There is a saying in Brazil that Brazilians realise they are Latin only when they travel to the US or Europe.
Among the many reasons for this is that the largest country in Latin America is also the only one in the region where Portuguese is spoken rather than Spanish.
It is, therefore, not surprising that Spanish-speaking artists have historically struggled to break into Brazil’s music scene – with a few notable exceptions, the latest of whom is Bad Bunny.
He is set to perform two sold-out shows this Friday and Saturday for more than 40,000 people a night at a football stadium in São Paulo.
But experts and fans see something new this time: unlike the past success of artists such as his fellow Puerto Rican Ricky Martin, or the Colombian Shakira, Bad Bunny appears to be stirring a stronger sense of Latin identity among many Brazilians.
A survey published 10 years ago showed that, unlike their neighbours, who predominantly identified first and foremost as “Latin Americans” (43%), Brazilians primarily described themselves as “Brazilian” (79%) and, only after “world citizen” (13%), as “Latin American” (4%).
Shortly after Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time performance, social media in Brazil was flooded with declarations of Latin belonging. A leftwing congresswoman even introduced a bill to grant him the title of “honorary citizen”, claiming it would “build another cultural bridge between Brazil and its Spanish-speaking sister nations”.
The DJ Rafael Takano, 40, has been hosting Latin music parties in São Paulo since 2016 and said demand has never been as high as it has been since last year. His party !SÚBETE! now has a carnival street-bloc edition and will host parties after Bad Bunny’s concerts.
“Especially with DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS [which won this year’s album of the year Grammy], Bad Bunny conveyed a message and an aesthetic that are very universal for Latin America … and has made it easier for Brazilians to see themselves as Latin,” said Takano.
Brazilians were exultant when Bad Bunny said “God bless America” before naming almost every country in Latin America and the Caribbean – Brazil included – during his Super Bowl performance, and many identified deeply with symbols such as the young boy sleeping across three chairs at a wedding.
“Bad Bunny brings a cultural weight, and we end up recognising ourselves in his narrative,” said Leandro Rodrigues, 28, one of six volunteer administrators of the fan account Bad Bunny Brasil, who will travel 1,550 miles from the Amazonian city of Belém to São Paulo for the concerts.
Thiago Soares, who coordinates a research group on Music and Pop Culture at the Federal University of Pernambuco, said that unlike the “more commercial appeal” of Shakira – who was recently announced as the headline act at this year’s free concert on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach – Bad Bunny broke through in Brazil “in a different way, aligned with a more anti-American agenda of emancipation”.
The heightened interest among Brazilians in an outspoken critic of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies may have been fuelled by the US president’s tariffs and his attempts to interfere in Brazil’s judiciary, which inflamed Brazilian nationalism, as has happened in other countries targeted by the White House.
“When Bad Bunny began to succeed abroad, I doubted he would fill a stadium here. And now he is filling two consecutive nights,” said Soares, who nevertheless added that the artist was “not yet mainstream”.
“Unlike Shakira or Ricky Martin in the past, he doesn’t have songs in soap operas and does not collaborate with Brazilian artists … He is a social media phenomenon which is more closely associated with a certain Brazilian cultural elite.”
Even so, Bad Bunny became the first non-Brazilian Latin artist to place a solo track in the country’s Billboard Hot 100 list – others had done so before, but only in collaborations with Brazilian singers.
“It moves me because I recognise that in Brazil people listen more to Brazilian music, and I didn’t even do something like collaborate with artists from there,” Bad Bunny recently said in a joint interview with Vogue and GQ Brasil.
Brazilians do love their own music – there were no foreigners among the 10 most-streamed artists in 2025 on Spotify. The language barrier could be a factor, given that fewer than 1% of Brazilians are estimated to speak Spanish or English fluently, yet anglophone artists were still more widely listened to and accounted for all five of the most-streamed foreign acts.
For Takano, this is a result of US “soft power”: Brazilians are taught from an early age to look more towards the US than to their Latin American neighbours.
“The US culture has always been heavily marketed to us, promoting the so-called American way of life. Now, because of the internet, we have access to other things as well, and we are seeing the emergence of a Latin way of life,” he said.
