“Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion, let it sink back in the ocean,” sang Rita Moreno as Anita in 1961’s West Side Story. Watching with my 11th-grade film class in Ponce, my hometown on the island’s southern coast, I felt my cheeks burn.
Until recently, most popular references to the island—even those that uplifted its culture—did so from a distance. Esmeralda Santiago’s celebrated memoir When I Was Puerto Rican unfolds mostly in Brooklyn. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights stays exactly there. Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” reserves its Spanish lyrics for the chorus. Puerto Ricans’ stories, it seemed, were only heard abroad (save for Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”) once they moved there.
But in recent years, Benito Martínez—known to his millions of fans as Bad Bunny—has become the exception to that rule. Since the release of his 2018 debut album, X 100pre, the Puerto Rican rapper has become a global sensation: topping Spotify charts, hosting Saturday Night Live, performing at the Super Bowl, and co-chairing the Met Gala.
Now, at 31, Bad Bunny has returned home with the release of his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an ode to Puerto Rico, and a 30-concert residency in San Juan, the first 9 of which are reserved exclusively for locals.
Since the residency kicked off, in July, more than 200,000 people have poured into the “Choli” (the Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot), filling the space between the two custom-built stages: one, a mountain sculpted after the island’s landscape; the other, a casita, a modest Puerto Rican home with a wide porch and a flat roof. “It looks like my grandma’s house,” the person next to me told his friend at one of the concerts I went to. (I’ve been twice.)
The flat roof—a flawed and ubiquitous design on an island that gets more than 200 inches of rain a year—is painted with faux humidity stains and topped with a drain, a satellite dish, and an A/C unit. Midway through his three-hour set, Bad Bunny climbs up and performs there, giving nosebleeds a front-row view.
But the real party is downstairs—inside the casita and out on its front porch, which doubles as the V.I.P. room and has hosted LeBron James, Jon Hamm, Austin Butler, Darren Aronofsky, and Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. There’s an open bar and a D.J., who routinely holds out a microphone and invites someone from the audience, usually a beautiful woman—in Justin Bieber, “One Less Lonely Girl” fashion—to step up and scream, “Acho, P.R. es otra cosa!” (Damn, Puerto Rico is something else!) A far cry from the line Stephen Sondheim once wrote for Moreno, and one, I suspect, she would rather have delivered.
It all started with a tweet. The day before opening night, James posted, “Benito! I’m at the Los Angeles airport right now, coming to see you!” The next night, the N.B.A. star was seen wearing an orange bucket hat and a floral shirt and nearly grazing the casita’s low ceiling as he danced with a drink in his hand. By the end of the night, videos of James at the casita had gone viral, with one clip catching the moment the crowd noticed him and erupted into chants of “M.V.P.! M.V.P.!”
The following weekend, soccer stars Achraf Hakimi, of Paris Saint-Germain, and Kylian Mbappé, of Real Madrid, showed up in wifebeaters and undone linen shirts.
Before the concerts began, fans had predicted the V.I.P. section would be filled with Bad Bunny’s entourage and the occasional Puerto Rican star, such as Benicio del Toro or Ricky Martin. Now, spotting international stars in attendance has become an unexpected part of the concerts’ thrill.
The Puerto Rican sneaker designer Chrizia Feliciano, 26, was at the casita the night Cruz and Bardem were there. “They had the most fun,” she tells me.
The casita, she says, is “literally a house. It has a sofa, it has a kitchen, they have two TVs, and, obviously, there’s a bar.... Everyone is dancing. Bad Bunny’s music makes you feel like you’re at a get [a house party] in your friend’s living room.”
There are only two rules in the casita, she adds: no pictures inside—Bad Bunny often drops in for a drink—and “Have fun.”
Hamm, an avid Bad Bunny fan who was spotted at the casita with a similar uniform to James’s (floral shirt, bucket hat, drink in hand), says, “It was epic.... The casita was, indeed, like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.... At no time did you have the sense that you were ‘onstage.’ You just felt a part of it. Gracias, Benito! Gracias, P.R.!”
Last month, Billy Ray Cyrus—father of Miley—posted a video in which he begged Bad Bunny for an invitation to one of the concerts. (Cyrus has yet to make an appearance at the casita.)
In addition to the $200 million windfall the concerts have brought to the local economy, the residency, which wraps on September 14, swaps “I like to live in America” with “Puerto Rico.” It’s a feeling locals have understandably needed reminding of, as 800,000 people have left since 2010.
The Debí Tirar Más Fotos album and concerts ultimately serve as a call to action: for residents to stay, for those in the diaspora to come visit, and for tourists to not displace locals. As one concert chorus roared at the Choli in Spanish, “Nobody can get me out of here. I’m not moving from here. Tell them this is my house, where my grandfather was born. I’m from P fuckin’ R!”
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
