The Intersection of Art and Plants in Resistance: Bad Bunny Sets the Stage for a Decolonial Revolution

Across histories and geographies, two elements consistently underpin movements of resistance: material survival and collective imagination.

Material survival is the foundation. Resistance requires people to eat, to care for one another, to have the strength to oppose what harms them. This includes control over land, food, labor, shelter, and mutual aid networks. The underpinning of material survival is, of course, plants. Plants make up the matrix of physical being, and culture arises first and foremost from the land and the body. And this is the reason why plants can be found as a central point of the tug-of-war between autonomy and oppression. Plants have always been embedded in resistance movements. Enslaved people used agricultural knowledge to survive, sabotage colonial efforts, and preserve cultural practices. Indigenous communities have fought for land rights through the defense of seeds, crops, and ecosystems. 

Food itself has always been political; who grows it, who eats it, who profits from it. Enslaved communities growing their own food, striking workers sustaining one another, migrants forming informal support systems– these are not side effects of resistance but its infrastructure. Without the ability to reproduce life outside oppressive systems, resistance collapses.

“We cannot free ourselves until we feed ourselves.” - Ericka Huggins, human rights activist, Black Panther Party leader

Collective imagination is what gives survival direction and expands the edges of what is possible. It allows people to recognize themselves as part of a collective rather than isolated subjects of power. Without it, survival becomes mere endurance rather than organized opposition.

This imagination lives in stories, songs, rituals, symbols, and art. Art is subversive communication through which we express, without permission or apology. It is the shared capacity to imagine life otherwise—to name injustice and envision futures beyond domination. And in art, we can speak to all of these things, tell our histories and demand our futures, without any overt explanation. Art communicates through the language of context, and its message conveys louder than any wordy speech, because it moves you through a multitude of senses. 

When Bad Bunny, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, opened his superbowl half-time show in a field of sugarcane, he said, “we remember.” Sugarcane’s presence invokes histories of colonial extraction and labor exploitation tied to European and U.S. control of Caribbean economies. Over the course of the next 13 minutes, the performance poetically unfurled so many historical and modern symbols of culture and politics, it was hard to keep up. Many of the political messages of these artistic choices would be lost on someone without the background knowledge to recognize them. Something as nuanced as a shade of blue, Azul Celeste, can move someone to tears in the right context. But the universal language that is spoken through color and movement and music, and a million other subtle pieces of a performance, speaks to us even when we don’t know the full meaning. Most of us experience this daily, in our exposure to colonial capitalist propaganda in the form of advertisements, television, social media, etc. We need to change our own internal algorithm through exposure to art and nature. This is a form of resistance not only because we can communicate through it, but because our brains need exposure to these types of experiences in order to prevent the sense of powerlessness that comes from exposure to non-stop bad news. Staying informed is not enough, we also need to stay inspired. Dancing and fighting are sometimes not so different.

The botanical imagery in this production was not a decorative prop. It connects multiple historical and contemporary processes: colonial extraction, subsistence agriculture, ecological continuity, migration, and immigration enforcement. Each plant references a distinct relationship between land, labor, and social organization. They were cultural artifacts, reminders of violence and oppression, survival and resistance. Over 140 million people watched this unfold. In centering these plants on one of the most-watched stages in the world, Bad Bunny transformed a halftime show into a radical act of reclamation. 

“The revolution 'bout to be televised,” - Kendrick Lamar, 2025 Superbowl Halftime Performance

Aña de azúcar, Saccharum officinarum (sugarcane) is inseparable from the story of Puerto Rico and much of the Caribbean. Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea roughly 10,000 years ago, then brought to India and China several thousand years later via Austronesian seafarers. From there it spread into the Levant, and later into Europe after the First Crusade at the turn of the 2nd century. 

Sugarcane was introduced to the Americas in 1493, and by the mid-16th century, it had become a massive industry. Sugarcane was indeed the central pillar of the plantation system, driving the economy, labor practices, and social structure in many tropical and subtropical regions for centuries, including Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Hispaniola, Barbados, and Puerto Rico, and many other countries. Plantation owners enslaved indigenous people, convicts from the British isles, and ultimately Africans. Sugar plantations fueled empire-building, enriched colonial powers, and amplified racial hierarchies still shape Puerto Rico’s reality today. Even after the abolition of slavery, sugar plantations continued to extract labor and land value while leaving local communities impoverished.

In the set, there were several nods to jíbaro culture, the subsistence farmers of Puerto Rico. As they chopped sugarcane, they wore traditional pava hats, made from palma de sombrero, Sabal causiarum, (Puerto Rican hat palm). Benito also wore the all-white ensemble and simple campesino rope belt alongside his fellow performers. Jíbaro is a rich traditional culture that combines elements from Taíno, Spanish, and African heritage. Their lifeway is imbued with connection to the land and the plants they tend there, celebrated through folk music and dance. It is also a stigmatized culture, criticized as “impure” (i.e. not white enough), “backwards,” or “irrelevant.” Sentiments that mirror stigmas all over the Americas, from the so-called "barbarism" of Indigenous North Americans to disdain for hillbilly culture of Appalachia. In the halftime performance, the tapestry of the multiethnic identity is celebrated.

Holding space for the cultural erasure, loss of self‑determination, and displacement of peoples and their traditions on a global scale, Enrique Martín Morales (Ricky Martin) sang “Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii” (What Happened to Hawaii) in front of the backdrop of plátanos, Musa × paradisiaca (plantains). This song draws a parallel between colonial histories of Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

“Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa

They want to take away from me the river, and the beach as well

Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya

They want my neighborhood, and also for Grandma to leave

No, no suelte′ la bandera ni olvide' el lelolai

No, don't drop the flag and don't forget the lelolai

Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái

I don't want them to do to you the same thing that happened to Hawaii”

The plátanos illustrate the layered history of colonialism and of multicultural evolution. Like sugarcane, the plantain originally came from Southeast Asia, making its way to Madagascar, and Central and West Africa, where it remains a staple food. The plátano was introduced via slave trade ships to America in the early 1500s, and with them the enslaved Africans brought the knowledge to cultivate them. Along with yams, which were also introduced in a similar fashion, plátanos were essential for survival and ultimately became a staple food across the Caribbean and Latin America. Communities adapted them into everyday survival, a story as old as time. In Puerto Rico, plátanos are central to cuisine and identity: tostones, mofongo, amarillos. The dynamic adaptation that allows for cultural continuity. Cultural heritage and traditions are vital, but they are never static. These are sovereign, living, breathing cultures, not relics of the past to be erased. 

The nativist movement of the 19th century was built on the near-annihilation of indigenous North American cultures, and yet wanted to barricade against immigrants to preserve their “old stock” American bloodlines and culture. The catastrophic irony of this seems to have been lost to those sporting blood-red “Make American Great Again” ballcaps. This cognitive dissonance is what feeds the outrage toward an American citizen singing in a uniquely American language that is the Puerto Rican Spanish dialect, celebrating uniquely American cultural heritage and diversity that exists within our American continents (or, singular continent as taught in Latin America).

Bad Bunny’s performance shows us what a future can look like when we don’t white-wash and erase history, and when we embrace a future of equity and diversity over hierarchy and hatred. The message that we can celebrate and hold onto our cultural heritage and let it nourish us, without the need for exclusion or erasure, without supremacy or stagnancy. Nature is ruled by cooperation, not competition.

This is the kind of vision and message we need. This is the mantra of sovereignty. We stand together. The land remembers us. We decide our future. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.