From Carolina to Coachella: Bad Bunny and the Globalization of Reggaetón

MUSICS ABROAD

SPEAKER: Petra Rivera-Rideau, Wellesley College

In April 2023, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, made history as the first Latin star to headline Coachella. During the performance, he highlighted the historical impact of Latin music, and Puerto Rican music in particular, on the United States through a series of videos detailing the histories of reggaetón, salsa, and Latin music in the US. This talk uses those videos to understand how Bad Bunny's meteoric rise to fame happened, and the significance of his success in understanding the shifting place of reggaetón in the US mainstream.

About the Speaker

Petra Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke, 2015) and the forthcoming book Fun, Fitness, Fiesta: Selling Latinx Culture in Zumba Fitness (Duke). She is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. Dr. Rivera-Rideau co-founded the Bad Bunny Syllabus with Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount), an online resource that contextualizes the cultural, social, and political impact of the reggaetón artist Bad Bunny. Petra has published articles in journals such as Latino Studies, Identities, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderon’s Diasporic Interventions” published in Small Axe in 2018 won the inaugural Blanca Sivlestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Latin American Studies Association. Petra frequently appears in popular media such as NPR, Al Jazeera +, and The Atlantic, among others, and she has written for The Washington Post and PBS’s American Experience. She has also served as a consultant on several reggaetón-related projects, including for Bad Bunny’s historic 2023 Coachella headlining performance.