News that Loyola Marymount University offered a class titled “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico” spread quickly.
“LMU posted a Reels on Instagram. My mom sent it to me and she goes, ‘you need to take this class right now!’” said Carolina Acosta, a junior at LMU who took the class last year.
Acosta was born and raised in Puerto Rico and her mother lives in San Juan, the capital. She’s majoring in entrepreneurship with the goal of earning a bachelor’s in business administration.
She was skeptical about taking the class.
“I didn't really think it was going to be about the island itself,” she said. “And then I remember my first day talking about it. I was just like, wow, it's [about] a lot more than the artist.” The class taught her aspects of Puerto Rico’s history and culture that she didn’t learn while growing up there.
Talking to students who are taking the class now and who took the class in past semesters opens a window into how this class engages college students and has transformed some students’ views of their college work and what they want to do after college.
That impact is by design.
Bad Bunny has a lot of firsts under his belt. He’s broken streaming records on Spotify and his concert tours break ticket sales.
(Editor's note: He also knows how to enter a WWE ring.)
But the doors of academia have opened because of the cultural impact of his song lyrics and videos; how he leads his personal life; and how he challenges established ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. territorial dominance over Puerto Rico.
I want to make my students feel engaged in their learning. I want them to feel connected to the curriculum and I want them… to want to come to class.
“I want to make my students feel engaged in their learning. I want them to feel connected to the curriculum and I want them… to want to come to class,” said professor Vanessa Díaz.
Díaz first taught the class at LMU last year. She drew inspiration from a similar Wellesley College first offered two years ago.
Díaz’s doctorate is in cultural anthropology. Her dissertation is titled "Manufacturing Celebrity and Marketing Fame: An Ethnographic Study of Celebrity Media Production." She worked as a red carpet reporter for People Magazine.
The three-month class begins with the basics about the artist Bad Bunny and his career. Then students learn about Puerto Rico’s history as a colony, modern day natural and political crises, resistance movements, and how reggaeton comes on the scene using innovative as well as toxic elements of Caribbean identity.
Díaz said she’s seen those topics engage these young adults because of how profoundly some of these issues affect their lives. Number one on that list: how gender and sexuality are represented in popular media.
“My students’ generation are much more likely to identify as queer, or non-binary, or kind of fluid in these different ways,” she said.
For instance, the class watched how Bad Bunny bends images of gender and sexuality in his music video for “Yo Perreo Sola.” It's given students plenty to talk about, including whether the singer should or shouldn’t be considered a queer icon.
“I just remember week two of the course just immediately being like, ‘Oh, my God, this course is kind of going to change my entire perspective,’” said Ashley Buschhorn, a senior majoring in journalism who’s taking the class this semester.
As a queer person I've seen the ways that queer groups in Puerto Rico have been oppressed, and ... discriminated against.
That perspective, she said, has been shaped by being a “white American from Texas” who grew up with people of Latin American descent but who didn’t know how colonialism shaped those cultures.
“As a queer person I've seen the ways that queer groups in Puerto Rico have been oppressed, and ... discriminated against,” Buschhorn said.
The class lectures and readings on gender and sexuality led Buschhorn to think about if she in any way is contributing to violence against women and queer people in Puerto Rico and how she could help stop that violence.
And subsequent discussions about Bad Bunny as a political activist and crafty manipulator of authentic and manufactured personas has helped Buschhorn think about the work she wants to do after graduation: documentary filmmaking.
“I think that's something that this class kind of directly combats is that you can't look at something just [through] one perspective. In this class there's probably five different perspectives that you have to look at something through,” she said.
Colleges and universities in the U.S. are facing many challenges, among them how to engage growing proportions of students who are from non-white backgrounds with classes that combine academic rigor and speak to students’ various lived experiences. Increased student engagement is good for the student and good for the college.
Ana Garcia is a senior majoring in marketing. She knew a lot about reggaeton but very little about Puerto Rico before taking this class. In the class she learned there was solidarity across social classes in Puerto Rico when a major hurricane hit the island the same year as the 2017 Mexico City earthquake, which she lived through.
Loyola Marymount University professor Vanessa Díaz and Wellesley College professor Petra Rivera-Rideau developed The Bad Bunny Syllabus to "explore the cultural significance of Bad Bunny as a way to draw folks in to the complex, dynamic historical, and contemporary realities of Puerto Rico."
The syllabus covers reggaetón resources, colonialism in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria, race and gender politics, and more.
“I took it from a very personal experience that I saw this first hand, and just like seeing what it was for Puerto Ricans to go and do the same thing and a very different point of their history,” she said.
Garcia and most of the rest of the class enjoyed an epic class opportunity that connected theory to practice. Professor Díaz was able to secure funding to pay for the students to attend the Bad Bunny concert on March 14 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
The assignment was to create a video-reflection based on the lessons in the class.
The Bad Bunny class is a course in both Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and Film, Television, and Media Studies. It’s a class that looks at media, race, and representation.
“People want to know about what's happening in the world and they want to know about why artists, musicians, etc. feel so much need to put that into their art,” said Emily Penner, a UC Irvine professor who studies K-12 student engagement.
The class syllabus for Díaz’s Bad Bunny class, Penner said, shed light on parallels with the high school ethnic studies classes she looks at in her research. Some of those hallmarks include curriculum as counter narrative (the challenging of dominant views), intersectionality (the overlap between topics such as race and gender), and students as intellectuals, which can be the most transformative part of the student experience.
“Anything that students can bring to the table to demonstrate their prior knowledge and their expertise, I think always is useful for orienting students toward what they're about to do for the rest of the semester,” Penner said.
That prior knowledge doesn’t have to be an exact match with the class topic, in this case Puerto Rico and the pop music icon. Effective teaching will engage students of different races and socioeconomic status. For some students who have taken the Bad Bunny class, what they bring to the table is sometimes challenged and transformed in ways the students didn’t expect.
Political science major Mateo-Luis Planas brought a strong sense of identity to the first day of the Bad Bunny class last year, citing his appreciation for dancing salsa, bachata, and merengue.
“I was born and raised in Connecticut but my entire family's from the island of Puerto Rico,” he said. Many of his relatives still live on the island. He pointed to his grandmother’s pride in the Puerto Rican flag.
“I just thought my grandmother was really happy to be Puerto Rican. But turns out there was a point in history when it was actually illegal and punishable to even have those flags out in your house,” he said.
Puerto Rican history is American history.
I've never had a class teach me about my history, which is something that the average American has never had to say.
“I've never had a class teach me about my history, which is something that the average American has never had to say,” he said.
What engaged him the most is the overlap between centuries-old racial policies in Puerto Rico and how race was and was not talked about within his own family. The Bad Bunny class is leading him to rethink whether law school is the best move for him after college.
“I have the rest of my life to study law,” Planas said, but people in Puerto Rico now need to achieve rights to their land and need a functional government that’s responsive to people’s needs.
Planas now feels he wants to go to the island to help people achieve those goals.
