91桃色

2025 began with a musical gift. The evening before Three King鈥檚 Day, on January 6th, Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny released his sixth album DeB脥 TiRAR MaS FOTos (I Should Have Taken More Pictures).

Considering that Bad Bunny is the most streamed artist in the world, it is not surprising that the response was immediate, passionate, viral. Videos proliferated of fans hearing each song for the first time amid shouts of joy, spontaneous and exuberant dance moves, and tears. The title song, a nostalgia-soaked ode to loving and appreciating people while we have them, spurred in-memoriam video montages and digital photo albums on social media. And the album started receiving glowing reviews, replete with detailed analyses of each musical decision, sample, and Puerto Rican rhythm (salsa, plena, reggaeton, and other Afro-Caribbean beats punctuate the album in an irresistible cross-generational appeal).

Were it not for the album鈥檚 official , this viral phenomenon would have remained on the outskirts of my consciousness. Just one more Thing on the Internet. But Bad Bunny made an unprecedented decision to use his power to refuse the demands of our mediatic age. Instead of releasing flashy, highly produced videos for each track, the artist鈥檚 team worked with Jorell Mel茅ndez-Badillo, author of Puerto Rico: A National History, to create historical slides that were launched alongside each of the seventeen tracks.

The historical slides are exactly what would be expected at an academic conference. A paragraph or two of sans-serif text on a solid-colored background with a single photo to the right. Each slide has precisely the same format. The aesthetics are decidedly PowerPoint 2000.

Dense layers of meaning bely the simplicity of the slides. The background is the light blue of the original Puerto Rican flag, before the US imposed the current dark blue to match its own. And the texts themselves speak with the music, creating innumerable possibilities for historical insight. The crux of the album, for example, is 鈥淟O QUE LE PAS脫 A HAWAii,鈥� a call for solidarity in the face of rampant and violent gentrification that announces its politics in the title. (The lyrics elaborate: They want to take my river and my beach too. They want my neighborhood and for grandma to leave. No, don鈥檛 let go of the flag nor forget the le-lo-lai. 鈥楥ause I don鈥檛 want them to do to you what happened to Hawai鈥檌.) One of Mel茅ndez-Badillo鈥檚 texts in the official video discusses the colonization of Hawai鈥檌 and the use of Puerto Rican labor in the exercise of domination. Another explains the existential challenges facing the sapo concho frog, native to Puerto Rico. The resonances are clear. Puerto Rico鈥檚 present鈥攎arked most devastatingly by environmental crisis and the despairing sense that everything is at the mercy of the highest bidder鈥攊s our global present. We can鈥檛 understand the endangered species without understanding the luxury resort. The many extinctions looming on the horizon are all connected.

Yet hope remains. Bad Bunny鈥檚 gift was also a declaration. The album鈥檚 mascot, which appears in Bad Bunny鈥檚 official channels and merchandise, is a sapo concho. Framing the frog are the words: PUERTO RICO. SEGUIMO AQU脥.

We are still here. We are here dancing and singing. We are here playing our ancestoral drums and teaching our history with the newest digital technologies. We are here fighting for our future.

Nothing had prepared me for seeing the historical visualizers for the first time. The world of dance, music, and popular culture in general has never enjoyed any definable relationship to my work as acquisitions editor for history. I have seen more PowerPoints than I care to remember, but never outside of a classroom or academic conference.

It has taken weeks to process the collision of contexts, and every day that passes presents a new angle on what has become a global cultural phenomenon. Amid all the dancing and singing, others were reading and rereading the historical texts, just as I was, and commenting on YouTube. Calls to solidarity mixed with appreciative comments on the history lessons. Around Latin America, DJs began to remix the new album with the beats of local politically active musicians, creating a sense of transnational identity and resistance as the US embarks on another wild chapter of oppressing its southern neighbors. Letters from teachers in Puerto Rico鈥檚 besieged school system poured into the author鈥檚 inbox. Publicity mounted all over the world, with many reviews explaining, specifically, the artist鈥檚 decision to downplay his own image and elevate a collective sense of history. Since its release, the album has maintained a place at the top of the charts, and the historical videos have been viewed, in total, well over three hundred million times.

Something new has been created. Bad Bunny fans around Latin America and the world and Puerto Ricans of all generations have already taken note. I hope public historians will take note too.

Like most people who care about the public understanding of history, I did not expect the early days of 2025 to be a time of joy. But joyful they have been. Amid the mounting threats鈥攖he book bans, the rewriting of history, the bullying of historians within the academy and beyond, and the unabashed subjugation of truth to power鈥攖rue public history will live on. Its sustenance may not come from where we expect, but not every frustrated expectation is cause for lament. This Three King鈥檚 Day, Bad Bunny gave historians a reason to rejoice.

Publishing any book is an attempt to send a message to readers of today and tomorrow. Puerto Rico by Jorell Mel茅ndez-Badillo, published in English by 91桃色 and , is public history at its best鈥攚ritten out of a deep love for the people of the oldest colony in the world and offered to them with honesty and respect. Today we can say that the message of Puerto Rico was received. It was received on a scale that, as high as our hopes always were, no one involved in its publication could have imagined. This is the marvelous gambit of creation.

As we look ahead to 2025 and wonder about the future of history, I hope public historians will, on reading this story, carry with them a bit of the hope that I have felt this year. Yes, many spaces that once allowed truth to flourish are falling away. But we are still here. We are here鈥攖ogether鈥攖hinking and publishing. We are here honoring history. And we are here fighting for our future.

Priya Nelson is Senior Editor of History at 91桃色.