When Bad Bunny spoke at the Grammys, I felt it in my body before I understood it in words.
It’s not because he was winning awards, or because he’s become one of the most streamed artists who had the world talking again, a week later, when he performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. But it’s because of how clearly he stood in his identity. His language. His values. His refusal to dilute where he comes from, even on the biggest stage.
As a Puerto Rican woman living in Australia, that matters more than people realise.
I’ve lived here for 16 years. Long enough to build a life, raise children, create a career, and still feel the quiet absence of culture every single day. Puerto Rican people feel to be few and far between, and Latinos make up a very small proportion of Australia’s population. There are no Puerto Rican restaurants I know of. No neighbourhoods. No places where our references are understood without explanation.
When you live that far from home, culture becomes something you carry rather than something you share.
It lives in food cooked from memory, in music played loudly so it fills the gaps, and in stories told to children who are growing up between worlds. It lives in women, in mothers and grandmothers, in the ones who remember and repeat and insist that where you come from still matters.
That’s why Bad Bunny’s upcoming arrival in Australia to perform in late February and early March hits very differently.
This isn’t just a tour stop. It’s not just another near-sold-out show. It’s culture arriving somewhere it’s rarely seen, let alone centred. Despite Latinos making up such a small percentage of the population here, his first show quickly sold out. That fact alone says something important about the reach of his music, and about how deeply people are craving voices that are unapologetic, rooted, and real.
For Puerto Ricans living far from the island, moments like this feel affirming in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. When you’ve spent years being invisible, representation feels like oxygen.
Bad Bunny has never been just a musician. He’s been a mirror – a reminder that you don’t have to soften your accent, translate your values, or make yourself smaller to belong. He sings in Spanish on global stages. He centres Puerto Rico in conversations that would rather ignore it. He speaks about dignity, identity, and self-respect in ways that resonate deeply, especially for women and non-binary people navigating a world that constantly asks them to be quieter, nicer, more palatable.
For young women in particular, that matters.
So many of us grow up learning that success requires compromise – that to be taken seriously, we have to edit ourselves. Watching someone succeed without erasing where they come from challenges that narrative. It offers permission to be whole.
Here in Australia, that permission feels powerful. I’m raising my children here, teaching them Spanish, explaining traditions their classmates don’t recognise, flying their grandparents across the world so they can hear their stories firsthand.
Alongside me is my dear friend Dr. Yadira Perez, a Puerto Rican anthropologist from The Bronx, now living in Melbourne with her family. Between us, we are keeping culture alive in small but intentional ways, through food, music, festivals, dancing, and community. Through refusing to let our identity fade just because it’s inconvenient.
What has changed everything, though, is social media. For the first time, living far from home doesn’t mean being culturally isolated. Through Instagram, podcasts, and online communities, I’ve been able to follow creators who sound like me, think like me, and carry the same cultural references I grew up with. I’ve watched Puerto Rican and Latin communities connect across continents through music, language, humour, and shared memory.
And right now, that connection is becoming real.
Bad Bunny will be performing in Sydney across two nights (February 28 and March 1), and it will be bringing Puerto Ricans from the United States all the way to Australia. People we’ve never met before. People we didn’t even know existed here or were willing to travel this far. We’re finding each other online, exchanging messages, sharing phone numbers, creating WhatsApp groups, talking late into the night about where we’re from and how we ended up here.
And soon, we’ll meet in real life – strangers connected by culture, standing next to each other at a concert on the other side of the world, forming friendships that will last long after the music stops. All because culture found a way to travel. All because someone refused to make himself smaller, and in doing so made space for the rest of us.
That feels wild. And it feels sacred.
It’s also a reminder of how culture moves now. Not just through borders and bloodlines, but through digital spaces that allow us to find our people, even when geography says we shouldn’t have any.
This moment also says something bigger about the world we’re living in. Yes, there are people travelling from overseas for the shows, but we must acknowledge that a Puerto Rican artist selling out shows in a country with minimal Latin representation speaks to a shift. People are drawn to authenticity. To voices that are grounded rather than manufactured. To art that carries meaning, history, and emotion.
For the Puerto Rican diaspora, especially those of us living in places where our community is tiny or nonexistent, that shift matters deeply. It reminds us that we don’t need to wait for permission to take up space, and that our culture is not something to hide or apologise for. It reminds us that being seen, even briefly, can be healing.
Bad Bunny’s Grammys moment wasn’t just about accolades. It was about standing firmly in who you are, and bringing your people with you. For those of us carrying culture quietly, that kind of visibility feels like solidarity.
So when he steps onto Australian soil, it won’t just be a concert for us. It will be a moment of recognition and a reminder that Puerto Rico exists everywhere its people are. That even here, far from the island, we are still here.
And now, thanks to music, technology, and shared identity, we’re finding each other. We are not alone.
Top photo – Pictured: Bad Bunny, Source: AP with additional design by Missing Perspectives