Author: Petra Rivera-Rideau
This summer I had the pleasure of working with Yahana Streeter (2028) as a Summer Research Fellow. Yahana worked on several different tasks related to the Bad Bunny Syllabus.
Bad Bunny is a groundbreaking reggaetón and trap artist from Puerto Rico. He was the first Spanish-language artist to be nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys and to headline Coachella and the Super Bowl Halftime Show. His album El Último Tour del Mundo was the first Spanish-language album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. Each of his albums has broken numerous records for streaming numbers around the globe. He is one of the biggest pop stars of our time.
At the same time, Bad Bunny has increasingly used his platform to advocate for his homeland of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since 1898 when the Spanish ceded the island to the US as a result of the Spanish-American War. Since then, Puerto Rico’s politics and economy have been controlled by US corporate and political interests. Over the past thirty years, the economic crises that resulted from US policies favoring US corporations doing business in Puerto Rico have come to a head with an unprecedented debt crisis. In turn, Puerto Ricans have experienced dramatic austerity measures, untenable increased cost of living, and intense gentrification and displacement. Natural disasters such as the devastating Hurricane María in 2017 have only exacerbated these problems. Since first beginning in 2016, Bad Bunny has repeatedly spoken about issues impacting Puerto Rico, whether it is LGBTQ rights, gender-based violence, the crisis in public education, political corruption, or, increasingly, Puerto Rican independence. What’s more, rather than shying away from controversial political topics as he has grown more popular, Bad Bunny has instead leaned into these political critiques, most notably with his critically acclaimed 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS and his historic 31-night residency in Puerto Rico this past summer.
The Bad Bunny Syllabus is an online resource that provides educational materials to contextualize Bad Bunny’s work. We offer readings, podcasts, popular news articles, and videos about topics such as the Puerto Rican debt crisis, Hurricane María, the historic 2019 political protests that ousted then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló, the fight for LGBTQ rights in Puerto Rico, and the role of Spanish in US mainstream media, among other topics. Over the years, my collaborator Vanessa Díaz and I have worked closely with students from Wellesley and her university, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, to create and update the syllabus.
Yahana joined the project after the syllabus was already established, but we were in need of significant updates given Bad Bunny’s continued success and recent work that continues to push the envelope. She completed several important tasks, such as updating the syllabus with important new sources that have been published over the past few years. Yahana also worked on a new page of our syllabus website that offers resources about the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. In addition, Yahana translated and annotated Bad Bunny lyrics for educators who wish to use his songs in their classes; the annotations provide important historical and cultural information to help educators and students interpret the lyrics. Yahana also began creating a new archive of online materials related to Bad Bunny’s latest album and his residency in Puerto Rico. Yahana is continuing her work with me during the 2025-2026 year as Bad Bunny continues to push the envelope and break new ground with his recordings and performances.
The TSSL Summer Research Fellowship offered an important opportunity for Yahana to engage in undergraduate research and learn about interdisciplinary, humanities-based approaches to studying popular culture. The fellowship is especially important given the substantial stipend that students receive ($5,000), which enables students to focus exclusively on summer research opportunities rather than juggling these projects with other paid work that so many students need over the summer months to support them through school. In my ten years at Wellesley, we have had limited opportunities for undergraduate students to engage in humanities research. TSSL fills an important void on our campus and offers students and faculty the chance to meaningfully engage in humanities research together.