SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (news agencies) — In a small bookstore in the Caribbean’s largest mall, dozens of people gathered on a recent evening for the launch of a slim dictionary. Its title is “The ABC of DtMF,” which is short for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” the newest album from Puerto Rico’s latest prodigious son, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny.
The mostly older crowd flipped through the pages, seeking to understand more about Puerto Rico’s culture, the places, phrases and references in Bad Bunny’s music.
The singer has elevated the global profile of the island, a U.S. territory, to new heights, promoting its traditional music, denouncing its gentrification and challenging its political status.
It was an unexpected opportunity for an island that for years has cried out about its territorial status, dwindling affordable housing, high cost of living, chronic power outages, medical exodus and fragile economy. Pleas for change have been largely pushed aside, but Puerto Ricans are optimistic that Bad Bunny’s new album and his series of 30 concerts that began Friday means they’ll finally be heard.
“He’s going to bring change, and there’s a young generation who’s going to back him,” said Luis Rosado, 57, who this week attended the dictionary launch at the urging of his son, who lives abroad.
Ten minutes before the first concert on Friday, a giant billboard on stage lit up with the words, “Puerto Rico is a colony since Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the island during his second trip to the New World in 1493.”
The crowd that filled the 18,000-capacity coliseum whooped.
“This album has sparked a conversation around the world about our situation as a colony,” said Andrea Figueroa, a 24-year-old professional athlete who said foreigners have started to ask her about Puerto Rico and its issues, something she hopes might lead to change.
Those born on the island of 3.2 million inhabitants are U.S. citizens but cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, and they have one representative in Congress with limited voting powers.
Figueroa said the album resonated with her because her father is one of thousands forced to leave the island in search of work as the economy crumbled. It’s a sentiment Bad Bunny sings about in “What happened to Hawaii,” with the lyric, “He didn’t want to go to Orlando, but the corrupt ones kicked him out.”
The song taps into concern that the Puerto Rican identity is eroding amid an influx of people from the U.S. mainland, many of them attracted by a 2012 law that allows Americans to move to the island and pay no taxes on capital gains if they meet certain conditions.
Hundreds of Americans also snapped up properties in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck the island as a powerful Category 4 storm in 2017, forcing more than 100,000 people to leave.
“They want to take the river away from me and also the beach; they want my neighborhood and the grandma to leave,” Bad Bunny sang on Friday as the crowd drowned out his voice.
The artist spent half of Friday’s concert singing from the porch and roof of a traditional Puerto Rican home that served as a second stage, where he wonders about its fate aloud because it’s been rented: “Do good people live there? Is it an Airbnb?”
The mostly young crowd booed loudly, flinching at their reality on an island where the housing price index increased by almost 60% from 2018 to 2024 and where short-term rentals have surged from some 1,000 in 2014 to more than 25,000 in 2023.
