San Juan, Puerto Rico
–
It was the “mind blow” idea, and Jorge Perez remembers two years after he first heard it: Bud Bunny wasn’t going to tour the United States.
In August 2023, Perez, a tourism official who manages the island’s biggest concert venue, Coriseo, received a call from two producers at Benito Antonio Antonio Martinez Ocasio.
According to the producers, Bud Bunny said he wanted to skip Continental Us on his upcoming album tour. Instead, he stayed in Puerto Rico for all shows, all in Coriseo. If an outside Puerto Rican fan wants to see the Bad Bunny, they will need to come to San Juan after the first nine concerts. These first nine performances will be open to the island residents only.
“I never thought it would be as big as it really is,” Perez recalls from Coriseo’s nosebleed seat on stage. “We could have done this anywhere… Vegas, every big city, and he chose Puerto Rico, where his roots are.”
Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican music have never experienced commercial and artistic success on the scale of the Bad Bunny residency, which begins in July and ends this week. The effect was volcanic. According to local economists, over the past three months, Bad Bunny has so far attracted an estimated $200 million to the economy. Perez expects the final tally to be much higher after the residency closes on September 14th.
That’s “something you don’t see in the 20-year history of Coriseo itself or in the entertainment industry in Puerto Rico,” says Perez.
“It wasn’t just in the San Juan area,” Perez says. “This has had an impact on the entire island.”
Those who come to Bad Bunny will stay in local hotels, eat at local restaurants and spend money on bad bunny themed tours. Fans want to see his church, the grocery store he worked for before becoming one of the world’s biggest stars, his church, his childhood home.
The boost was exactly what Puerto Rico needed, Perez says. The island has seen “a decade of slow economic movement.” Hurricane Maria first appeared in 2017, killing nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and shredding the island’s infrastructure. Then came Covid. This has destroyed the tourism industry around the world for several years.
Perez believes that the ripple effects will continue to bring people to Puerto Rico after the residency is over. Fans saw Bad Bunny at the concert and left as the island’s “ambassador.”
Despite this, Perez says, “It’ll be difficult to get to the top.”
This is usually the low season in Puerto Rico, with visitors avoiding the island’s powerful hurricanes. But I don’t know that from the crowd at the Lapsita party in San Juan.
Evelyn Aucapiña, one of the many people in La Placita, came to Puerto Rico to see Bad Bunny. She and her friends bought tickets at the first chance they could have in Chicago’s winter death.
“We were saying, ‘We’re out of here and it’s too cold,'” she says.
Aucapiña estimates that between hotels, flights and other expenses will cost around $2,000 on the entire trip. It’s worth it, she says. She understands why Bad Bunny is escaping the mainland of the United States. The residency has been planned for more than two years, but in a recent interview with ID Magazine, the singer said he was worried that Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) would introduce fans to and arrest him at a concert in the continent.
“I have a family that lives in fear,” Aukapinya says. “We Latinos need to stick together.”
Aucapiña considers the economic boom that Bad Bunny brought to Puerto Rico, combined with the care of his fans, as “the best of both worlds.”
“This is the way, in my opinion, Latinos are supposed to be together.”
Peruvian American Owen Varasco and his girlfriend Leila Gamonal agree. They spent $1,000 each on tickets and hotels for what they considered a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
“We are Peruvians,” says Varasco. “If we had artists as big as bad bunnies, I hope they would do the same, bring awareness to Peru and tourism and help the economy boom.”
Pain leaving Puerto Rico for opportunities in the US is a constant in the history of the island and the music of Bad Bunny.
“No one wanted to leave here and those who left their dreams of returning,” Bud Bunny tweets in his song “lo quepasóa hawaii.” “If it’s my turn one day, it’s going to hurt so much.”
“I speculate that one of the main things coming out of this settlement is that younger generations who were considering leaving Puerto Rico will say, “I can stay in Puerto Rico.”
One of those young people is Sebastian Muniz Morales, a freelance illustrator. Muniz, just 20 years old, won a job designing the official Bad Bunny product when he and his friend DM served as the rapper’s creative designer.
“I just sent you an emoji,” recalls Muniz, sitting at a table in his dining room in Ponce, Puerto Rico. “We both sent emojis. We didn’t say, ‘Soybean Graphico, Pick Me!’ ”
The emojis worked well. He has not met Bad Bunny himself yet, but Muniz’s designs are in Puerto Rico. It was just after Christmas that Muniz first saw him wearing what the wild people made.
“It’s very surreal,” he says. “It’s back to a time like, ‘Yo, I was drawing this at 2am’! ”
The main highlight of Muniz’s illustration is “El Concho”, a stylized toad “screams the Puerto Rican” that acts as a bad bunny mascot for residencies. Muniz’s shirt features Hawking Pillagua, a unique style of El Chocho Boxing, Puerto Rican flags, and Puerto Rican shaved ice.
Along with experiencing residency as a member of the rapper’s team, Muniz witnessed the impact on the island with his own eyes. “In the town you go to, you will basically find two or three people, and I spoke to them – they’re here for the Bad Bunny.”
Like many young people in Puerto Rico, he felt the pull of the outside world. He had a friend who left Puerto Rico for opportunities elsewhere.
“Puerto Ricans, we think, ‘Here’s no future,'” says Muniz, but Bud Bunny “has made me realize that Puerto Rico is more than that.”
“So you look at Puerto Rico and you’re a little more patriotic and feel better about where you came from,” he continues, referring to residency. “We don’t look at it from a different perspective, we look at what Puerto Rico really is.”
“I don’t have that idea anymore, like, ‘Wow, I have to leave to have a better future’,’ but instead, ‘I have to fight for my better future here.’
