Global reggaeton star Bad Bunny almost never bares his feelings outside of his songs. But the artist recently stunned fans — and critics — after he did exactly that during an interview in which he pleaded for voters in his homeland of Puerto Rico, who have become increasingly apathetic about the U.S. territory's upcoming election, to not downplay the election's importance.
“I really care about Puerto Rico and I don’t know if it’s the weight of ... I want to cry and everything,” the singer said in Spanish as he attempted to swallow back tears in a clear effort to contain himself from crying. “It's good to go out on the streets to protest, to let ourselves be heard as people, but I think that the biggest act of protest is to vote against the people who have led us to this mess on Nov. 5.”
Bad Bunny made the statements as part of a wide-ranging interview with Puerto Rican YouTuber El Tony posted on Labor Day.
Since then, clips of the interview have become the source of countless memes on social media, from people posting what outfits they'll wear on Election Day to fan-generated jingles echoing some people's discontent with the political party that's currently in power.
It also seems to be having an early effect in empowering disenfranchised voters frustrated with local party politics and motivating newly eligible young voters to register to vote before the Sept. 21 deadline.
“Voting is very important, especially if you are young. Deciding the future of the place where we live, where we grew up, don’t let others decide it,” Bad Bunny, 30, said in Monday’s interview.
A day after the interview was posted online, college students at the University of Puerto Rico were hosting a voter registration event on the Río Piedras campus when the entire school lost power, serving as a bleak reminder of Puerto Rico's new normal: one in which widespread power outages have only become longer and more recurrent in recent years as permanent reconstruction of its hurricane-ravaged electrical grid has been pending since 2017.
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Hundreds of students who had attended the event were unable to register to vote Tuesday following the outage, but organizers urged people to return Wednesday. About 300 students became newly registered voters and dozens more updated their existing voter registration with their latest address.
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Several voting rights and civic engagement organizations shared videos and photos on social media showing long lines of people at different college campuses at various voter registration events Thursday.
Bad Bunny's remarks came days after Somos Más, a Puerto Rico-based civic engagement nonprofit, released data revealing that 75% of all newly eligible voters under age 21 had not yet registered to vote.
According to the organization, the numbers are consistent with an overall decline in new voter registrations and voter turnout since 2012 that experts have attributed to both a growing lack of trust in Puerto Rican government institutions and population loss.
More than 700,000 working-age Puerto Ricans have been forced to migrate to the U.S. mainland over the past 15 years due to economic turmoil stemming from Puerto Rico's financial crisis, which became the largest public debt restructuring in U.S. history, and devastating natural disasters that include 2017’s Hurricane Maria and a series of earthquakes in 2020.
Against this background, Puerto Ricans have become more critical of the partisan lines that have deeply divided the local electorate for more than five decades, resulting in significantly lower voter turnout over the past two election cycles.
In 2016, Puerto Rico had record low voter turnout of 55%, an unusual milestone for an island known for high voter turnouts of 73% to 89%. Voter turnout remained at 55% in the 2020 election.
Traditionally, most people have supported either the pro-statehood New Progressive Party or the Popular Democratic Party, which supports the current territorial status. A smaller percentage of “independentistas” support the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which advocates for independence from the U.S.
But a surge of independent candidates and newly formed political parties, such as the Citizens’ Victory Movement, which is running on an anti-colonialism ideology, and Project Dignity, which favors a Christian democracy, have emerged in recent years as a result of growing distrust in local government institutions that have long been run by the establishment parties.
This year, members of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and the Citizens’ Victory Movement joined together under a new coalition named Alianza de País in an attempt to go against establishment parties.
Desperate for a change, younger voters who have only known a Puerto Rico riddled in crises tend to be more open and supportive of new, emerging candidates, compared with the older electorate.
"No changes will happen overnight, but at some point we have to start rebuilding Puerto Rico," Bad Bunny said as he urged people to register to vote.
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