NUEVAYol: A celebration of diaspora experience and nationhood

Editor’s note: Bad Bunny is not just a global music star; he is a cultural and political force whose work reflects how many Puerto Ricans experience identity, migration, power, and belonging. Ahead of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, Pasquines is publishing a short series of essays, explaining songs like NUEVAYol from across his discography for audiences who may be encountering his music — and its meaning — for the first time. We will be unpacking individual songs and what they mean to the writers who live with their echoes — on the islands and in the diaspora. Through music, memory, and context, these pieces explore Puerto Rico as lived reality, not metaphor.

Identity is a tale of our shared humanity. It structures how we see the world and how we move through it. Puerto Rican nationhood, in particular, reveals the complexities of identity. Shaped by territorial framings, we as a distinct people have long been separated and divided, often navigating the currents of nation and empire. And yet, Puerto Rican nationhood has continually prevailed, imagined and reimagined in ways that bind us together through a shared sense of homeland. Our homeland, while it remains a laboratory of democracy, gives us a tangible and material reference.

From NUEVAYol to Chicago, I have witnessed the project of nationhood with my own eyes. Benito’s NuevaYol celebrates the diaspora experience as an extension of nationhood, while placing a distinct national identity front and center. Diaspora realities represent a reimagined nationhood that connects people to a homeland that exists both materially and symbolically.

My father is Nuyorican. My mother was born in Loíza, Puerto Rico, but spent her early childhood in New Jersey. I was born and raised in the archipelago, but migrated “allá afuera,” as Puerto Ricans colloquially call the United States, nearly six years ago. Different stories, different routes, still proud boricuas full of contradictions and aspirations.

Once home to approximately 900,000 Puerto Ricans, the city of NuevaYol maintains deep historical and cultural ties to the island-nation. Independentista exiles made NuevaYol their home. The Puerto Rican flag was born there, much like other Caribbean national symbols. It was there that sons and daughters of the archipelago organized not only to survive in new heights, but to fight for the dignity and future of their homeland.

New York City is staged by overlapping diasporas, as communities carry with them the traditions and customs of that material project called homeland. It is no coincidence that Benito chose Dominican genres to celebrate diaspora experiences. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are cousins, a phrase often said jokingly but always with pride. Our histories, migrations, and cultural rhythms have long been intertwined.

As I reflect on my years away, not only from home but from land, I have had to grapple with my own struggle with identity, not only as a Puerto Rican national, but also from a class standpoint. I am not de aquí. I am, without a doubt, de allá. Questions of belonging, security, and success in an Anglo-Saxon society inevitably arise. Benito challenges those anxieties through reggaetón and dembow, insisting that he will make it anyway, without needing to assimilate. Reimagining my own path and writing myself into a story shaped by otherness may not always feel like power, but it is my strength. While dancing to NUEVAYol, I cannot ignore the titans of our homeland who carved out space and purpose in this strange new world. From Rita Moreno to Nydia Velázquez, from Toñitas to my aunts, cousins, and father, to the architects of the flag that identifies a people to the world, the intersection of diaspora and nationhood becomes the sound of identity, sustaining the living soul of its people.