[music]

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: On Sunday night, the Grammys were opened by the one and only Bad Bunny. While Bad Bunny gave a performance full of Puerto Rican culture and history with dancers dressed in colorful skirts and big caricature heads of Puerto Rican icons like baseball player Roberto Clemente and musicians Tego Calderon and Andy Montanez, Grammy viewers who were using closed captions while watching the live telecast were not shown the lyrics or transcription of what Bad Bunny was singing, instead, the captions read--

Speaker 2: Singing in non-English.

[music]

[applause]

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: CBS has since fixed the issue of captions, but we wanted to know more about what it meant to sing and talk in non-English. Joining us now is Yarimar Bonilla, professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino studies at Hunter College and Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY. Yarimar, thanks for joining us.

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: How do the, and I'm using air quotes here, "non-English" captions reflect on the Grammys?

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: I think the audience was disappointed. Apparently, this is the standard practice when there's not a multilingual person captioning to just write non-English if that's what they hear. Folks felt like, "Okay, you're making history here. For the first time, you have a Spanish language act nominated for Album of the Year. This is the largest streaming artist in the world. You know that he sings and speaks only in Spanish, do better, Grammys."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Again, just to be clear, Bad Bunny does not generally or ever perform in English, right? I mean, this should not have been a surprise.

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: His entire album is in Spanish, and he's known for speaking Spanish even in unexpected places like national television. They should have been ready.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: What makes an artist like Bad Bunny so important to Puerto Ricans and Latinos in general?

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: I think it's precisely his defiance in these spaces. The idea that this was supposed to be an English-speaking space, something equivalent to white public space where everyone there is expected to speak and understand only one language, and he comes, and he disrupts that. I mean, at this point, it's an expected disruption, but still, it feels subversive. It feels like an act of resistance to say, "Okay, I'm here, and I am speaking non-English."

I think that's why, aside from the anger that people felt, it also went viral because I tweeted out that it was a mood the way that his image was reflected there with the captions "speaking non-English, singing in non-English." He himself posted that image on his Instagram as if it was a point of pride for him.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Is this something that's normal and reflective of how certain artists are treated in English-only spaces?

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: The way he approaches it is not normal. It's not what we've been led to expect. We're used to seeing Ricky Martin and Shakira. These Latin artists take English lessons and try to package themselves for the mainstream audience. He takes a different route. I mean, he is unapologetically, unabashedly Puerto Rican, Latino, Caribbean, Spanish speaking.

The more famous he becomes, the more he seems to double down on his very localized Puerto Rican identity, his use of slang, his winks and nods to those who know the cultural traditions that he's bringing with him onto that global stage. He's changing what we expect, and he's also forcing the industry to change.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: People from the Caribbean speak Spanish with a different accent than others in Latin America. Can you talk a bit about the difference in the accent?

Yarimar Bonilla: Some folks said, "Oh, Spanish is a colonial language. It's a European language," and yes, that's true. There's Spanish that's spoken in Spain, but the kind of Spanish that Bad Bunny, or as we call him, Benito, speaks is not the Spanish of the Royal Academy or even the Spanish of the standardized dialect of Telemundo. His Spanish is the Spanish you hear on the streets in Puerto Rico.

Also, he draws from Dominican slang and these other Spanishes from the Caribbean that are all often derided as being polluted, as using a lot of Spanglish terms, as having a lot of heavy slang. Also, because of their pronunciation, there's a lot of dropped consonants and vowels. He has no concerns about trying to speak in a different way or use a more normative, standardized language.

That is what captioners are probably used to hearing and captioning. Instead, he speaks as he would on the streets of San Juan or the streets of Santo Domingo, but he just does it on a global stage.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Quick break. More on Bad Bunny and the Grammys right after this. We're back with Professor Yarimar Bonilla talking Bad Bunny and the Grammys. Part of the tension here that came up after Bad Bunny's Grammy performance here seems to be about race, maybe not Bad Bunny in particular, but of the Caribbean. Are those two things connected at all?

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: Absolutely. I think the controversy that emerged about him being titled non-English might have not happened, or at least not in the same way if it would've been someone speaking French or speaking Italian. There's a way in which Spanish, in particular, is racialized. It's associated with Latino populations who are themselves racialized and who are often thought to be speaking non-English no matter what language they speak.

Even when they're speaking English, even when, for example, in his speech at the beginning, he tried to meet the audience halfway and to speak in a language that for him is foreign, and that's something that he says all the time, English-speaking artists, they travel the world, they sing in their language, they do interviews in their language. Why is that only possible for English-speaking artists?

In the case of someone coming from a US colony, this is a particularly political stance. It's a way of saying, "I refuse this insistence that I assimilate". Puerto Ricans have rejected assimilation for over a century now. The US tried to change the entire name of the island to Puerto Rico and to impose English, but there's been a legacy of resistance, and some of the figures that pushed on that resistance were represented by the puppets that were dancing with him in the entry of the Grammys.

The entire display, the cultural symbols that he brought with him, the language that he spoke, and the particular dialect of language that he spoke were all active resistance and defiance, and people loved it.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: You direct the Center for Puerto Rican studies at Hunter College. I'm told that coming up in the spring, there will be a symposium dedicated to Bad Bunny. Tell us more about that.

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: It's called Thinking With Bad Bunny, Cultural Politics, and the Future of Puerto Rico. We want to do is to precisely think and theorize with Bad Bunny. There's constant conferences, symposiums, books about other artists, about Shakespeare, pop artists like Prince and Beyonce.

We think that really it's time to recognize the historic nature of his celebrity, but also what he opens up for us to think about regarding race, the racialization of Latinos, but also colorism among Latinos because we do have to recognize that even though he's racialized by the US media and is seen as being a particular racial subject because of the language that he speaks and sings in, he's still a light-skinned artist within this genre.

We also do want to take a critical stance and think about what has facilitated his ability to become such an icon. We also want to think about the way he pushes not just against language but against gender norms and different cultural norms and the political stances that he has taken in his music and how they speak to emerging political trends in Puerto Rico.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Yarimar Bonilla, professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College, and Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla: Thank you.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.