Carina del Valle Schorske Examines Bad Bunny's Caribbean Spanish for The New York Times Magazine

Poet, translator, and essayist Carina del Valle Schorske's profile of Puerto Rican singer Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—aka Bad Bunny—for The New York Times Magazine deals out their encounter in poetry-rich spades. A choice excerpt:

…Benito doesn’t have to go to graduate school to practice what the late Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite called “nation language”: He is well aware of the politics latent in his language choices, and he performs this awareness slyly in his lyrics. In “Otra Noche en Miami,” Bad Bunny has “modelos extranjeras que me dicen papi” and “francesas hablándome en español” — models from abroad begging papi, French girls speaking Spanish. French especially has long held an unjustifiable position of prestige, but these girls will drop it all on a dime to catch his Puerto Rican ear, on his Puerto Rican terms.

Christopher Columbus noted how the island people he would later slaughter had “the sweetest talk in the world” — the Arawakan language spoken by Taíno people. The grammar is no longer intact. But driving across the island from east to west, I stopped for gas under a giant sign reading TOTAL GUASABARA, a nondescript roadside station bearing the Taíno word for uprising. Even in the deadly grip of the world’s fossil-fuel regime, the vocables of Indigenous revolt stay on the tips of our tongues, and generations of Black speech from Kingston to Brooklyn to Santo Domingo style our interjections. Yales. Demente. Mera woo. To me this is still “the sweetest talk in the world,” the stickiest. Even those who deride it can’t kill their own taste for it. Melaza.

Caribbean languages have long been held in contempt as derivative, adulterated, illiterate. What Puerto Ricans speak is “barely Spanish,” I’ve been told more than once by sophisticated American liberals who read Roberto Bolaño in translation. This is the blame game of diaspora: We’ve cannibalized “too much” English. But Puerto Ricans have fought fiercely to preserve this supposedly cut-rate Spanish as the official language of government, schooling and culture under U.S. colonialism. This syncretic, sidelong way of speaking — celebrated and circulated via popular music — archives histories of migration, resistance and coerced intimacy barely audible elsewhere.

Benito has become famous for his playful code-switching across islands and eras. But none of us, he reminded me, are born with it.… 

Read more of this feature at The New York Times Magazine.