Victoria places her plate on the kitchen table and sits across from him. He lifts his gaze slightly, just enough to see her, and enough for her to see him do it, just not enough to hold it. With that same caution, he brings his fork to his mouth. They eat scrambled eggs, with thinly chopped onions and tomatoes. Where Victoria comes from, they call them huevos pericos, but he does not know this; he has never asked. Victoria’s eggs are cold. She eats them anyway, more out of habit, and to give her hands something to do, than out of hunger.
It had been a while since she had felt real hunger, or perhaps she felt it all the time, a low ache so constant she no longer knew how to recognise it. She stares at her plate, fork held between palms in a gesture on the verge of prayer, praying, perhaps, that the eggs on her plate might confess something to her, that something, anything, might happen, that her gaze could pierce its ceramic, or the wooden table, or even the tiled floor beneath her feet. Break apart this kitchen, this apartment, this life she was never meant to stay for. With the same intensity Victoria fixes on her plate, he fixes on her. Probably with similar intent: to provoke a reaction, any reaction. He watches the stubborn line of her mouth, the brief crinkle of annoyance at her nose, studying her the way one studies a closed door, searching for a way in. Victoria can feel his eyes on her. She refuses to return them.
“My eggs are cold.”
“I told you to give me the first ones.”
Victoria opens her mouth to say something, but does not. For a brief second, she thinks the gesture makes her look a lot like a fish; the thought amuses her.
“What are you laughing about?”
She says nothing.
“What are you laughing about?”
Victoria looks at him then, for the first time. One eyebrow raised slightly, eyes hovering between scolding and something close to pleading; see me, they might say. He cannot tell which she means, perhaps she cannot either. She simply shakes her head. It seems to satisfy him; maybe he lacks the will to insist further, maybe it is indifference, probably a bit of both. Victoria lowers her gaze to her plate again, and he to the crown of her head. He can see the roots of her hair, the newest bits of her; they make him think of the first time he saw her. He had liked her hair so much then. He follows each strand with his eyes: those intertwined shades of brown and copper, the curls forming at the ends. He thinks of how well he knows this hair, how many times his hands have… and then stops. Some things it no longer helps to remember. It occurs to him how beautiful she looks.
“Are you crying?”
The sound of her voice catches him off guard. He straightens too quickly, shifts his gaze to Victoria’s eyes, but she has already returned hers to her plate. Victoria furrows her brow. His tears make her angry, in fact, they make her furious. That her heart will not yield at the sight of the man she loves crying across from her, and yet it refuses to. She bites down on her tongue, hard enough for it to show on her face. The gesture draws another tear down his cheek.
“I shouldn’t have stayed.”
She does not know, quite, why she says it. Her words have a tendency of arriving before she does. He sets down his fork. Her words come slowly, like furniture moved between two. Then anger; at what she said, but mostly at her eyes, still fixed on her plate. He wants her to look at him. Even knowing that he will no longer find in them that same tenderness that once lived behind her pupils, reserved for him only. He knows she has already left in every way that matters. He looks at her anyway.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed.”
Victoria’s eyes flick to him, just briefly, just half a second before she intends them to. She lets out a small laugh.
“Are you agreeing with me?”
He laughs too, but it sounds hollow even in his own ears. They allow themselves to look at each other, and they smile. For a moment, elapsed time collapses, and the room is dim and orange, and she is in his shirt, sneaking back into bed with a plate of scrambled eggs, the window full of sunset. She was happy then, or thought she was, or was just not yet unhappy. Just as quickly, Victoria looks away, back to her plate. She is the one to do it; she notices this. They both miss it, though not in the same way. He misses her, and she misses who she was before. The eggs are colder now.
They will stream the music, push it up the charts, but never protect the bodies that make it. They want rhythm without remittance, spectacle without the subject, pieces of our culture in their country, but not us.
Lest we forget: America is not a country, America is a continent. Maybe two, depending on who draws the map.
Benito says it plainly: together, we are America. His claim is not new, either; José Martí wrote Nuestra America over a century ago, Silvio Rodríguez then played it on his guitar, Residente now repeats it in stadiums. The argument always: the continent does not stand under a single flag.
El Gran Tazón (The Super Bowl) has long served as liturgy to U.S nationalism: corporate excess baptised in red, white, and blue. Historically, a space both white and anglophone. To step onto that stage in Spanish, to dembow, under floodlights usually reserved for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, is no accident nor mere aesthetic choice; it is intervention, and it is political.
It is a claim to stolen land, exploited land, land worked, plowed, and nurtured by migrant hands. It unfolds at a moment when immigration is once again framed as invasion. Eduardo Galeano knew to warn us that the North depended upon the extraction of the South; silver, sugar, oil, labour. Our veins remain open. Now the mining is cultural: reguetón everywhere, streams and ticket sales and halftime show; the rhythm circulates freely, the people do not. The irony should not be lost on us: one Latin body is welcomed onto the most-watched stage in the country, others detained and deported.
Bad Bunny’s show unfolds in constant motion, shifting from song to song, and scene to scene, transitions far from arbitrary. His setlist is deliberate architecture, each song laid carefully in constructing a history:
LA MuDANZA (the move)
The show opens with movement; salsa and colour. Why translate ourselves when we express everything perfectly in our own tongue? From the first strum it is clear this performance is not asking to be understood, it is demanding to be witnessed.
We are engulfed by sugarcane and suddenly we are somewhere humid, somewhere worked. It feels García Marquezian; Macondo in a NFL area, a place both marginal and mythical. Latin America has always occupied that paradox: peripheral in geopolitics, indispensable to global imagination. They want all the magic, and none of the realism.
The stage feels like a stifling tropical summer, and the sweat on worker’s brows. Heat is aesthetic, but it is also historical.
Mauro González / Netflix
Pedro Farias-Nardi / Mother Jones
NFL / Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show
Tití Me Preguntó (Tití asked me)
Benito appears, dressed in Zara; not couture, not luxury. An accessible brand, found in the fluorescent aisles of shopping centres across continents, and a Spanish-owned one at that. His value does not depend on elite approval.
It is Latin America’s economy on full display. Behind this moment sit the tienditas: street food vendors, liquor shops, nail salons; that “informal labour”, migrant labour, that sits at the backbone of the U.S economy.
Yo Perreo Sola (I dance alone)
The casita is decorated with Latin icons; Karol G, Pedro Pascal, Jesica Alba, Cardi B, all your favourites in one place, all of them Latin. Look how far we can come, all that we can build. To see ourselves centre stage, is to shift the frame, and the power.
Kevin Mazur / Getty Images
Perreo, it turns out, can also be political; to move the body and occupy space. Latina women flood the stage; frizzy hair and thick thighs, real, sexy. Not diluted or softened, not assimilated into something palatable. They are bodies I recognise. To see them like this, desired and desirable, self-possessed, does something tender, it feels like being seen.
“Las mujeres en el mundo entero, perreando sin miedo” (women across the world, dancing without fear). In a country where women’s bodies are legislated, to dance like this is to reclaim sovereignty.
Safaera (chaos; or the moment during a party where things tip over into it)
This is this generation’s Gasolina, it saw us through adolescent parties and coming-of-age. We all know the lyrics, I know because I mouth them as I watch, and the stadium shouts them back. It had to make the setlist, and we are glad it did, even those of us who think ourselves feminists (sure, the lyrics are questionable). But that, too, is part of it. Culture is not curated for moral purity, it is contradictory, chaotic if you will, but it unifies us with its chaos.
VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR (I’m going to take you to PR)
If anything, Benito has been taking us to Puerto Rico since the show began. I watch from my kitchen before a morning lecture, ten thousand kilometers from home, and yet, suddenly, I am there. He falls into a living room: a family gathered around a television. It feels familiar, recursive. We watch them watch him, and in doing so, watch ourselves.
His jersey reads Ocasio, Benito knows where he comes from. Tego Calderon, Don Omar, Daddy Yankee; the patriarchs. He names his lineage. “Están escuchando música de Puerto Rico, de los barrios y los caseríos”
(you’re listening to music from Puerto Rico, from the hoods and the villages)
EoO (literally: on occasion, or a cue given before a beat drops)
And then the dembow; the body understands even before the mind. If there is one thing Latinos know how to do, it is move (there is a joke there I will leave for you to find).
MONACO
“Buenas tardes CalifoLnia, mi nombre es Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio”
(Good afternoon, California. My name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio)
The intentional use of a full name, the stereotype spoken out loud, and then a reminder: “Y si hoy estoy aquí en el Super Bowl 60 es porque nunca dejé de creer en mí. Tú también deberías de creer en ti, vales más de lo que piensas, créeme”
(And if I’m here at the 60th Super Bowl today, it’s because I never stopped believing in myself. You should believe in yourself too, you’re worth more than you think. Trust me.)
He breaks the fourth wall, for an instant the performance recedes, and the man remains.
The American Dream has been sold as: work hard, rise alone, transcend your origin story, and you may succeed, you may belong.
Die With A Smile
What follows is a display of belonging as Latinos conceptualise it. A (real) wedding ceremony on the halftime stage, the knot tied between a Latina and an American. They kiss, and like a kiss on the Berlin Wall, their marriage is a symbol of the collapse of borders. Intimacy where rhetoric insists on separation. A kiss for peace.
NFL / Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show
Joachim F. Thurn / Bundesarchiv
Lady Gaga is no coincidence either; a globally famous English-speaking singer with a globally famous English-language song enters a Latin space. Anyone is welcome at a Latin wedding. You dance alongside the family. The tías (aunts) dance cumbia, the tíos (uncles) are already drunk, the children asleep in makeshift beds between chairs. Benito also dances with her.
BAILE INoLVIDABLE (unforgettable dance)
To us, these dances are almost forgettable, precisely because they are so ordinary. We dance at weddings, and in kitchens, and on streets, and everywhere. But ordinariness becomes radical when movement is policed, to dance without fear is no small demand, and yet Benito urges us: “Baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo” (dance without fear, love without fear).
NUEVAYoL
The stage obeys, they dance. It is theatrical, a musical number refracted through diasporic memory: perhaps West Side Story, perhaps In The Heights. The American Dream feels staged within reach.
Antonio RIBEIRO / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
A tribute unfolds: Willy Colon, Frida Kahlo, those trumpets! Toñita, named in the song, now standing there, in front of him, hands him a shot, and “PR se siente cerquita” (PR feels so close).
NFL / Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show
Benito hands over his Grammy; it belongs to us all, to those who listen, to the children watching at home who look up to him, to his inner child too, perhaps, and to all those children who are now living in fear.
LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii (what happened to Hawaii)
“Quieren al barrio mío y que tus hijos se vayan” (they want my neighbourhood, and for your children to leave). That Ricky Martin sings this matters, a voice our mothers grew up with, a Puerto Rican idol shaped by American industry and polished for export. He opened a door in the 90s, when ‘Latin explosion’ meant temporary fascination. Benito does not ask for fascination. He now walks all the way through that door and closes it; we no longer need subtitling.
El Apagón (the blackout)
Electric poles and risky jobs; infrastructure turned symbol. What keeps the States united: building, repairing, cleaning, maintaining. The blackout is no metaphor. Puerto Rico knows this too well; a colony left waiting for power to be restored, political and electrical.
Immigration in the United States is not a crisis of numbers, but a crisis of ethics. Migrants sustain the nation’s infrastructure while being systematically denied its protections.
Benito holds his flag, and his country, high. He climbs upwards, and at the top, a lyric cuts through everything: “Ahora todos quieren ser latinos, pero les falta sazón, batería y reguetón” (Now everyone wants to be Latino, but they lack seasoning, battery/drums, and reguetón)
And then, a targeted warning: “Cuidao con mi corillo, que somo’ un montón” (careful with my crew, there’s a whole lot of us).
NFL / Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show
CAFé CON RON (coffee and rum)
The first few notes and something stirs, my soles itch. I want the dim light of a club, voices hoarse, someone’s arm heavy over my shoulder. I want the bitter coffee my father brews in the mornings, and the rum and coke poured generously before we step out into the night. Ours has always been a culture of effort and enjoyment in the same breath.
Flags rise from every corner of the stage, and something tightens in my chest; pride, anger, homesickness, then pride again. Everything converges now; the flags, the songs, the story, the way we do, inevitably, even scattered across continents.
“God bless America.” He says, and names it properly:
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, Brasil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, México, Cuba, República Dominicana, Jamaica, Haití, Las Antillas, United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico
He does not abbreviate, so neither will I.
Kevin Mazur / Getty Images
DtMF (I should have taken more photos)
He ends with the song everyone knows, even los gringos, and feelings just as familiar. Not a naive plea for unity, but rather something of a challenge: togetherness requires seeing and being seeing.
They jump, shout, laugh, sing, because despite detention centres, policy debates, headlines, we are excessive with life, and joy, and above all, we are most certainly, loud.
Power is rarely threatened by silence. It is not coincidental that the performance drew criticism from certain political figures, whose careers are built on policing borders, territorial and epistemic. But sound refuses containment.
Sound travels, and apparently it crosses borders. Latin America has always been an act of sonic resistance.
When I was a child, crying fits were a frequent occasion. Whether because I felt things more intensely, or for attention, I am unsure. Something would hurt, and I would cry. And cry, and cry. My father would come to me, kneel to meet my eyes, and explain things to me. He would dissect the world with logic, step by step, with scientific methodology. He would make me breathe and count to ten. And by the time I reached ten, my cheeks were already dry, and those enormous feelings had shrunk into a solved problem, neatly labeled and ready to be forgotten. A gentle lesson in rationality.
Girls are taught from childhood that emotions are a thing to be contained, that logic and composure are signs of maturity, and that feeling is synonymous to failing.
This is how we learn to explain things so as not to feel them.
But these feelings grow as we do, and so does the habit of tidying them away. Somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, the language of reason slips quietly into a language of restraint. What was once a kind lesson becomes a nasty habit. Instead of counting to soothe our tears, we count the calories we eat, the words we speak, the glances we attract, the eternally unbridgeable distance between who we are and who we should be. We become self-conscious, rehearsed, reflective. Somewhere in the process, we trade our chaos for poise.
What a funny, cruel thing to be a woman; to carry inside all these feelings so vast and so deep, so uncontainable they deform you from within. Worse still, to live in a world that demands you hand them over, tears them from you, turns them abnormal, rationalises them until they have lost their pulse. Your sadness must have a cause, your anger justification, your passions their limit. What a strange thing, to force your heart to fit the mold of the Other, your wishes to their commands, your needs to their whims. You always end up losing.
The female archive is scattered; diary fragments, forgotten poetry, therapy sessions, late-night conversations with a friend. Each whisper a familiar refrain, carrying the shared burden of attempting to name what is so fervently silenced. The impulse to rationalise one’s feelings is almost universal among women raised in the cult of composure.
An excerpt from my own diary: “Perhaps I am trying to rationalise my feelings too much. Perhaps I should stop.”
These recurring phrases and patterns, which my own writing is not exempt from, are not just the bitter aftertaste of personal unrest, but of a collective one. The inheritance of generations of women unsettled by their intellectualised pain and muzzled emotions.
Private thoughts, or public scripts, whispered into women’s minds and passed between their lips:
If I am not small I cannot be a woman (not properly, nor successfully).
If I do not learn silence I cannot be desired.
If I am so intense, so much, I cannot be of interest.
With my convictions so sharp, my desires so defined,
I cannot be softened, cannot be shaped.
If I cannot be shaped, I cannot please.
If I do not say what they want to hear,
I will not be wanted,
The same goes
if I do not do
what is asked of me.
If I am whole,
I will not fit.
And if I fit,
I will disappear.
If I am not small
I cannot be
a woman.
The catechism of femininity. A doctrine without scripture, taught through repetition; smile, soften, submit, smile, soften, submit. In this faith salvation is found in self-denial and damnation in desire. It demands devotion, asking us to kneel before our own subjugation.
We bury these thoughts, hide them away from the world because they are too ugly to be seen, and far too irrational (that much we know, even if we all think them nonetheless). Yet as we dig them their graves, we unknowingly pile all that dirt onto ourselves, bury ourselves alive. Beneath the ground, we grow unsatisfied, unfeeling, hollow. To be functional means to be numb, the byproduct of a world that values control more than it does authenticity.
We learn to see our bodies as burdens; too heavy, too loud, too visible. We are insistent, intense, speak too much, and too soon. Our presence spills over boundaries already drawn out for us. The female form becomes a site of conflict between selfhood and social expectation; being and appearing. To occupy space is a transgression of the worst kind.
We praise women who take up less room, who bend like silk, soften their edges, make themselves light enough to be carried by a man’s gaze. Those who become what is asked of them; desirable, sensual, small. Mastering the art of being almost, of being seen but never truly known. In this currency we convert performance into power, obedience into love, stagnance into grace. So we all try to fold ourselves thinner, to disappear beautifully, so the world too might applaud. Yet the more we shrink; less air, less noise, less hunger, less body, the more the truth claws its way out, gutting us in its path, leaving us emptied, depthless things. Taxidermied and ready to be used at the will of others.
It is no coincidence that women’s emotions are pathologised; the hysteric, oversensitive, irrational. The language of medicine and reason has long been used to domesticate feeling. There are times I still find that same sobbing child, hidden away in a corner of my body. I want to tell her there are wounds that only heal if you feel them, that not everything must be explained, much less solved. Perhaps what frightens us is if we stop explaining away our feelings, they might drown us. Perhaps that is exactly what we need. Not to contain ourselves, but to let something overflow.
