San Juan, Puerto Rico
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It was a “mind blowing” concept, Jorge Perez remembers, two years after he first heard it: Bad Bunny wasn’t going to tour the US.
In August 2023, Perez – a tourism official who manages the island’s greatest live performance venue, the Coliseo – received a telephone name from two producers for Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the genre-bending Puerto Rican rapper, singer, actor and occasional skilled wrestler higher often called Bad Bunny.
Bad Bunny, the producers mentioned, wished to skip the continental US on the tour for his upcoming album. Instead, he would keep in Puerto Rico for a run of shows, all on the Coliseo. If followers from outdoors Puerto Rico wished to see Bad Bunny, they would wish to return to San Juan after the primary 9 live shows. Those preliminary 9 performances can be open solely to island residents.
“I had no idea it was gonna be so huge as it really is,” Perez recollects from a nosebleed seat above the stage within the Coliseo. Bad Bunny “could have done this anywhere …Vegas, any large city, and he chose Puerto Rico, where his roots are.”
Never has Puerto Rico, or Puerto Rican music, skilled business and creative success on the dimensions of Bad Bunny’s residency, which started in July and ends this week. The impact has been volcanic. Over the previous three months, Bad Bunny has drawn an estimated $200 million into the economy thus far, in line with local economists, and Perez expects that after the residency ends on September 14, the ultimate tally might be far greater.
It’s one thing not seen “in the 20-year history of the Coliseo itself or in the entertainment industry of Puerto Rico,” Perez says.
“It hasn’t only been the San Juan area,” Perez says. “This has impacted the whole island.”
People who come for Bad Bunny keep in native resorts, eat at native eating places and even spend cash on Bad Bunny-themed excursions. Fans need to see his childhood residence in Vega Baja, his church, the grocery retailer the place he labored earlier than he turned one of many world’s greatest stars.
The increase was precisely what Puerto Rico wanted, Perez says. The island has seen a “decade of slow economic movement.” First got here Hurricane Maria in 2017, which killed almost 3,000 folks in Puerto Rico and shredded the island’s infrastructure. Then got here COVID, which decimated the tourism business worldwide for a number of years.
Perez thinks that after the residency ends, the ripple results will hold bringing folks to Puerto Rico, with the followers who noticed Bad Bunny in live performance leaving as “ambassadors” for the island.
Nonetheless, Perez says, “it’s gonna be difficult to top.”
Normally, this time of 12 months can be the low season in Puerto Rico, with guests avoiding the island’s highly effective hurricanes. One wouldn’t understand it, nonetheless, from the partying crowd at La Placita in San Juan.
Evelyn Aucapiña is one in all many at La Placita who got here to Puerto Rico to see Bad Bunny. She and a buddy purchased their tickets on the first likelihood they might, within the lifeless of Chicago winter.
“We were like, ‘we’re gettin’ out of here, it’s too cold,’” she says.
Aucapiña estimates she’ll spend round $2,000 for her entire journey, between resorts, flights and different bills. It’s price it, she says. She understands why Bad Bunny is avoiding the US mainland. While the residency has been deliberate for greater than two years, in a current interview with I-D journal the singer mentioned that he fearful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would profile and arrest followers at his live shows within the continental US.
“I have family members that live in fear,” Aucapiña says. “We Latinos have to stick together.”
Aucapiña sees the financial boom Bad Bunny has delivered to Puerto Rico, mixed with that take care of his followers, as “the best of both worlds.”
“This is how Latinos are supposed to come together, in my opinion.”
Peruvian-Americans Owen Valasco and his girlfriend Leyla Gamonal agree. They spent $1,000 every on tickets and resorts for what they thought of “a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
“Us being Peruvian,” Valasco says. “If we had an artist as big as Bad Bunny is, I would love for them to do the same thing and bring awareness to Peru and tourism and to help the economy boom.”
The ache of leaving Puerto Rico for alternatives within the US is a continuing within the island’s historical past, and in Bad Bunny’s music.
“No one here wanted to leave, and those who left dream of returning,” Bad Bunny murmurs in his track “Lo Que pasó A Hawaii.” “If one day it’s my turn, it’s gonna hurt so much.”
“I think that one of the main things that will come out of this residency,” Jorge Perez speculates, “is that the younger generation that has considered leaving Puerto Rico for better opportunities will say ‘We can stay in Puerto Rico. We can impact the world.’”
One of these younger folks is freelance illustrator Sebastian Muñiz Morales. Just 20 years outdated, Muñiz scored a job designing Bad Bunny’s official merch when he and a buddy DM’d the rapper’s artistic designer, who had put out a name on Instagram for artists to work with Bad Bunny.
“I just sent an emoji,” Muñiz recollects, sitting at his eating room desk in Ponce, Puerto Rico. “We both sent an emoji, we didn’t say like ‘soy illustador grafíco, pick me!’”
The emoji labored. Though he nonetheless hasn’t met Bad Bunny himself, Muñiz’s designs are throughout Puerto Rico. The first time Muñiz noticed folks within the wild carrying one thing he’d made was at a winter market in Old San Juan, simply after Christmas.
“It’s very surreal,” he says. “It drove me back to a time where I was like, ‘Yo, I was drawing this at 2 a.m.!’”
The chief centerpiece of Muñiz’s illustrations is “El Concho,” a stylized toad that “screams Puerto Rican” and serves as Bad Bunny’s mascot for the residency. Muñiz’s shirts characteristic El Concho boxing, flying the Puerto Rican flag and hawking piragua, Puerto Rico’s distinctive type of shaved ice.
Along with experiencing the residency as a member of the rapper’s staff, Muñiz has witnessed its impact on the island along with his personal eyes. “In any town you go to, you’ll basically find two or three people, and I’ve talked to them – they’re here for Bad Bunny.”
Like many younger folks in Puerto Rico, he’s felt the pull of the surface world. He’s had mates who’ve left Puerto Rico for alternatives elsewhere.
“Puerto Ricans, we have this thought that ‘here, there’s no future,’” Muñiz says, however Bad Bunny “made us understand that Puerto Rico is more than that.”
“I mean, seeing Puerto Rico through it makes you feel a little more patriotic, feel better about where you’re from,” he continues, referring to the residency. “We’re not seeing it from another perspective, but rather what Puerto Rico really is.”
“I don’t have that thought anymore, like, ‘wow, I have to leave to have a better future,’ but instead, ‘I have to fight so that my better future is here.’”