On Bad Bunny, Latino Values, and Progressive White ‘Inclusion’

Luke Shalz

+JMJ+

My thoughts never necessarily reflect the official positions of any organization and are certainly not explicitly endorsed by any. They are my own, and I welcome their criticism.

I try to fly above politics these days (I definitely used to not), but this whole Bad Bunny thing, as trivial as it may seem, sheds light on an interesting reality worth considering. It seems to highlight how white performative progressivism often claims to “respect” non-white cultures while selectively affirming only those cultural expressions that flatter modern liberal sensibilities. When a culture’s moral or religious values resist those sensibilities, they are dismissed as backward or victims of colonial persistence. This results in a shallow, aestheticized inclusivity that prizes celebration of appearance over sincere consideration of ethos. This phenomenon is well exemplified in their defense of popular Latin performer Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance. I’ll first construct the argument against Bad Bunny’s music as a representation of Latin America, and then dissect the progressive tendency to defend it, further understanding its underlying dispositions and implications.

Recently, I have encountered many white liberals in online spaces defending Bad Bunny’s performance in the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. Initially I was surprised by the intensity of their response. I thought it was odd considering that his songs cover themes like "I have possession of many young women for sexual usage". This notion is not progressive; it is animalism. Certainly, this language does not promote gender equality. In a contextual vacuum, I intuit that most educated progressives would find this kind of content rather ugly! Oddly, though, it appears that they support this gross content because it is simply a ‘thing that is Latino’ at a time when many in the Latin American community in the United States are genuinely fearful for their safety. While such a move may be defensible given the current circumstances, it seems that many white progressives have adopted Bad Bunny as a Latino representative of sorts in ways that are general and downright incorrect.

While some prominent Latin American people may defend him, many of those in my personal circles have volunteered their distaste for his current rise—completely unsolicited. They feel that Bad Bunny’s values do not represent Latin America, certainly not its entirety. For approximately 500 million Latin American Catholics, the region is represented by our blessed mother and intercessor, La Virgen de Guadalupe. For these same people, healthy, bold, self-giving masculinity is embodied by men like Martyr-St. Oscar Romero and a more obscure figure of my own lineage: Arzobispo Rossell y Arellano de Guatemala.

For the progressive reader, it’s easy to write off Catholic values as merely a residue of colonial presence. It is easy to suggest that modern Latin Americans needn’t pay cultural obedience to this ‘outdated system of spiritual control’. I would encourage the person who holds to such paternalism to consider that they are insulting the self-awareness and intelligence of hundreds of millions of free inhabitants of the post-modern world who live in Latin America and follow Christ. They could abandon their faith, and yet they choose not to.

Obviously, “Latin American culture” is a bit of a silly term due to its vagueness. There are dozens of Spanish-speaking countries south of the States each with different economic conditions, social expectations, foods, attire, and political landscapes. While Latin America is diverse, it still holds several things in common, perhaps the chief of which is a conservative, dignity-oriented social ethic cultivated by 500 years of nearly ubiquitous Catholicism. I claim a little part of this world as the grandson of a Guatemalan immigrant and son to a mother whose first language was Spanish. (She has since lost most of her Spanish ability due to xenophobic American social pressures in her youth. I intend to discuss the intergenerational impacts of “culture-loss” in a future essay.) My experience of Latin culture is shaped by the attitudes and values of these women in my life and my immersion in Latin-American Catholic spaces as both an inhabitant of the pew and the choir loft. This experience and identity of mine are surely not exhaustive given that I am also rather white in upbringing, but it is not uselessly narrow either. For this reason, I argue not that zero Latin American people hold that Bad Bunny represents them, but rather that most freely participate in a value system wholly incompatible with his demonstrated view of sexual ethics.

Catholic Latin culture reveres the sharp minds and unrelenting love of our mothers and sisters. In the Latin Catholic domain, women rule the world as they rock the cradle; men do not see them as interchangeable objects of male genital stimulation—they see women as the life-blood of the home, the community, and the common good. Such explicit wording may sound crass or harsh, but it is painfully necessary—because it is painfully accurate. Within a Catholic, Latin American social ethic, Bad Bunny's music is clearly reprehensible since it crudely dishonors the equal-if-not-greater role that the woman plays in community. Art both represents and reinforces its culture. Clearly, this art is not worthy of cultural ambassadorship.

Putting aside his alleged representation of a predominantly Catholic cohort (Latin America), I’d like to further suggest that such music does not represent the values of any polite, allegedly ‘feminist’ society. The earliest modern iterations of feminism were advances towards practical equality: suffrage, fair legal treatment in marriage disputes, and good-faith treatment in the workplace. Recent feminist activism has interestingly focussed on men’s attitudes. Among many things, it seeks to dismantle the deep-seated societal reduction of the female to a sexual object with kitchen skills. I’d like to make the far-out claim that lyrics like “Ya me aburrí, hoy quiero un t*tit* inédito” (tr. “I’m bored now, today I want a new p*ssy”) from one of Bad Bunny’s songs does not exactly de-objectify women, as it regards a body part as more relevant than the person to whom it belongs. This means that even by the current American standards of acceptable gender ethics, this kind of music should not be exalted in public life.

Given the great disparity between these morally hideous lyrics and the decency owed to any woman of any culture, the ‘conejo malo’ is not really a suitable or respectable representative of Spanish-speaking America nor is he a role model for young men. Am I wild for contending that most mothers would cringe or cry if their sons sang his lyrics from the heart? And yet the progressive Left, especially white progressives, would like to treat Bad Bunny’s music and message as acceptable and representative of Latin America. I don’t think that this phenomenon is uniquely due to cultural or linguistic ignorance, however. It seems to be part of a broader trend in how the white progressive class treats foreignness.

I sense that this way of thought generally only offers space to the portions of other cultures that align with its very young, largely untested value system. If culturally white Americans can only accept the portions of Latin America that forsake her historically Catholic values then they are only pretending to love diversity. In my study of ancient Greek interaction with West Asian cultures, I was introduced to the concept of “exoticism”. In this specific academic context, the term is used to describe a dominant culture’s often myopic fascination with the aesthetic markers of another people, usually without meaningful understanding of how these markers relate to one other, or to their people’s formal or lived ethos. Consider the ancient Greek incorporation of Persian motifs into everyday artistically adorned objects which greatly misrepresented Persian masculinity as effeminate and servile. This is a certain kind of cultural interaction in which one group desires the external aspects of another culture while negatively misrepresenting or otherwise discarding the abstract principles behind the relevant culture’s aesthetics. It seems that the modern progressive movement takes on a similar approach. The “enlightened white” mindset seems to welcome intriguingly foreign objects and accents and skin colors and art, yet not hold the same space for the values of the people from whom these things come. Further, they seem to almost intentionally reject these values in many instances. In the instance of Bad Bunny’s appreciation, they fail to consider the ways in which his messages are not only objectively distasteful, but at odds with the Christian ethos that defines the historic and continuous ethical identity of Latin America.

Consider a modern example of this same preference for appearance over substance in the white inclusion of foreignness. The Anglican Church is predominantly comprised of African people in Africa, and yet the highest symbolic and procedural elements of the Anglican Communion not only remain largely English but also make socially progressive doctrinal advances within their own national church which challenge their unity with their African peer bodies. The Church of England would love to remain in a visually diverse communion of churches, but does not take seriously the values and perspectives of the non-white churches with which they exist in communion. The progressive white world largely holds these positions on traditional marriage, gender complementarity (over gender equality), and the authority of scripture as characteristics of a less advanced people.

This uncovers a deeper reality of the shallow inclusivity of the white progressive mindset: the notion that people from perceivably less developed and more “backwards” nations hold equally undeveloped and backwards social values ripe for the salvific touch of white progressive advancement. There is a certain condescending duplicity in the mind that simultaneously believes that it holds space for foreign cultures and that people from those cultures are “advancing” only if or when their reasonably held values begin to look more Western or ‘progressive’. I specify the difference between reasonable and unreasonable cultural values because it seems that there is a clear difference between attitudes towards consensual sex (such as what is expressed by Bad Bunny’s song lyrics) and attitudes towards basic human rights matters. I would not consider a progressive person condescendingly duplicitous for celebrating Somali culture while abhorring female genital mutilation, a culturally ingrained practice undergone by roughly 99% of Somali women according to the World Health Organization. In the future, I intend the explore the concrete rule that defines the line between reasonable and unreasonable cultural values, but for now, I’m happy to leave this logical loose end.

It seems that there is this sense among the progressive Left that a few good generations of liberal arts degrees, iPhones, and LGBTQ districts will “save” Latin America from the grip of oppressive Christian colonization. As previously noted, this is an insulting, rather self-congratulating notion. Modern inhabitants of the Americas south of Texas are not 16th century Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayans, or Incans. Latin Americans today are quite literally both Spanish and Indigenous in every sense. For Latino Christians, the abstract concept of Jesus is not suppressing a “real” Latin America. Rather, a very real Jesus still guides their heart, as roughly 90% of the region identifies as Christian. In Central America, South America, and the Caribbean atheism, secularism, and indigenous religion are surely prevalent worldviews, and yet a broad majority remain Christian in 2026.

Because of the highly conditional inclusion of Latino identity in the progressive space, this kind of inclusivity is not nearly as all-encompassing as the world of white progressivism sincerely hopes it is. In the 2024 election, the Republican Party nearly won the majority of the Latino vote—an unprecedented circumstance—precisely because of this ideological inclusion. Socio-sexual issues constituted a major battlefield of the race, and the Democratic messaging on the issue represented such a high degree of social progressivism that it isolated nearly half of this traditionally Dem-voting bloc. The Left has attempted to maintain such a big tent that when they speak in definitive approval of any one constituent group’s professed needs, they alienate another’s. This kind of alliance is only maintainable if the Left continually convinces these groups that their individual ethos is less central to their identity than the mere fact that they are not simultaneously white, straight, Christian, male, and well-off. That kind of paternalism cannot be reasonably maintained indefinitely.

So, picture yourself entering a bustling Brooklyn coffee shop. In this space, people of all varieties should be able to drink, work, ponder, read, and encounter. On the window hang flyers for a modern dance performance, a drag brunch, a local Latino-owned comedy club, and a Russian lady offering reasonably priced piano lessons. The centerpiece of this collage is a brightly colored, well-produced poster that reads “All are welcome here.” I pose a question. Does this little coffee joint welcome all people in their diversity of sincerely held values, or does it merely welcome their bodies, colors, languages, and other markers of external diversity? What is being sold as unconditional inclusion is actually just highly curated and controlled difference without room for friction. For the white progressive Left, inclusion has been reduced to an aesthetic experience rather than a challenging moral encounter. There is a difference between the kind of inclusion that welcomes any living human body into a diversity project and the inclusion that welcomes any human person for genuine and perhaps uncomfortable dialogue and encounter.

America will never again be a nearly-racially-homogenous place. It will also never be an idyllic tapestry of externally diverse people who all think the same way. A mature approach to American society must accept these two realities, as we live in ideological tension for very concrete reasons. The grease—if you will—that makes this friction bearable and sustainable is a certain kind of respect that leaves one willing to remain in relationship with people whose values they reject. This respect is the ability to tolerate moral disagreement without turning the other into a problem to be solved or a conditionally accepted foreign token. It is the humility and internal command to encounter and honestly exchange with cultures that do not flatter one’s worldview. Sustainable pluralism dies the moment difference is permitted only as morally-comforting spectacle.