On August 30, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke to his excited audience in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, at one of his campaign events. “All Puerto Ricans are going to vote for Trump now,” he said. Moments later, reggaeton singers Anuel AA and Justin Quiles took the stage. Both wore red caps with the slogan “I love you.” Make America Great Againthe Republican’s campaign slogan. “Since Trump has not been near Puerto Rico, it is no secret that we have been going through a lot as a country,” said the first of them. This political activism by Puerto Rican musicians, far from seeming unusual, has striking precedents years ago, when other artists from the island went so far as to support other candidates or even provoke the resignation of a governor.
The political status of Puerto Rico has historically been the subject of controversy. The director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Studies, Charles Venator-Santiagostates that the official term for the island’s current status is “unincorporated territory” of the United States, which means that it belongs to the country, but is not part of it. In 1952, Puerto Rico was allowed to adopt a local Constitution, but without changing that status. As a result, the island’s citizens—around 3.2 million people—cannot participate in federal elections, but they can vote for governors on the island and for a resident commissioner in the U.S. House of Representatives (where they have a voice, but no vote).
For Venator-Santiago, Trump’s claim that “all Puerto Ricans” would vote for him is inaccurate. The University of Connecticut professor also says that the political positioning of Puerto Rican artists in the federal context does not have a significant impact from the island. Although the status of an unincorporated territory does not allow the population of Puerto Rico to vote in federal elections, they can do so Those who live in the demarcations of the national territoryThe number of Puerto Ricans in the United States represents around 2% of the total population, some 5.8 million people of the nearly 332 million who live in the country.
Although Puerto Rico does not have that federal “impact,” Venator-Santiago believes that this positioning could be beneficial for the artist himself. “When Anuel AA joins forces with Trump, he is like accessing to national markets on the same wavelength as, in my opinion, Beyoncé and Jay Z (who showed their support for Democrat Barack Obama years ago) They accessed“President Obama gave Beyoncé and Jay Z a different status, national recognition, national validation that opened other commercial doors for them,” he reflects.
Republican tints
Venator-Santiago, an expert, comments that the values of trap and rap culture tend to be identified with the values of the right. “On the one hand, there are the Republican narratives that the party is for the rich, to help everyone get rich, as if that notion of economic success (of the genre) is cultivated; on the other hand, I think that many artists do not understand politics and have a cruder vision, where they blame the poor for being poor,” he points out.
The case of Anuel AA and Justin Quiles were not the only ones in the history of the Republican Party. Last Friday, Trump himself brought another of the great personalities of Puerto Rican descent, Nicky Jam, onto the stage in Las Vegas, Nevada. “It is an honor to meet you, Mr. President. The people who come from where I come from, do not know the president. So I am fortunate (…) We need him. We need him back. We need him to be the president,” the reggaeton singer exclaimed at that campaign event. Jam’s words were a change of position from the one he took just three days earlier in an interview on Univision: “No, no, not politics, not religion, I do not get involved with those two little things.”
In 2008, the then Republican candidate John McCain (who lost the election against Obama) met with Daddy Yankee, with whom he spoke about education, reintegration and a project focused on the Hispanic community. “I am here to support Senator McCain because I believe in his ideals and his proposals to govern this nation,” he said at a rally held in August of that year, where he also called the Republican “the best candidate.” The professor of Political Science at the Amherst College in Massachusetts Alexander Theodoridis explained in an interview with this newspaper that the support of an artist for a candidate should not affect the decision and the way of thinking of his fans (“it is highly unlikely,” he specified). “What it will do is show his enthusiasm and spread it among his fans. That they make donations, that they volunteer,” he added.
A flag flies in San Juan
But the pattern has not always been that way. Another of the island’s great contemporary superstars, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Bad Bunny), has kept a profile away from the presidential campaign, but with a criticism of corruption and the unrest that exists in Puerto Rico with the political class. In recent days, the Bad Bunny has expressed the importance of electoral participation as a solution to counteract this discomfort. “I’m not getting involved in politics, politics gets into my life because it affects my country, because it affects Puerto Rico. I know that politics is shit, nobody believes in the country’s politicians. Having a moment to take out the (electoral) card, go vote, can be like… Devil, it is very important as a young person to decide the future of the country in which we live,” he expressed last week in a conversation with the Podcaster Puerto Rican The Tony.
Before that, two years ago, Martínez Ocasio published the music video for one of his songs, The Blackout. Far from limiting himself to accompanying his lyrics with exuberant images —typical of reggaeton—, he turned the video clip into a short documentary made by journalist Bianca Graulau, where he dealt with serious problems that affect Puerto Rican territory, such as gentrification, social injustice or privatization on the island. Hurricane Maria, which destroyed two thirds of the electrical grid and caused damages of nearly 100 billion dollars in Puerto Rico in 2017, and left almost 3,000 dead, was a great inspiration for that report by The Blackout. The power cuts that occurred during the great natural disaster have continued to this day. That great storm continues to leave a visual mark in some of the territories.
It was not the only time that she showed this discontent with the political class. In the summer of 2019, Martínez Ocasio joined, along with other renowned artists such as the actor Benicio del Toro or the musicians Ricky Martin and Residente, the massive protests in San Juan that demanded the resignation of the then governor, Ricardo Roselló, involved in a strong controversy for participating in homophobic and sexist conversations through Telegram. The image of the protests was not a position at the federal level, like that of Anuel AA with Trump, but it does show the artistic discontent with one of the political situations that denigrated the name of the island. It also became a historic moment: it was the first time that an elected governor of the island resigned from his position in its history as an unincorporated territory of the United States.
Bad Bunny expressed his sadness on the podcast for having heard since he was a child that the Puerto Rican government was corrupt and regretted that he continued to hear that complaint over the years. “I dream of a Puerto Rico where everyone can be happy, where what people from outside see can be at least a little more real for people here,” he summed up.
