First things first: I don’t care who sings at the Super Bowl: Bad Bunny, Bugs Bunny, whoever.
I don’t object to a Puerto Rican singer performing at the Super Bowl.
And it’s fine with me if BB wants to sing in Spanish, or Swahili, or Lithuanian.
Foreign language study is one of my passions. And I’ve been studying Spanish for more than 40 years. I’ve spent weeks at a time in Mexico, speaking only Spanish.
So unless you’ve read Cien Años de Soledad in the original Spanish text (I have) please don’t play that card with me.
But this controversy raises another issue:
127 years after the end of the Spanish-American War, it is time for Puerto Rico to be granted a pathway to full independence from the USA.
The Puerto Rican independence movement used to be a thing. In 1950, radical Puerto Rican secessionists tried to assassinate US President Harry Truman.
But in a 2017 referendum on Puerto Rico’s future status, 97% of PR voters chose US statehood, while only 1.5 percent chose independence.
Puerto Rican statehood makes no sense. Puerto Rico is not logically part of the USA, even if it became so as an accident of history. US statehood for Canada (not that I’m an advocate of that, mind you) would make a lot more sense than Puerto Rican statehood.
Why this frantic eagerness to join with a country that doesn’t share the island’s historic, linguistic, and cultural roots? Has Puerto Rico lost its independent spirit?
Puerto Rico: If you don’t want to be a colony, stop behaving like one. You are never going to become a US state, and you should not be a US state. Push for full independence instead.
-ET