Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl: Celebration or a Stereotype of What They Call “Latino”?

Yesterday, February 8, 2026, the Super Bowl LX took place, along with the highly anticipated halftime show, which — as always — generated enormous expectations. This time, however, in the midst of a deeply agitated internal political climate in the United States — between the Epstein files, ICE raids, deaths, and more — the artist taking the stage was none other than the Puerto Rican, and therefore Latino, Bad Bunny.

It was clear there would be a statement tied to his Latin American roots, in a United States where the performance offered a very explicit representation of what it means — and does not mean — to be “Latino” in the 21st century.

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Let me clarify something from the beginning: the show was great. Especially considering the current climate of extreme racism toward this community in the United States, representation in a space like the Super Bowl was not only appropriate, but deeply necessary.

This is not a critique of Bad Bunny, nor of his artistic proposal, nor of the fact that this representation took place. Quite the opposite.

But precisely because of this show, I’ve seen a huge number of people on social media talking about “Latino pride,” and that’s where a thought I’ve had for a long time begins to surface. Not because of the show itself, but because of what is said afterwards: how that word is used, how an identity is celebrated that is often loaded with simplifications, stereotypes, and an external gaze that is rarely questioned.

This text is born from there — not from a rejection of pride or representation, but from the discomfort of asking what exactly we are celebrating when we talk about “Latino pride,” who defines that concept, and who gets left out.

That a Puerto Rican artist became the first Latino male to headline this global event, largely in Spanish, is a historic milestone for music and for many communities. But it is also a good moment to question how the label “Latino” is constructed and used when viewed from the outside — especially from places like Europe or the United States.

What does it mean to reduce vast cultures, histories, and internal differences to a single concept?

If you’ve read my other articles, you know I’m Chilean and have been living in Berlin, Germany for almost eight years. I’m mestiza, I have Indigenous features, and I come from a very cold city at the southernmost tip of the continent called Punta Arenas. The cliché of the Latino who lives in heat and at the beach could not be further from — or less representative of — my reality.

Photo by Hans-Jürgen Weinhardt on Unsplash

Living here in Germany, I have often been the target of fetishization because of my race and physical appearance. White men who say, “I love Latinas” (what is that even supposed to mean?). How could that not be a fetishizing and stereotyping comment? There is no interest in me as a person: I’m Latina, and that’s all they need to know. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.

At the same time, I’ve also come across many Instagram profiles of women from different Latin American countries whose bio simply says: LATINA. I don’t want to judge, but I can’t help wondering whether this is a way of embracing that same objectification and stereotype because it generates some kind of “value” and almost as if it guarantees certain things about you.

But value for whom? For what audience? And at what cost? And what kind of assumptions come with that label?

And it’s not just that I’m stereotyped — I’m constantly being confused with other Latin American cultures. I’m asked about information, customs, or recipes from countries that are thousands of kilometers away from my home. Things are attributed to me that have nothing to do with me, and I’m constantly reminded that, in the end, “we’re all Latinos.”

It’s as if Latin America were a single country, even a small village — as if we were interchangeable, without local identities, without situated histories. As if we all came from the same place, as if that place were small, homogeneous — just like our supposed identity.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

And I think that’s where the problem lies. Calling oneself Latino begins to operate like a brand: a label that promises certain characteristics, tastes, and ways of being. An identity ready to be consumed. That’s where the white male idea of “the Latina” comes from — porn, mass media, stereotypes — and there is nothing positive about that. It’s as if we were a dog breed, guaranteeing a certain personality type.

In that process, the personal, the local, and the national are often diluted. What remains is not a shared identity, as it’s often framed, but a simplified version of ourselves, designed to be understood — and accepted — by others.

Latin America covers nearly 20 million square kilometers; it is an immense territory that is poorly represented in traditional world maps (Africa isn’t either). I’ve written about this before, about how white people treat people of color. If you want to take a look, I’ll leave the link.

Being “Latino” isn’t even a self-designation, the concept was imposed to us.

People from Africa don’t usually say “I’m African”; they say Nigerian, Senegalese, Yoruba, Amharic, Zulu, etc. — even though there is a shared history, in many ways similar to that of Latin America.

Photo by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash

Yet for some reason, Latinos have accepted this term as part of our identity, despite the enormous differences between us. We are different countries, with different climates and different histories. Even within the same country, people are different — just as happens everywhere else in the world.

I often wonder why people from other regions, with similar histories or similarly racialized populations, do not identify themselves by the name of the continent in the way we do.

Another thing I want to clarify is that in school I was never taught the concept of Latin America as something political, identitarian, or geographical. It was presented mainly as a linguistic category, used to designate regions where languages derived from Latin — like Spanish and Portuguese — are spoken. But even before that, the concept didn’t exist at all, and we didn’t invent it.

The idea of “Latin America” emerged in France in the mid-19th century, not in the American continent. It was promoted by French intellectuals and adopted by the government of Napoleon III. The logic was roughly this: France wanted to justify its imperial influence in the Americas, and to do so it proposed the existence of a large family of “Latin” peoples. A fraternal narrative was constructed so France wouldn’t appear as just another colonizer.

That conceptual framework didn’t disappear. Decades later, in the United States, “Latino” began to be used systematically as an external category, shaped by a white gaze — first imperial, then administrative and media-driven.

Being Latino is a white invention, a European invention embraced by imperialism and racism. It is used to lump enormous numbers of people together, erasing specific identities and cultures. It doesn’t matter whether you’re from Tijuana or Ushuaia: you’re Latino, and with that label come expectations, stereotypes, external projections, and a prefabricated idea of who you’re supposed to be.

And that is not visibility, nor something to celebrate. It is reduction, exoticization, and symbolic control.

So I ask myself: What does someone from Santo Domingo in Dominican Republic really have in common with someone from Lima in Peru? Why do we allow ourselves to be stereotyped — and then celebrate it as pride? Why don’t we see Europeans referring to themselves simply as European, or Africans as African? Because doing so would be reductive and unrepresentative, which is obvious, but for us the ‘latinos’ is not.

Photo by Jeffrey Eisen on Unsplash

I understand the desire for unity and fraternity. There is shared pain. But that pain does not justify homogenization.

The issue is not community, but the fact that what is celebrated as “Latino” represents only a small part of the continent, mainly the Caribbean and Central America. And the reason is concrete: most Latin American immigrants in the United States come from Central America and the Caribbean.

As a result, this pseudo-Latino identity is built in a non-Latino country and shaped through a white gaze, but it is also reinforced from within: by Latinos — primarily from certain countries — who end up embodying and reproducing that identity based on their region’s specific culture, or rather, a mix of them.

Everything that is considered “Latino” seems to come from that area: the beaches, the heat, salsa, bachata, merengue, reggaeton, being “good dancers” — you name it. And even if these elements are real cultural expressions from that region, they are still turned into stereotypes. More importantly, they have little to do with many other countries in Latin America, especially those in the so-called Southern Cone and neighboring regions.

Thus, a category that claims to represent an entire continent is fabricated from the cultural, aesthetic, and symbolic codes of a single part, while the rest is excluded from the narrative — even as it claims to speak for everyone.

It’s strange when you think about it. And yet, for some reason, we are all expected to embrace this identity and identify with it simply because we were born in that part of the world — a region that is enormous and deeply diverse.

Photo by Ivars Utināns on Unsplash

So where do the Amazon, the Andes, Patagonia, the Atacama Desert, the Altiplano, the Pampas, the fjords, the glaciers, the forests, the cold coasts, the gray cities, and the extreme territories fit in? Where do cold climates, wind, silence, distance, isolation, austerity, and restraint fit in?

Where do literary geniuses, philosophers, poets, and political thinkers fit in? Where do rock legends, metal bands, punk scenes, underground movements, experimental music, folk traditions, or even bossa nova fit in?

Where do artists who work with silence, melancholy, abstraction, or darkness fit in? Where do cultures shaped by cold, distance, restraint, and introspection fit in?

Where do different racial mixes fit in — Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities outside the Caribbean, European diasporas, mestizaje in its many forms? Where do places that are not tropical, not colorful, not festive, not “hot,” not easily consumable fit in?

Because all of that is also Latin America — just not the cliché version of it. And that cliché is largely based on a small part of what is Hispanic America; Brazil, for example, is often not even included in what is considered “Latino” from this U.S.-centric perspective.

Isn’t it obvious that much of what is understood today as “Latino” is a construction created and exploited in the United States, amplified by the media, and based almost entirely on a mix of cultures from a very specific region?

Not everything is palm trees, hot weather, and reggaeton.

As for me, I continue choosing the local, the situated, the specific.

I remain Patagonian, Chilean, and obviously also Latina — but that term will never represent me culturally or identitarianily, only racially.

Everything else feels like a stereotype I refuse to participate in. I refuse to let people think we are all the same, and I constantly fight in Europe against being reduced to a convenient, simplified, external label that erases my history, my place, and my real identity.

If you enjoyed this article or have any comments, please feel free to leave them below! I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a clap to help the algorithm share this with more people, especially if it resonates with you. Thanks so much for reading and/or sharing — it truly means a lot to me! ^^