NEW YORK (AP) — Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny has redefined what it means to be a global giant — and he could make history again at the 2026 Grammy Awards.
The artist, born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, is up for six awards at the Feb. 1 show, becoming the first Hispanic artist to be nominated for album, song and record of the year simultaneously. His critically acclaimed album Debí Tirar Más Fotos became only the second Spanish-language record to be nominated for Album of the Year. First? Well, it also belonged to Bad Bunny, 2022's “Un Verano Sin Ti.”
Win or lose, experts say Bad Bunny's Grammy nomination marks a symbolic moment for Latinos. After all, he's just a week away from headlining the Super Bowl halftime show.
Historical nominations reflect the cultural zeitgeist.
Vanessa Diaz, assistant professor of Chicano and Latino studies at Loyola Marymount University and co-author of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance,” says Bad Bunny's nods go beyond his own art and serve as “a very welcome acknowledgment of a growing Latino music scene.”
“The music of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean has shaped global musical tastes since the 19th century,” adds Albert Laguna, assistant professor of ethnicity, race, migration and American studies at Yale University. “Bad Bunny is another link in a much longer chain of popularity for Caribbean music on the world stage.”
Much of this music—especially Latin trap and reggaeton, genres in which Bad Bunny began his career and continues to use in his new work—has been historically criminalized in Puerto Rico, not unlike hip-hop in the United States. Reggaeton in particular, Diaz notes, “comes from some of the most marginalized communities in Puerto Rico. And so the fact that Bad Bunny is nominated in three major categories, and he's the artist who invented trap… is the most innovative thing about this whole situation.”
Petra Rivera-Rideau, an assistant professor of American studies at Wellesley College and co-author of “P FKN R,” says this element is especially notable because institutions often ignore marginalized genres—including at the Latin Grammys, the Grammy Awards' sister ceremony.
Winning in major categories can have “deep symbolic meaning,” she says. But with a caveat: “I’m interested to see if this opens doors for other people.” After all, Bad Bunny himself isn't immune to the Recording Academy's institutional biases: He has three career Grammys to his name, but all of them were in the urban music categories—despite being the most streamed artist on the planet.
Addressing the local and global scale in response to the political moment
On “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” Bad Bunny and his producers weave traditional Puerto Rican folk styles into a hyper-modern context. Latin trap and reggaeton did not disappear, but merged with jibara music, salsa, bomba, plena and even aguinaldo, a kind of Christmas music, in “Pitorro de Coco.” While Bad Bunny's previous albums also combined different genres, including bossa nova, mambo, rock, merengue and many others, this album's melange was more homegrown.
Laguna sees “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” as a direct challenge to the prevailing “global pop stardom formula”, which he describes as an artist finding success locally, gaining momentum, and then “watering down” their sound into something commercial and palatable to a global audience.
“Bad Bunny went in the opposite direction. This is his most Puerto Rican album ever,” says Laguna. He hopes it will show other artists that they too can look to their background and history when creating art.
“There's so much amazing Latin music that gets overlooked, and that's part of what's so wonderful about this moment,” Diaz says. “And that’s why this feels like a win for all Latinos.”
The timing of the album's release and its recognition are also important. “In the United States, there is a history of other Latinos, another Spanish language… We are in a moment where this seems extremely poignant,” she continues. “For a community that is being attacked on such a deep level, this is a little bit of light, a little bit of faith that we can still have a place here.”
Latinos and the Hispanic community in the U.S. are becoming increasingly wary amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment and raids as President Donald Trump's immigration policies and executive actions have vastly expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation and routine hearings have turned into deportation traps for migrants.
In an interview with iD Magazine earlier this year, Bad Bunny mentioned that concerns about mass deportations of Latinos influenced his decision not to tour the continental US (hundreds of people have been detained in Puerto Rico itself since large-scale arrests began in late January).
“The content of the lyrics, which are so steeped in Puerto Rican history, political history, tourism and gentrification, has a very rich political and historical content,” Diaz adds. “This album is historic even without the Grammy win.”
But if Bad Bunny does win, Diaz says, it will be “akin to Halle Berry becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar.” This was a turning point. Or Rita Moreno will become the first Latina to win the award.”
Beyond that, Laguna says the album's politics aren't limited solely to Puerto Rican or even Latino identity—”the lyrics on this album speak to global struggles,” he says. Take, for example, “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), a call for cultural autonomy in an era of neo-colonialization.
The album's cross-generational appeal
Rivera-Rideau says one of the reasons “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” has resonated is not only because of the political implications of using folk music in addition to urban music, but also because of its sound. Traditional genres are “much more relatable” to listeners who cling to the outdated taboos surrounding Latin trap and ridicule the sexuality of reggaeton. The resulting combination of sounds creates an album that is “popular across generations,” she says.
But it only works because “musically it's very interesting. If it was just traditional music and people cared about that, it wouldn't be as successful,” she explains. “Musically, he’s super innovative and makes available many of the older genres that people listen to in Puerto Rico, but he’s been able to globalize these very local genres in a way that no one else has.”
This cross-generational appeal was a feature of Bad Bunny's iconic Puerto Rican residency, given the age and global diversity of its audience.
“A lot of people feel that this is a tense moment, this is a difficult moment. And now someone is giving us a sound language in which to talk about this difficult present,” Laguna says. “The nice thing about political criticism is what music makes possible in a beautiful way. And I think that's very welcome.”
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The 68th Grammy Awards will take place on February 1, 2026 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The show will air on CBS and Paramount+. For more information, visit https://apnews.com/hub/grammy-awards.
