The following is an uninformed, off-the-cuff, spontaneous reaction post to a piece of media — a trend — I came across yesterday when doom-scrolling on my Instagram feed.

Like any other habitual doom-scroller, I was mentally turning off from a day of work, heavy research and writing and “serious language”, when I decided to open my Instagram app and look through people’s daily highlights. I came across a video montage of my guilty pleasure, reality stars, and their recent visit to the country-music festival Stagecoach, which was famously shut down and crowds evacuated Saturday night because of strong winds. The reality star influencer capturing the moment pieced together her experience as this random “adventure”, as she and others tried to take shelter from the natural forces in operation — heavy dust and winds.

Her choice of song to piece together this montage did not go unnoticed. It started with a lyric that matched the randomness of the situation: “first time in San Juan, mi hijo (really [mi hi’ jou])…” — delivered in the most diphthongized pronunciation, the most Americanized pronunciation of Spanish, in an upbeat harmony with synths that mimicked 80s music. Followed by “the ca-pi-tal of Puer-to Ricou.” I sat up. This was a song about my island.

The song itself had a small storyline — alluding to things that could be plausible in a trip to Puerto Rico, inserting Spanish words here and there to solidify the storytelling. “Immediately was enchanted.” “The whole plane clapped when we landed.” Then the verse: “didn’t just want to do tourist stuff…so I took a bus to Caguas” — to which I immediately wondered whether there was even a direct bus to Caguas, but more to the point: that lyric is the most tourist thing in the song. The move of performing anti-tourism is itself a tourist move. Perhaps only someone narrating Puerto Rico from the outside would reach for the bus to Caguas as a marker of authentic local experience, and no other place name occurs in this narration (like a local eating spot). Someone who actually lives that commute would reach for something more specific, besides name dropping.

“It’s a wild place to vacation.” “Slot machines in the bus station.” The composition sounded plausible on its surface, but sort of perpetuating the vision of Puerto Rico as an island casino. It was also jocular with playful with upbeat trumpets and synths, giving showtune vibes, somewhere between the 80s and the Full House theme song.

“My first time in Puerto Rico, malta and mofongo, papacita, one flag is light the other dark blue” — to which I asked myself, da fuq is a papacita. And also sort of applauded the A.I. recognition of the different symbolism in flag shades of blue, although not diving into the topic it of course. Then “a Barack Obama statue” — which is not the first thing that comes to mind when I go to Puerto Rico. In fact, I didn’t even know there was one… “all of this in Puerto Rico!” A horn instrumental break followed, a big-band 80s energy that seemed to gesture toward Puerto Rican brass traditions without quite landing there. There’s a difference between music that comes from a place and music that samples its surface features. The horn break didn’t sound like Puerto Rican music, it sounded like someone’s idea of Puerto Rican music, assembled from a distance, from a voyaristic white-generated gaze.

At the end there’s a Spanish verse:

“cuando te vi en la playa mi vida / toda la noche soñé contigo querida / la luna en San Juan brillaba con ardor / y supe esa noche que era amor aquí en Puerto Rico”

Which had the grammatical bones of a romance but the feeling of something processed from the outside. And this is where I’d add: Spanish in Puerto Rico is not seasoning. It’s not a closing verse you drop in to authenticate a story at the end.

The AI song does what mainland pop has often done: treats Puerto Rican Spanish as flavor rather than language. It does it faster, cheaper, and without even an artist who once set foot on the island.

The song is uploaded to Spotify with different remixed versions. Some people are dubbing it the “song of the summer” on TikTok even though at present it hasn’t broken any records on Spotify. And honestly, despite the lyrics’ attempt to pay homage to aspects of the island, and some effort to localize through the horns, I could not place the song on the island. It sounded both ridiculous and distant — both geographically and temporally. It also sounded like a commercial: adopting mainstream, non-local harmonies to deliver a story about a place it doesn’t actually know.

It wasn’t necessarily bad in the sense of perpetuating harmful stereotypes. It was harmless enough. The beat was catchy. It just sounded absent. Present in all its cheerful sonic confidence, and completely absent at the same time.

My partner did not want me to write about this. He’s a music lover, produces his own music in GarageBand, and is an avid concert-goer. He told me he didn’t even want to hear the song — that AI music made him deeply uncomfortable, that artists put so much of themselves into creating something, and that AI-generated music was becoming scarily good in ways that threatened to put people out of work and flatten what it means to make something with intention and craft. He didn’t want to give money to a machine.

He’s not wrong. When AI generates culture or storytelling about a place, the people from that place lose something particular. It’s not just artistry in the abstract, but the right to have their home represented by someone who knows it. Not assembled from data points or algorithms.

Still, I felt a reaction post would be worth it to tentatively share my perspective, sitting with the strangeness of hearing your home in a song that has never been there.

“Fresa, naranja… banana (??)… or do I teach her guineo? … blueberry… wait—
SIRI, cómo se dice blueberry en español?
Arándanos.

I know this because I’ve forgotten it enough times to look it up every single time.

I am raising my child bilingually. I decided that from the moment I found out I was pregnant.

If I didn’t, my entire career—what I study, what I write about as a linguist—would feel like a lie. It would feel like failure. Like giving in. Like assimilating to the American standard out of convenience, out of environment, out of the simple exhaustion of living in English.

And the truth is: English has taken over me in ways I didn’t fully realize until I had to give Spanish back to someone else.

I grew up in Puerto Rico, but my academic life—my training, my writing, my professional voice—has been shaped in English. English is my dominant language across registers. It’s the language I think in when I’m tired, the one that comes out most fluidly, the one I can perform in. I can even slip into a British accent, attempt Irish depending on my mood.

Spanish, on the other hand, feels… layered. Dimensional. Sometimes insecure.

I vacillate between a more formal, careful Spanish—minding my s’s and r’s, trying to sound less Caribbean, closer to some imagined “correct” Spanish—and my social Puerto Rican Spanish, which is alive, fast, and fully mine. And somewhere in between those, there’s the version of Spanish I now speak as a bilingual adult in the U.S.—touched, shaped, and sometimes disrupted by English.

As a Ph.D. in Linguistics, raising my child bilingually has been humbling in ways I didn’t expect.

Because suddenly, I hear myself through the ears of every prescriptive ideology I’ve ever critiqued.

The voice that says: don’t mix. Don’t say “okay.” Say está bien. Say formidable. Say it correctly. Mrs. Ruiz—my high school Spanish teacher—was the original defender of Spanish. The O.G. (Do we still say that? Am I showing my millennial age?)

But here’s the reality: bilingualism doesn’t work like that.

At 19 months, growing up in Brooklyn, my daughter’s favorite toy is a book. She flips through pages, points at images, babbles, pauses, returns. She has books in Spanish and English, and I’ve developed this careful choreography of displaying both equally—rotating them, hiding some, bringing others out—trying to engineer balance.

And then there’s my favorite exercise:

She picks up a book in English, flips through it rapidly, and I have to live translate into Spanish—like a sports commentator dubbing over an English broadcast on Telemundo.

“Robin”… pájaro.
“Wren”… pájaro (??).
“Holly leaves”… hojas… de holly?
“Squirrel!”—okay, that one I panic.

My translations are not always good.

Sometimes they’re hesitant. Sometimes they’re approximate. Sometimes they’re wrong.

And what I’m witnessing, in real time, is language transfer—what linguists call the interaction between languages within a single speaker. It happens when systems overlap, when one language fills gaps in another, when meaning, sound, or structure travels across linguistic boundaries.

It’s not failure. It’s not contamination.

It’s how bilingual minds work.

This interaction between languages can happen at every level—sound, syntax, meaning, vocabulary. It often flows from a dominant language into a less dominant one, especially under pressure, in real-time production, like trying to keep up with a toddler flipping pages at speed.

At the same time, there are moments when you lose ease in one of your languages. This process is known as language attrition. It has real, material effects in how language shows up in your brain and in your speech. It happens often in contexts of migration, or when there are limited opportunities to maintain your first language—your so-called mother tongue. You forget. You hesitate. You search.

But this doesn’t mean the language is lost necessarily. The ability to retrace your steps—to relearn, to reactivate—remains. It can just become harder as you age, as other responsibilities in life take priority — or if the circumstances are not conducive to practicing the other language.

Not all approaches to bilingualism and language acquisition see this “language transfer” as natural. Some describe these processes as “interference” or even “corruption”, especially if leading to attrition or apparent loss of ease or distinction of certain language abilities. A recent paper (2025), for example, examines the “attrition of” phonology—how pronunciation shifts over time—and frames these changes as a kind of corruption.

But even within that work, the picture is more complex. While speakers’ pronunciation shifted after long-term immersion in another language, it became more native-like again after even short periods of re-exposure. In other words, what looks like “loss” can in fact be a matter of use—of what is activated, practiced, and heard regularly—rather than something permanently erased.

If one were to adopt the “corruption” perspective fully, it would assume that knowing a language well means knowing it in isolation, untouched by others. Yet the evidence suggests something else: that languages remain present, even when they are not constantly in use, and that bilingual speakers move in and out of different linguistic alignments depending on their environments.

But when we look at the broader picture—for example, data from Ethnologue—we find that the majority of the world is multilingual.

So I try to part from that perspective. To give myself some grace. And to extend that grace to others who, in my view, are more than competent to carry meaningful, successful conversations.

That, to me, is a bilingual person.

As a sociolinguist, that is the reality of bilingualism. As an educator, that is the messy truth of language learning—it’s not always linear, and the opportunities to practice it are not always there. But you have to make them.

And yet, despite knowing all of this—despite teaching it, writing about it, defending it—I still feel the pull of a different ideology.

One that tells me bilingualism should look like two separate, intact systems. As if I were two monolinguals in one brain. (Which we know is not real.)

In fact, many linguists working from critical perspectives understand bilingualism as dynamic and transcendent—not something you have, but something you do: a process of languaging. A form of knowledge that moves, shifts, and takes many forms — translanguaging.

Because in reality, bilingualism is never linear, and it is never neatly mapped onto perfect “standards.”

But for me, there’s also something else at stake.

As a Puerto Rican, losing ease in Spanish is not just linguistic—it’s social. It’s ideological. It’s read. It’s judged. It’s heard as distance, as assimilation, as becoming “gringa.”

Jonathan Rosa talks about this feeling as being “languageless”—when, despite knowing more than one language, you feel like you don’t fully belong in either. It relates to ideologies of race and belonging, which are often understood as monolithic or monolingual.

And that resonates more than I would like.

The other day, I wrote an essay—my first opinion piece—in Spanish. Fully in Spanish. When it was published, the first message I received was from my mom, correcting a verb. Telling me it didn’t exist.

(It did exist. It was just… complicated.)

But that moment stayed with me. Because she knows my Spanish. She knows where it slips. She knows where it hesitates. She feels responsible for it in a way that I now feel responsible for my daughter’s.

And now I find myself in a very particular position:

I am the sole provider of Spanish in my household.

My partner speaks English. Daycare claims to have “Spanish time,” though I’m not entirely sure what that means beyond vocabulary. So my daughter’s Spanish depends, largely, on me.

Which means my daily life has turned into a kind of running narration:

“Vamos a cruzar la calle.” (Silence.)
“Carro—beep beep.” (“Beep beep.”)
“Árbol.” (“Arboww.”)
“Adioooos.” (“Bye.”)
“Vamos a subir las escaleras.” (Silence.)
“Dile hola.” (“Holaaaa.”)
“Treeeeen.” (Excitement. No words.)

And that’s the rhythm of it.

Partial uptake. Cross-language responses. Moments of alignment. Moments of silence.

I may not be the best Spanish teacher my child will ever have, according to the most prescriptive standards.

But this daily, imperfect, improvised, personal practice is not just about language.

It’s about continuity. It’s about small acts of maintenance and refusal—carried out in ordinary, repetitive ways.

Eventually, something will come out of this.

And… she will know Spanish.

Of some sort.

Stay tuned for updates.

Fin.

(Source: Apple Music, Bad Bunny | Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show 2026, YouTube)

In the spring of 2023, while I was lecturing at Teachers College, a journalist called to ask about what he termed “the reggaeton effect.” His question was simple: Is Bad Bunny making more people learn Spanish in the United States?

I’m a linguist who studies how identity shapes language learning, particularly among young people. I’ve examined what motivates individuals to embrace or reject a language — especially when speaking that language carries political or social weight. That has long been true of English in Puerto Rico, where it has often been viewed with suspicion or seen as imposed. The inverse is also true: Spanish has historically been treated as out of place in spaces that expect English to be the default, such as the mainland United States.

So when the journalist asked me 3 years ago whether one Puerto Rican superstar could spark a large-scale language-learning movement, I was skeptical. The question felt premature. Cultural visibility can inspire curiosity. Representation matters. But appreciating bilingualism and sustaining it are not the same.

What has become clearer since in the past year is that speaking Spanish is not simply a cultural act, but an overtly political one. In truth, it always has been. But in a moment when immigration enforcement raids dominate headlines and people are linguistically profiled and surveilled for speaking Spanish in public, language feels unmistakably racialized. To speak Spanish openly is to mark oneself.

I write this as a Latina mother raising a bilingual child in New York City. I write this as an educator and linguist. Each time I speak Spanish to my toddler on the way to daycare — pointing to objects on the street, “casa,” “carro” — I am conscious of how we are being heard, and by whom. Despite being an American citizen, I now carry my passport with me. I am not alone in this unease.

Spanish, Power, and Fragile Progress

In the United States, Spanish has long carried complicated political weight. Black and Hispanic parents in New York organized during the bilingual civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s to demand equitable access to education, helping secure bilingual programs and legal protections for Spanish-speaking students. As a result of sustained advocacy, New York City now offers over five hundred bilingual education programs.

Yet that progress is uneven and fragile, with persistent staffing shortages and students not consistently receiving the support they are promised, as detailed in a 2025 NYC comptroller report. In other states, English-only policies have limited access to bilingual instruction, framing linguistic assimilation as “empowerment” despite decades of research demonstrating the social and cognitive benefits of bilingualism (e.g., Arizona Prop 203; the now repealed California Prop 227). Maintaining Spanish in the United States has never been a purely cultural choice; it is shaped by political structures that often work against those linguistically marginalized. These systemic issues complicate the possibility of sustained bilingualism.

Across generations, Spanish frequently recedes by the third generation. This is not because families do not value the language, but because they respond to powerful English-only pressures and systemic gaps. Persistent myths that bilingualism confuses children — repeatedly disproven by research — push some parents to abandon their home language in pursuit of social mobility or a “native” accent. In the American imagination, assimilation has long been understood as linguistically white.

U.S.-born Latinos are significantly less likely to “carry a conversation in Spanish” by the third generation. Source: Pew Research Center (September 2023).

Recent debates about so-called “No Sabo kids” have reignited anxieties about language and belonging within Latino communities, with some advocating for a more fluid understanding of the diaspora experience and the possibility of identifying as Hispanic without having to speak Spanish. Meanwhile, a recent executive order by President Trump designating English as the nation’s official language effectively rolled back language-access protections to multilinguals under Executive Order Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency. A federal move that further signaled whose languages (or voices) are prioritized in public life. In turn, language organizations like the Linguistic Society of America have pushed back, recognizing that language access is a civil rights issue tied to full participation in society.

Language debates are rarely just about language. They are debates about people. For example, Spanish and Spanish-accented English have long been caricatured across media and public discourse. Stereotypes persist, casting Spanish speakers as “disorderly” or “un-American”. This echoes the sentiment in some conservative-leaning reactions to the Bad Bunny half-time show.

President Donald Trump reacted to Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language halftime performance in a post on Truth Social, calling it “disgusting” and incomprehensible.

Identity in a Polarized Moment

Against this backdrop, a Spanish-language popular artist insisting on communicating their language is more than entertainment. For U.S. Latino adolescents navigating polarized times, language sits at the center of identity. Do they hold onto Spanish? Blend it into Spanglish? Quietly abandon it to avoid scrutiny?

The question is not merely whether Spanish is spoken or learned, but what it costs to speak it publicly and by whom.

There are signs that their performance at the halftime show resonated culturally. Duolingo reported a surge in Spanish registrations following the halftime show. Spain’s Royal Academy acknowledged Bad Bunny’s global influence in amplifying the visibility of Spanish. Last week, former President Barack Obama praised the performance’s message of unity.

But the significance likely runs deeper than enrollment spikes or institutional recognition. At a moment when many young people feel pressure to assimilate linguistically, Bad Bunny models another possibility: success without accommodation. He does not soften his accent or switch languages for legibility. In doing so, he reframes Spanish as an asset.

Is Bad Bunny, or popular music more broadly, making more people learn Spanish? Can it be re-identified as “cool”? Perhaps. But that was never the larger story.

In a country where language is increasingly surveilled and politicized, the sight and sound of a public figure speaking Spanish unapologetically is itself a consequential act. Without the mechanisms in place to sustain multilingualism in public education, it is difficult to predict whether this will make any lasting change outside of cultural impact.

Bad Bunny is not teaching Americans how to conjugate verbs. He is compelling the country to confront the politics of language and who is allowed to belong.