t it something that this country holds all of this?

Because it does hold all of this. It always has.
The people who feed us deserve better than to be scapegoated for our own appetites. And maybe the next time the halftime show features someone from a culture different from our own, we can leave the channel right where it is. Enjoy the music. And pass the dip.