O Canadá: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, Canada, and the New World Order

This article uses Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show to examine Canada’s relationship with the Americas amid the geopolitical turbulence of the second Trump administration. The author argues that the performance, consciously or not, offers a resonant yet alternative vision to the new world order offered by Prime Minister Mark Carney, advancing an imaginary in which Canada and Latin America form a geopolitical alliance of middle and lower powers. Although the show was a corporate-sanctioned, profit-driven spectacle, it drew on a tradition of Latin American thought in which the concept of America has long served as a vehicle for regional unity against US imperialism. By uttering Canada in Spanish, Bad Bunny phonetically separated the country from the United States while symbolically uniting it with Latin America. This sonic gesture opened space to rethink Canada’s hemispheric role and situated Trump’s economic coercion and annexation threats within a longer history of US intervention in the region. The public reaction to the show and the Canadá utterance, evident in the memes Canadians and Latin Americans made and shared, suggests that they found Bad Bunny’s vision and values exciting and validating. However, while online audiences across the Americas joyfully celebrated this newly imagined continental community, Bad Bunny’s performance also made audible more fraught histories of Canadian involvement in Latin America, exemplified by the segment critiquing Puerto Rico’s electricity crisis under the Canadian–American company LUMA. Putting Canadian and Latin American studies into dialogue, this article ultimately contends that, in the new world order envisioned by Carney, Canada should align not only with middle powers but also with lower-income nations, fostering forms of continental collaboration that are politically equitable, culturally resonant, and materially non-predatory.