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Heather Cox Richardson on Bad Bunny, the US sugar industry, and imperialism
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-9-2026As James Burke would say, there are connections.
Last night's thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is ​​Benito Antonio MartÃÂnez Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish.
Right-wing critics complained about the NFL's invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was "not an American artist."
In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.
In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant "trusts" that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.
. . .
The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers.
. . .
Right-wing critics complained about the NFL's invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was "not an American artist."
In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.
In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant "trusts" that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.
. . .
The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers.
. . .
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