Hola, hablo poco español
How Bad Bunny helped me learn why this language matters so much to me
I’m writing this while listening to Bad Bunny, because I’m a nice white lady in 2026.
Like millions of behind-the-times Americans, I’ve been listening to the album DeBí TiRAR MáS FOTos by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio a.k.a. Bad Bunny since the day after the Super Bowl. I was aware of the artist over the past few years, but I’m an old white lady who generally ignores hip hop music unless it becomes unignorable. I caught Bad Bunny’s “Tiny Desk Concert” last year (how many ways can I say I’m an old white lady?) — loved it, pulled up his top tracks on Apple Music, and walked away because I clocked it as party music that I wouldn’t enjoy.
Thankfully, this year’s Super Bowl Halftime performance put him in front of me again, made me cry, and I’ve been listening to this album and devouring half a decade of Spanglish press appearances ever since.
It’s the latest reminder that I love Spanish. And Puerto Rico.
I visited San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the first time in 2017, and I truly did fall in love with la isla del encanto. Just a few days there brought out the Spanish I’ve been studying in some way since seventh grade. It’s not conversational, but as a sober, shy tourist, I didn’t have much occasion to have conversations with anyone in Spanish, anyway. (Any locals interested in making conversation used it as an opportunity to practice their English, which eclipsed my Spanish.) But I could read a menu, order a meal, direct a cab and let a drug-store cashier know no necesito una bolsa, gracias. I visited again in 2023 for a conference, and I had the opportunity to network with Puerto Rican colleagues in Spanish and to watch entire presentations about personal finance in Spanish.
A few days living in Spanish in Puerto Rico always leaves me longing for more.
While writing my book, I found an exercise called “Your Ideal Day,” asking you to discover the life you want to live by imagining your ideal day. The first question asks you to imagine where you’re living, and the image that rose out of my gut was Puerto Rico. I hadn’t thought about the island in ages. This longing surprised me, and I haven’t been able to let it go since.
I know I’m only a tourist in Puerto Rico. I understand I’m not the first Midwesterner to fall in love with a tropical island on vacation. But in my defense: I was living on the gulf coast of Florida at the time, so the Caribbean wasn’t that novel. And I get the oppressiveness of tropical summers, the anxiety of hurricane season and the demeaning experience of living in a place designed around vacations for people richer than you.
I wasn’t dazzled by white-sand beaches and gem-toned waters.
I was dazzled, because Puerto Rico was the first time I was immersed in a Spanish-speaking world.
I started learning Spanish in school in seventh grade, and I took classes every year through my first semester in college. I loved learning a language; I loved how it made me think about my native language, and I loved how my teachers used the language as a portal to teach us about countries and cultures my other classes ignored. I loved, as the years went on, how much more mainstream Spanish was becoming in the United States, and that I was learning something that let me be part of that.
I’ve kept the language in my life after those seven years of formal education. I’d chat with people online in Spanish, pick up a copy of La Casa en Mango Street from the library, listen to the Spanish versions of familiar Ricky Martin or Shakira tracks, pick up a tutor through iTalki, run some streaks on Duolingo.
I’m a huge nerd for language and communication. I could spend hours in any conversation about the origins of words, regional accents, linguistic differences between countries, you name it. For years, this was where my relationship with Spanish lived. I learned the technical structure of the language, enjoyed drawing conjugation charts and desparately tried to decipher the nuances of ser versus estar. But in 27 years of studying the language, I never learned how to communicate in Spanish. Putting that number on the page is pretty embarrassing, actually. Spanish has been in my life for well over half of it, and I still have to use a translation app to order a turkey sandwich with confidence?
Visiting Puerto Rico and existing in a Spanish-speakers’ world began to unlock a new relationship with the language. It began to feel like a part of me; the language attached to my soul the way the island did, and I couldn’t shake it. It feels odd, because the language isn’t mine. But I finally understand why it feels like part of me.
Bad Bunny’s current seat at the helm of pop culture is the culmination of decades of Latin Americans forging a path into mainstream culture in the United States. Booking an almost-all-Spanish show in front of Middle America’s biggest audience of the year lets us know definitively: This is American culture.
In my lifetime, Spanish has made its way into American popular media assertively and unapologetically —Ugly Betty lines flying by without subtitles, “Despacito” hitting the Billboard Hot 100, In the Heights, AOC, Coco, so much more that I don’t have my finger on the pulse of. These successes send an undeniable message that this language is part of America — not a minority or a novelty or a niche concern, but an integral piece of what it means to be American in the United States and to live on the American continent.
What Bad Bunny’s foregrounding of the language has clarified for me — and, simultaneously, tons of others — is that Spanish feels like part of me because it’s part of what it means to be American.
I love Spanish, and I want to speak Spanish better (and more often), because I’m American.
I feel just as bashful saying this as I do proclaiming my love for Puerto Rico. Just as I am on the island, I’m a tourist in the Spanish language. No matter how much I love sunshine, saltwater and maduros, I’ll always be able to return to the mainland to escape a hurricane, flush toilet paper and work on reliable wifi. No matter how much my language skills improve, I’ll still have the privilege of a world that has been forced to run on English.
I’m a colonizer in love with the land my people have colonized.
The U.S. took over Puerto Rico colonization from Spain in 1898 and has been effectively re-colonizing the island for more than a century, most recently after some modern laws gave stupid tax breaks to stupid rich people if they pretend to live there. Gentrification is causing Manhattan-level housing costs and forcing locals out of homes that are being turned into short-term rentals for tourists like me who’ve just “discovered” the island. Or worse, being plowed down and replaced by skyscraping hotel-and-conference-centers that hide the Caribbean beaches from anyone who doesn’t pay for access.
I stayed in an Airbnb on my first trip to San Juan, and my conference was in one of those hotels on my second trip. (Hated the latter, for the record; there’s a reason shorelines should be protected as public domain.) When I’m there, I eat from local businesses, walk the public beaches and speak the local language. As a visitor, I attempt respect and deference — and, certainly, I do better than any tech bro stomping on the culture for a tax break — but I know I’m too ignorant and too foreign to the island to get it just right.
That distance is the same thing that’s kept me from learning Spanish the way I would have liked to all these years.
I can blame my rural, white, Midwestern upbringing for keeping me estranged from Spanish-speaking America — but I have to admit I’ve been surrounded by Spanish-speaking people my entire life. Not only as an adult living for stints in California and Florida, but my whole childhood in rural Wisconsin.
The tiniest, most conservative towns in my state are home to large swaths of Spanish-speaking immigrant families from Mexico and Central America, attracted here originally for work on Wisconsin farms. I attended public school with immigrant and first-generation kids who spoke Spanish at home. But I was separated from these families by a Midwestern kind of segregation I didn’t recognize until well into adulthood. More than 7% of the 25,000 people in my county are Hispanic or Latino. That’s a third of the 20% across the whole U.S., but it’s substantial for a place that thinks of itself as only white. I was so disconnected from these members of my community that it never occurred to me to consider Latino culture part of my town.
Now I see it. Second- and third-generation kids at my niblings’ schools are still speaking Spanish at home, but their families are more integrated into the community. They don’t disappear for half the year for farm work in Texas like the kids of my generation. My niece has friends preparing for quinceañeras. The high school soccer team is majority Latino. The grocery store down my street is a Mexican tienda.
Still, I don’t speak Spanish with the woman who runs the store. I get out a few phrases. I always open with hola and como estas. I request no bolsa when I check out. We’ve acknowledged that I speak un poquito español, and she seems happy about it.
But she only speaks to me in English that’s about as fluent as my Spanish. Maybe it’s a commentary on my language skills. Maybe it’s like the Puertorriqueños using me to practice their English. Maybe it’s rude of me to practice my Spanish on unconsenting service workers. I’m not sure. But I’m a tourist in her language; she’s trying to survive in mine. So I’m following her lead.
I wish I would’ve understood Latino culture and Spanish language as part of my culture growing up. I wish our public schools would have incorporated Spanish into the classrooms instead of separating immigrant kids into their own ESL cohort. I wish our parents would have encouraged us to play with the Mexican kids after school — I could’ve learned Spanish phrases at a young age from some friend’s Mexican tia?! I wish I weren’t an ignorant white lady playing catch up at age 40, trying to figure out whether it’s offensive to say hola to the Guatemalan lady at the grocery store.
I wish it hadn’t taken Bad Bunny in 2026 to make me feel the Spanish in my soul.
But I should be grateful it happened at all. It’s never too late to learn a little more. I’m already planning my next visit to Puerto Rico and eyeing winters in Mexico. My Bad Bunny binges have trained my YouTube algorithm toward Mexican educational channels and Telemundo Puerto Rico. I’ve got 40 years ahead of me to do better than my first 40. So I’ll take them.
Sin remordimientos.
Your turn
What role does language play in your life? If you’re in the United States, what is your relationship with Spanish? If you’re in another country, which languages permeate your culture, and what do they mean to you?