Bad Bunny’s Historic Grammy Carries Cultural Significance and Powerful Classroom Potential

Bad Bunny’s Album of the Year win at the 2026 Grammy Awards for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is reverberating far beyond the music industry. As the first predominantly Spanish language album to receive the Grammys’ top honor, followed weeks later by his historic Super Bowl halftime performance, it is prompting educators to rethink how language, culture and power shape what is taught, studied and valued in classrooms.

For Sophia Enríquez, assistant professor of Music and Latino/a Studies in the Global South, the win confirms what many scholars have long argued: Music has never been contained by language or borders, even if institutions have treated it that way.

“Latin American music and dance traditions have shaped popular cultures across the world for decades,” Enríquez said. “Bad Bunny’s success makes the reach and importance of Latino artists unmistakably visible on a global stage.”

That visibility has real pedagogical implications. Enríquez studies how musical practices travel with people through migration, displacement and exchange, forming new soundscapes while remaining rooted in local histories. She sees Bad Bunny’s cultural moment as a powerful entry point for students to engage with multilingual archives, regional histories and non-English repertoires that have often been sidelined in traditional music curricula.

In Duke classrooms, the Grammy win creates space to examine globalization, genre formation, and the relationship between language and power not as abstract theories, but as lived realities shaping what students hear and value.

“Students don’t need a Grammy to validate their languages or traditions,” Enríquez said. “But global recognition of Spanish language music can influence future generations of researchers, especially as universities reassess curricula and canons of what is considered worthy of critical study.” 

She emphasizes how meaningful this can be for Duke’s Latine students, who benefit from engaging critically with music that reflects their cultural contexts in an everyday, relational way.

The moment also invites deeper classroom conversations about colonialism, imperialism and extraction — forces that have long shaped which sounds circulate widely, and which are marginalized. Enríquez points to Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón” as a striking teaching example: What begins as a dance track unfolds into a critique of Puerto Rico’s energy crisis, privatization and ongoing colonial condition.

“‘El Apagón’ reminds listeners that the party and the politics are inseparable,” she said. “It carries the realities of blackouts after Hurricane Maria, displacement and U.S. corporate extraction on the island.”

That layering reflects reggaeton’s longer history, which scholars trace to reggae en español among Black Panamanian artists, shaped by canal labor, Caribbean migration and U.S. imperial presence. The genre flourished through underground networks across Panama, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean long before U.S. mainstream recognition.

“Reggaeton didn’t need the United States to be culturally vital,” Enríquez said. “Caribbean and Black diasporic communities built musical networks and audiences across Latin America. What U.S. commercialization changed was not the music’s value, but its profitability. Power structures determine when a genre becomes lucrative, not when it becomes meaningful.”

This imbalance extends beyond reggaeton. Many Latin American musical traditions predate the recording industry itself and function as living archives of colonization, racialization, forced migration and resistance. Yet in classrooms, Enríquez notes, they are often framed as folkloric or supplemental, while blues, jazz and pop are positioned as the foundation of “American” music.

From this perspective, the historic Grammy win is not simply about a Latino artist’s breakthrough. Where Spanish language music is often framed as foreign — as something “crossing over” into American culture — Bad Bunny’s win highlights the visibility of a Puerto Rican artist who is fully American.

“What exactly is there to cross over into,” Enríquez asked, “when Spanish language music already connects the Americas?”

Bad Bunny’s success also complicates assumptions about language. While Spanish language music gains visibility, Enríquez cautions against treating Spanish as neutral.

“Spanish is a colonial language,” she said. “Indigenous language traditions across the Americas — Náhuatl, Zapotec, Quechua, Taíno continuities and many others — remain even more marginalized within global media systems.”

In her teaching, Enríquez uses moments like this to challenge students to think critically about listening itself. Her courses examine how genres such as Tejano music, nueva canción and son jarocho circulate through migration, media and diaspora, and how power determines which sounds are amplified or dismissed.

“We tend to treat listening as passive,” she said. “But listening is shaped by history, language and race — by what we’ve been taught to value and what we’ve been taught to tune out.”

Through initiatives like Duke’s new music minor and the Listening Lab, Enríquez encourages students to slow down and ask foundational questions: What does it mean to listen to a language you don’t know? Who has historically been required to translate themselves, and who has not?

 “What we’re witnessing isn’t the arrival of something new,” Enríquez said. “It’s a recalibration of what we accept as dominant culture. Music from across the Americas has always shaped this country’s soundscape. Latin music has always been American music. We’re just finally being asked to hear it that way.”

Enríquez hopes to teach a Bad Bunny–focused course at Duke, building on her popular class, Selena: Music, Media, and the Mexican American Experience.