BREAKING BAD

SANDI AULT—Reporting from the WILD

Well before Bad Bunny took the stage on Sunday night, those on the Right had manufactured outrage and offense. For weeks, with white nationalist tropes and bigot boasts, they drummed up division in an attempt to stifle the mounting enthusiasm for the show. They countered with a proffer—a substitute staged for those unwilling to hear songs sung in Spanish, disinclined to take delight in diversity, dance, and deeply-rooted cultural celebration. And right on cue, moments after the magnificent, momentous event, their orange-faced dark lord raged online against the light—against the radiant, luminous glow still emanating from the show.

Me: I was—and still am—blissed out by the Bad Bunny extravaganza.^[1]

I spent four formative years of my childhood in Puerto Rico, so...the fireworks at the end of the Super Bowl Halftime Show?...they’re still going off in my head. Bad Bunny took me back to paradise.

At the tender age of four, I was just beginning to experience the world outside our home in Falls Church, Virginia. My dad worked at the Pentagon. One evening, he came home with the news that he’d been given a dream assignment in the Caribbean. And so, just a few days before my 5th birthday, I stepped off steep airstairs onto a runway and into fantasy land.

I remember looking out the tiny window of the plane during our descent and seeing beautiful white sand beaches, clumps of tall coconut palms bent nearly sideways by strong winds, fences alongside the runway draped with wild bougainvillea bursting with red blossoms.

Imagine that you are five and for the first time, you hear musical languages spoken everywhere, and see houses painted the colors of Easter eggs, and it is summer all year round. You eat delicious new foods, and drink flavorful fruity waters, and make your lips numb sucking on cones full of shaved ice laced with guava syrup. Imagine the delight of discovering mangos ripening and falling from the trees, and heavy clusters of bananas clinging to dark purple stems—but at the same time, curling away and turning towards the sun, as my sisters and I did in paradise.

We three girls were blonde and fair and always sunburnt, running barefoot on warm sand beaches, chasing frogs across the cool grass at night, or playing explorer in semi-jungle while our parents fished in the Lago Dos Bocas. There, in the evenings, they cooked up their catch: blue tilapia and tucunaré sizzled in a cast-iron skillet over an open fire while we opened papayas and scooped the soft fruit out into our plates. I still remember the free campfire concerts that came wafting across the water from the stilt shanties dotting the hills on the other side, These were soulful folksongs sung on front porches in the evenings by sugar cane workers, their voices raspy with rum and days-long call-and-response in the fields, and accompanied by twangy and slightly out of tune cuatros, the ten-stringed guitars played everywhere on the island.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show took me back to all this and more. And while those on the extreme Right gathered up a hefty dose of contempt before the event took place—even going to the extreme of creating their own switch-away-nothing-to-see-that-we-don’t-want-to-see show—well more than 100-million^[2] of the rest of us swooned at the spectacular sensory celebration of sets rich with symbolism, songs sung in Spanish, the sounds of the panderos, the cuatros, the maracas. Bad Bunny and his crew held a masterclass in storytelling, with scenes emblematic of Puerto Rican life—from the cane fields to the power poles to the piragua stands. I could go on and on here, but I’m guessing most of you saw it all and took away exactly what you needed from that extraordinary thirteen-minute, multi-layered, cultural, political, artistic, and spiritual gift, so rich with allegory and jubilation that we felt the darkness lift last Sunday night and we saw what happiness and unity and love look and sound and feel like again. From the defiant flying of the original Puerto Rican flag, to the gift of the grammy to a six-year-old child, El Conejo Malo refused to relent to cruelty and repression.

For the finale, Bad Bunny named nearly every Latin American country: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guiana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti...then added the United States, Canada...and finally Puerto Rico. The message on the screen above the show read: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” These words were inscribed on a football: Together We Are America. This history-making feast of music, dance, imagery, and elation felt a little like resistance, but more like insistence...a euphoric refusal to accept all the darkness, the divisiveness, the hate, and the oppression, and a persistent assertion of the power of love and goodness.

In the time-travel journey this performance prompted, I began to perceive that I am who I am today because of the power of my childhood experiences in Puerto Rico. Young though I was, I witnessed the pervasive presence of poverty, the deep-seated degradation caused by centuries of colonialism and slavery—and also the kindness of strangers in humble hilltop villages welcoming and sheltering us when we had to head to high ground during hurricanes. The celebration of the senses in the food, the music, the clothing, the art, and the colors—all this was rich and enduring defiance against dominance and deprivation. Those early experiences ultimately made me fiercely political, a seeker of justice, an advocate for joy and an evangelist for equality. And on Sunday, halfway through the Super Bowl, I could see how it all unfolded in me and why I continue to offer up the gifts I’ve been given to lend a little light in these dark times.

Sunday night’s halftime show was both a powerful party and a shining example of how love, light, art, and culture can come together to save us.

And while Bad Bunny had those on the Right hopping mad, he showed the rest of us how to break through the bad.

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Here’s a photo of Zuni, our wolf cub companion doing what wolves do in the snow.

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^[1] See the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show here: Bad Bunny 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show

^[2] The Journal Record—Nielsen Media Research, February 10, 2026, https://journalrecord.com/tag/nielsen-media-research/