Bad Bunny and the world he can't save, with Rosalynde Welch

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was the most popular of all time, amassing 128 million views the day of the Super Bowl, with millions viewing afterwards through clips online. We felt a vibrant energy, his palpable love for Puerto Rico, and enjoyed the wedding at the center, and the inclusion of children and the elderly.

But according to our guest in today’s episode, Rosalynde Welch, the vivid snapshots of intergenerational community life of Puerto Rico is, somewhat, a romanticized projection. Puerto Rico’s total fertility rate is currently one of the lowest in the world — 0.9 births per woman — far below replacement level. This, combined with out-migration mean there may not be such a bustling Puerto Rican society in future decades.

Rosalynde outlines a conflict between Bad Bunny’s medium and his message: his performance celebrated Puerto Rico's vibrancy, yet most of us watched it on screens and smartphones — key culprits in eroding attachment to local places and communities and contributing to global changes in coupling and fertility. She cites sociologist Alice Evans, who observes that smartphones provide endless private entertainment while enabling “cultural leapfrogging” — allowing people to sidestep local norms and preferences for those they encounter online. This weakens the social conditions in which people once met, paired off, and built families.

All this, Rosalynde explains, makes the wedding at the center Bad Bunny’s halftime show worth sitting with. His most recent album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, mourns the loss of Puerto Rican culture. What, beyond economic and political reform, would it take to save the world he loves? Is traditional marriage and, well, creating more Puerto Ricans part of the solution?

This conversation led to personal reflections on how technology, among other factors, has complicated where we belong in the world, as well as coupling. Even when we grasp these problems on a theoretical level, we can’t always sufficiently reform ourselves to undo their influence. Rosalynde asks a beautiful question: knowing that we can’t go backwards, can you cultivate “a local world within yourself?”

After all, there is a conflict between the medium and the message of fertility discourse, too: its apocalyptic, often scolding tone can invoke panic, guilt, and anxiety among the single or childless, whom the discourse supposedly wants to persuade to have kids. For a generation prone to neurotic overthinking about love and fearful that the end of the world may actually be nigh, this undermines the trust, ease, peace, and self-confidence necessary to enter and sustain longterm relationships.Perhaps pronatalists could take a leaf out of Bad Bunny’s playbook. His joyful portrayal of intergenerational community life, with a wedding at the center, had a spiritual coherence to it, despite its contradictions. He didn’t tell us to reform ourselves; he made us love and want what we were seeing.Hope you enjoy the episode!

______________________Rosalynde Frandsen Welch is Associate Director and a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research focuses on Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in English from Brigham Young University.

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