Bad Bunny's "NUEVAYoL"
Building(s) in lyrics
Through 2026, It’s Material is sharing buildings in lyrics, a kind of “acupuncture of meaning” to explore the back-and-forth connection between building/s and our lives.
This week, a lyric from Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYoL”, ahead of his Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny’s gone super-mainstream but if you haven’t yet heard of him, chances are you will have done after Sunday.
The song, on its surface about New York summers, includes:
“Un shot de cañita en casa de Toñita
y PR se siente cerquita”
Which translates roughly to “A shot of rum at Toñita’s place / and Puerto Rico feels close.” With Toñita’s place being The Caribbean Social Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Maria Antonia Cay - Toñita - opened the club in the ‘70s as a place for the local baseball team and their families to hang after games. In the 90s, the now soon-to-retire first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, Nydia Velázquez, held her first campaign meeting there. Over the years, as Williamsburg prices have soared, developers have pressured Toñita to sell. Velázquez said at the club’s 50th anniversary that when Toñita “purchased her building in the ‘70s, she was making a statement: ‘If you don’t want to leave, you have to own.’”
Most of Bad Bunny’s songs are rooted in Puerto Rico itself. And in 2025 he decided to do a 30-show residency on the island instead of including the mainland US in his tour for the album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, given the risk that his fans would be targeted by immigration enforcement at venues.
NUEVAYoL though, of course, is firmly set in NYC. It gets to the heart of how New York - and more broadly the country as a whole - is built by immigrants. It also gets to the intractable ties between the US and the countries of the Caribbean (watch the video above all the way to the end).
Later in the song the lyrics feature Juan Soto, the Dominican baseball player for the NY Mets (and previously the Yankees).
“Con los Yankees y los Mets, Juan Soto
A correr, que otra vez la sacamo’ el estadio”
(With the Yankees and the Mets, Juan Soto / Better run, we hit it out the park/stadium again).
The “stadium” here could be the Yankees Stadium in the Bronx, or Citi Field in Queens. On Sunday, Bad Bunny will perform at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, at the US’ biggest sporting event of the year. It’s an event where the power dynamics of money, culture and politics get distilled through football and at a time when the high-profile killings of two US citizen protestors by immigration officials is just the tip of the iceberg of a system of abuse of immigrants in jails, detention centers, streets and workplaces throughout the country.
The US is approaching its 250th anniversary. It’s as if the always-in-tension narratives of its soaring promise and harsh realities are coming to a head. Breaking up both those narratives with complexity, creativity and startling humanity that ripples across borders is needed more than ever.
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Also check out:
El Hilo’s latest podcast “Estados Unidos y la política del enemigo interno” (“The US and the politics of the internal enemy”). The podcast in Spanish and the English transcript are both here.
The “Memoirs of Bernado Vega: A contribution to the history of the Puerto Rican Community in New York”
“How the Superbowl will affect the South Bay”, a short listen from KQED
Past “Buildings in Lyrics” - get in touch with suggestions!
And I share it a lot, but Julie Mehretu’s painting “Stadia II” captures many of the dynamics that will be at play on Sunday
