American Game Changers
Bad Bunny, Heated Rivalry, and Mark Carney are the America we want to see more of.
Over the past few days Bad Bunny’s NUEVAYoL has been playing on repeat.
It has been my way to distract myself from the gloomy British climate, both political and real, not to speak of the latest revelations from the Epstein files, which by now include more characters than War & Peace and require their own dramatis personae chart to keep track of who’s who.
While Bad Bunny kept reminding me that I had to visit Nueva Yol in the summer if I wanted to have fun, I was also trying to make a dent on Wuthering Heights1 before Emerald Fennell’s adaptation hits screens this weekend, and carving out time -and sleeping very little as a result- to rewatch Heated Rivalry before my subscription to the platform it is on expires.
In case you have been hibernating and your internet access has been down for the past month, Heated Rivalry has become a global phenomenon in record time and a second season is already in the works.
Based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers gay romance series about rival ice hockey players Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, the story has been adapted for the screen by Jacob Tierney, who discovered Reid’s books during the pandemic and was instantly hooked. Some people have said Heated Rivalry is what Challengers would have been without Zendaya and I can’t say they're wrong.
Such has been the impact of Heated Rivalry that Episode 5 “I Believe in Anything” scored a 10/10 on IMDb, breaking the record of Breaking Bad held for over a decade as undisputed top-rated content from a tv show for its season 5 episode “Ozymandias.”
It’s almost impossible to open social media without seeing an interview with Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie (who look like younger versions of Keanu Rives and Patrick Swayze), the latest meme, parody or fan fiction. In fact, Saturday Night Live has brought to life, in a delightful tie-in, the wildest Harry Potter fans fantasies. It’ll be interesting to see the follow up to this when Connor Storrie hosts SNL at the end of the month, perhaps the freshest face to host a staple of US television.
As this past week we’ve been held hostage by hosting our annual staff conference at work, I’ve been trying to identify who among my colleagues across the globe may be equally bewitched, bottom and soul2, with this ice hockey romance as well because I can’t bear this obsession alone any longer.
Unfortunately, since I can’t go around asking colleagues if they’re also into a Canadian smutty gay show so we can fangirl the shit out of it together without landing in the turbulent hot waters of HR, which unfortunately does not stand for Heated Rivalry but Human Resources, I am afraid I have to feed on memes and live with the suspicion of my true nature until my next pop culture fixation takes over and unleashes a new identity crisis.
When you think about it, it is nothing short of miraculous that Heated Rivalry, a small budget Canadian gay sports romance, has managed to become a global hit that has been referenced by Zohran Mamdani, caused a spike in NHL ticket sales and inspired a professional ice hockey player to come out. In the time of monoculture it has united not only the LGBTQ+ audience and the female viewers but more surprisingly the straight men of the world. That was something only US shows and the Epstein files have managed until now.
But of course I forget there is another event that has restored the faith of the world in American culture this past week. I am talking about the excellent performance of Bad Bunny during the Super Bowl half-time show3, which was viewed by 129 million people live and which has received a record 4 billion views on social media after the first 24 hours.
To understand the historical relevance of this moment it’s important to bear in mind that Bad Bunny is the first US citizen -because Puerto Rico is a self-governing US territory- performing in Spanish at the this event. If we want to be strict, he is more American than the US First Lady but I give you their level of English is roughly the same.
If it’s taken so long for this to happen in a country where one in three people will speak Spanish by 2050 the explanation can be found in the pervasive linguistic imperialism at play in today’s world and which derives from the cultural and political influence of the US in the global stage in the XX century.
In the same way the West decided that being white, straight and male was everything anyone could ever dream of, linguistic imperialism established English, first through the British Empire and then through the rising influence of the US in global geopolitics after WWII, as the language everyone should aspire to mispronounce, whether they wanted or not. Because as Orwell would have said all language are equal but some are more equal than others. That is why no one ever expects English-speaking artists to make the effort of singing in any other language, regardless of whether we can understand them or not.
In fact, the common use of the word “American” to define anything that came from the United States, whether ideas or people, was never more widespread after WWII, with anything American considered inherently superior by default. The term was appropriated by the United States to signify its culture, citizens and even language exclusively instead of reflecting on the wider continent and its diversity.
In the current state of the world, however, calling yourself American may no longer be linked to the same positive associations it once did and an increasingly polarised world, where words are being weaponised to divide people, how you define yourself and in which language you do so matter.
The outrage that some manifested when Bad Bunny was announced as the performer for the halftime show, and which was based on the fact that he would perform in Spanish, a language spoken by a significant part of the US population, was a reflection of the damage that narrow cultural appropriation the term American has caused over the decades.
The failure of many English speaking US citizens to acknowledge that Spanish4 is a language spoken by many of their fellow US citizens and demanding they speak English and English alone goes on to show the workings of linguistic imperialism at its best and which is also exemplified in the running joke “What’s trashy if you’re poor but classy if you’re rich? Speaking a second language.”
Apparently even though Spanish is the second largest language in the word by number of native speakers after Mandarin, some US citizens don’t think it is as deserving of the global stage as English.
Attitudes like that remind us of how colonialism operates, where establishing the invaders’ language as the dominant one is the fastest way to devalue in first instance the local culture and ultimately erase it by depriving the natives from the tool that helps them understand its heritage and pass it on to future generations.
When you devalue and take people’s language and culture away from them you rob them of their identity and history, forcing them to adopt your own culture, language, values and history as their own. And when you can rewrite people’s history and past in that way you have a foolproof recipe for a yummy totalitarian regime.
Eventually those who have been robbed of their cultural heritage and past want to reconnect with it through the languages they were separated from and which they were forced to give up or abandon because they were sold the lie that that they had less value.
There is a reason why more people than ever are learning Welsh or are interested in the Irish language (in no small part thanks to Kneecap) and Gaelic, which along with Scots has been recently recognised as official languages of Scotland.
The choice of Bad Bunny to headlight the halftime show is the crystallisation of a new shift in the global paradigm, where the US no longer represents an ideal people feel inspired by and English is not the only language with the capacity to influence and shape culture globally, especially since social media has democratised access to a wider range of information and content that is more relatable to our personal experiences and cultural backgrounds.
This shift was apparent when Spotify revealed that Bad Bunny had been the most streamed artist of 2025, making this his fourth time since 2020. When Bad Bunny won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for an album entirely in Spanish this was the confirmation of a cultural shift that had been slowly unfolding before our eyes.
When in 2023 Spanish Rosalía won 5 Latin Grammy’s for her album Motomami, including Album of the Year, music critics noted how the artist had been snubbed by the Recording Academy by not including the album in their general awards nominations and flagging the lack of musical appreciation beyond the English language.
Something has clearly changed in those three years that went beyond the quality of the music and reflects a deeper generational shift where a new generation of Latinos in the US who are no longer immigrants but US born citizens are challenging the status quo and driving a seismic cultural change.
One manifestation of that shift can be found in Saturday Night Live. The team has been fast to secure one of the stars of Heated Rivalry because they need to attract a new generation of viewers to remain culturally relevant. In fact, the arrival of Marcello Hernández, a member of this new Latino game-changer youth challenging the US cultural status quo, to the team of SNL has been a breath of fresh air in a very English-centric comedy show.
He has brought not only a humour infused with culturally acute observations from his vantage point as a US citizen with a Cuban and Dominican heritage but also the GenZ vernacular and their understanding that we should celebrate what makes us different. His skits on everyday aspects of the Latino community life in the US with household names such as Pedro Pascal and Bad Bunny have resulted in some of the show’s most iconic and viral moments.
With this context in mind, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish was perhaps a logical next step in US history and a successful lesson in cultural representation.
He has shown it is possible to include everyone in a significant moment while paying homage to your roots in your native language.
There are three moments worth highlighting from his performance which focus on being proud of one’s heritage and the positive difference that people can make when feeling included rather than excluded from the continent they are living in.
The first was Ricky Martin, a fellow Puerto Rico native, singing in Spanish “Lo que pasó a Hawaii” a song about the dangers of colonialism at a sports game that is quintessentially anchored in US culture. This must have felt like a long overdue vindication for him.
Because Ricky Martín is the artist that best simbolises the explosion of Latin pop music in the world and his international success, first in the Spanish-speaking world and later globally, opened doors to many other artists across Latin America, from Shakira and Juanes to Maná and later in the early 00s the first wave of reggaeton singers which paved the way for the global phenomenon of Luis Fonsi’s Despacito.
Latin American artists that wanted to make it in the US and English-speaking markets however had to sing in English and Ricky Martin was no exception. Adjust to us and erase any trace of being different or be ignored. The reverse, I can’t repeat this enough times, has not happened with (nor ever been expected from) English-speaking artists who have achieved widespread recognition and success beyond English-speaking countries.
Cast your mind back to 2020 when Shakira and Jennifer López did the halftime show to celebrate Latin culture in the US. While they put on a terrific show they sung in English. Again linguistic imperialism at work.
The second key moment of the evening arrived with Lady Gaga singing in English a salsa version of “Die With a Smile.” Unlike Ricky Martin when he wanted to make it in the US as an artist, Lady Gaga wasn’t asked to erase herself to be part of the Spanish Super Bowl party.
What this performance said was that while English demands of people that they stop sounding like themselves and erase their heritage and culture, Spanish accepts everyone just as they are without making a big deal of it. You want to sing in English? No problem, let’s give the song a Latin arrangement and you’re good to go.
And the third moment of the evening, and perhaps the most significant, was what Bad Bunny didn’t say.
Given the opportunity to design a show the world would be paying close attention to, especially after having stated his clear opposition to ICE when he won Album of the Year at the Grammys, there was a lot of expectation about whether he would make any political statements.
And he did although not in the way people expected.
In fact, he was extremely clever and used English, a language that is being used to separate and divide people in the US, and transformed it in a tool to bring people together across nationalities, political ideologies, race or even dance abilities. Of all the things Bad Bunny could have said, he decided his message should be one anyone could easily understand given the pervasiveness of English in the world.
Together, we are America.
A short and clear statement that reminded the world, lest we had forgotten, that being American is not only the privilege of the citizens of the United States but a shared identity for everyone in the continent from Punta del Fuego to Nova Scotia. Under that light it is possible to dismantle even one of the most ominous slogans in US political history ‘Make America Great Again’ and turn it against those who have use against people to separate and divide them by transforming it into a message that symbolises the power of union.
Because America -like the English language- should be a term that includes, rather than excludes, everyone under its umbrella and represents a continent whose true greatness relies on its extraordinary diversity. As a member of the Latino game changer youth in the US, Bad Bunny reminded us that culture is not something to be tolerated. It’s something to be celebrated.
Those who didn’t watch the Super Bowl outraged by the fact the music will be in Spanish missed out the opportunity of a having a great time. Bad Bunny chose to throw a party where everyone, regardless of language skills, was welcomed. He used his moment on the spotlight to send a message of love and unity, reinforced by the presence of a Puerto Rican sign language interpreter, proving that his show was truly intended for all to enjoy.
The impact of Bad Bunny’s performance has gone well beyond the US as he has made it to the UK charts and may have achieved the impossible: that British people think Spanish is now the world’s coolest language. Benidorm is crying with gratitude.
His performance has brought to mind a novel by Laurent Binet, Civilisations, a counter-narrative on the discovery of America and how events could have unfolded if instead of my ancestors colonising America, Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, had landed in Europe and taken control of Spain. It is a very clever and provocative look at how global power dynamics are sometimes the product of chance events that could have easily been different.
What if Spanish had been the global language of power and the US had never existed? Who would be complaining today about Bad Bunny’s performance if Spanish had been established as the hegemonic language?
While we don’t know what the world order would have been in that case, what we do know is that when citizens that have been at the receiving end of oppression and cultural erasure are given the opportunity to take the spotlight they often create opportunities that celebrate our differences and remind us of the things that unite us.
Take Canada, for instance, the big forgotten in the North America/Lating America, English vs Spanish, cultural divide in the continent.
The shoutout to Canada from Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl made its people very happy to the point that Canadians are now calling themselves snow Latinos. That’s one for the history books and I absolutely love how Canadians have embraced their inner sabor and are showing it to the world with pride.
In fact, we should be thankful to have Canadians as another example of what being American is and looks like, for they are keeping an eye on their neighbours in the south and holding them accountable while being themselves rather chilled people. And if there’s anything the world needs right now is chilled people.
Canada has been on the international spotlight quite a lot lately thanks to Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry’s high-flying romance, which seems straight out of a Richard Curtis script: A former Prime Minister who hits it off with a pop star/astronaut.
Heated Rivalry has proven Canada’s cultural output can be as significant as that from the US and definitely more interesting as it is less afraid of taking risks. I doubt this show would have been the same had it been made in the US, where certainly a lot more compromises would have been made in order to attract the biggest audience possible by making it as bland as the human intelligence can tolerate.
Besides, where else can you create a show that features ice hockey, a young version of Keanu Reeves in love with an arrogant Russian that is secretly a soft toy while fighting toxic masculinity? Only snow Latinos could have made that happen.
And let’s not forget Canada has also given us Ryan Gosling, the man who proved everyone wrong when he was cast as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. He mbraced his Kenergy so proudly that he gave us the best Oscar performance in history. If any Canadian deserves to be the proud bearer of the snow Latino title is Gosling, whose marriage to Eva Longoria qualifies him instantly for the honour.
More importantly Canada’s current Prime Minister Mark Carney has reminded us that not all American political leaders are angry orange men.
Carney gave everyone a glimpse of hope during his speech at Davos last month, which the NY Times defined the most important foreign policy speech in years, where he called middle-power nations like Canada and European countries “to act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” and fight for democracy in a world where rules seem to no longer matter in the exercise of power.
His speech was a wake-up call for many attendees who may have already forgotten that Trump referred to Canada as the 51st State and threatened to join the country by economic force.
Like Bad Bunny and his native Puerto Rico, Mark Carney knows what it is to feel the overwhelming presence of the US at your doorstep and like Bad Bunny he chose his message carefully and avoided any mention of the US president during his Davos speech to make sure people focused on what really matters.
In doing so he offered a lesson on how a political leader can use the opportunity to speak at a global stage to send out a message that urges for collaboration and unity instead of fueling further fear and division in an already fragmented world where people look at anyone who is different as the enemy to fight instead of a neighbor they can rely on.
The integrity and pragmatism that transpire from his words are not only refreshing but arguably more powerful tools in the long run than tantrums and threats. He doesn’t need to slap any ‘Make Canada Great Again’ slogans anywhere for people to see this is the kind of American leader that has the power to inspire, something the US has been lacking for a while.
More importantly a straight white man in power who can stand up to the bullies in his speeches without even naming them, has a sense of humor and is a fan of Heated Rivalry, and proud that a Canadian show has inspired people over the world to stand against homophobia, is the kind of American we wouldn’t mind associating the word with.
I have no proof but also no doubt that since last Sunday Mark Carney has embraced the snow Latino energy and been listening to Bad Bunny’s music like the rest of us.
That a Canadian and a Puerto Rican have made the most for world peace in recent times than anyone from the US is hardly surprising. It’s people like them who can actually drive the necessary change that will make the world, not only America, great again. Perhaps with a little help from Heated Rivalry.
Abroad is an independent publication about London, living in between cultures, creativity, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.
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Cathy has died already but apparently I’ve seen nothing yet and things are about to get a bit Saltburn-y as there is some post-mortem funky business.
If you’ve watched the show, you’ll understand the liberty I’ve taken with this reference.
Which you will have to go to Youtube to watch as any attempt to include it here has been blocked.
A language itself of oppression that has come full cycle and eventually became one of unity as well as the language of a significant minority in the US, which goes on to show that languages can live many lives.
Great cultural commentary, Cristina! I listened to the audio version of your piece and really liked this format too.
This appropriation of the term American by the US citizens needed this nuance and reminder - they are not the only 'Americans'. Really wise message and with such a strong positive tone. I don't like his music, but I did watch the entire halftime show and I loved the message he sent.