When the Land Speaks on the World’s Biggest Stage: Super Bowl Reflections

By Ashley Cullen-Williams

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance wasn’t just a musical moment — it was a reminder that land holds memory.

The imagery of sugarcane fields immediately evoked the Caribbean’s colonial past. Sugar cane is not a neutral crop. It represents forced labor, extraction, and economies built through enslavement and exploitation. By centering this landscape on one of the world’s biggest stages, Bad Bunny invited viewers to sit with the reality that culture and wealth are often rooted in histories of land and labor.

One of the most striking choices was that the “plants” on the field weren’t props at all — they were people. Human bodies became the landscape. What could have been a limitation turned into a powerful metaphor: the land has always been shaped, worked, and sustained by people. Nature is not separate from humanity — it is inseparable from it.

Layered into the performance were visible power lines and infrastructure — subtle, but intentional. The grid represents modern dependence, extraction, and control: who gets power, who loses it, and whose land is sacrificed to sustain systems far away. These lines cut through natural landscapes just as colonial and industrial systems have long disrupted Indigenous and island ecosystems.

Together, the sugar cane, the people-as-land, and the power grid told a fuller story. Land is farmed. People are used. Energy is extracted. And yet — culture survives. Community persists. Joy and resistance still take up space.

At Brushwood, we understand land as a teacher. This performance echoed that truth. When people are treated as props, the land suffers. When land is overexploited, people suffer too. Healing — ecological, cultural, and communal — begins when we remember that people, land, and power are deeply connected.