Bad Bunny’s Botanical, Eco-Rasquache Aesthetic

This essay on Bad Bunny’s eco-rasquache aesthetic is the eleventh installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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There is a plantation on the football field. Rows of moving bodies spread across the turf beside swaying sugarcane forms, turning the synthetic green of the stadium into something cultivated, laboring, and historically charged.

Recently, the Super Bowl LX halftime performance marked a historic moment: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, became the first Spanish-language artist to lead this national spectacle—an event often treated as a sign of cultural arrival, one that defines American life.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was not simply a matter of representation. His newfound visibility, which began in 2016, is what Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus” repository, theorize as a shift toward a politics of resistance. They argue that Bad Bunny’s legibility has produced new forms of political address, including his criticism against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration during the 68th Annual Grammy Awards.

Bad Bunny’s performance stages and reads Puerto Rico’s conditions in real time. He pushes against Latinx erasure by bringing the material realities of history and environmental crisis into plain view. The performance remembers and protests at the same time, holding the past and the present together in the same frame.

Bad Bunny’s style is visibly shaped by the state of environmental precarity in Puerto Rico. I call this aesthetic “eco-rasquache.” Eco-rasquache names a way of living within conditions of precarity through improvization, reuse, and the cultivation of communal life. Recurring plant imagery, reused objects, and backyard-style design choices translate Puerto Rican material life into a visual language of survival and ongoing transformation.

Agriculture and the Making of the Petro-State in Puerto Rico

The stakes of Bad Bunny’s imagery become visible through Puerto Rico’s agricultural history and its transition into a petro-state.

From the Spanish arrival in 1493, colonial economies in Puerto Rico shifted quickly from gold mining to sugar production as a stabilizing economic regime, reorganizing the island around plantation labor, monocrop agriculture, and uneven global trade. By the late colonial period, the plantation had become Puerto Rico’s dominant spatial and economic structure.

Bad Bunny translates this agricultural history into the staging of his halftime performance. Bushels of grass adorn the stage. The synthetic football field, built for marching bands and drill teams, now consists not only of jíbaros, who represent the rural, countryside people who farmed the land, but also of over 400 human performers wearing costumes designed to look like sugarcane plants.

The plantation here is both a historical reference to Puerto Rico’s agricultural past and a way of naming the structures of labor and extraction that persist beyond it. Plantations no longer organize Puerto Rico’s economy directly, though their logics have become the groundwork for petrochemical development; agricultural infrastructures have mutated into fossil fuel-dependent energy systems.

This system is extractive because the value that is produced locally is accumulated elsewhere. Puerto Rico’s land and labor have long been incorporated into imperial economies.

Bad Bunny’s halftime performance of his song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) stages these inequities through infrastructural collapse. Before climbing a damaged electricity pole, he says in his lyrics, “Maldita sea, otro apagón” (“Damn it, another blackout”), a line that folds past and present outages into the same utterance, making the repetition of blackouts feel less like isolated failures and more like something that keeps returning.

Blackouts become tied to long-standing state neglect and climate instability, especially alongside Hurricane María in 2017, earthquakes in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Hurricane Fiona in 2022. Together, these overlapping crises intensify infrastructural and economic precarity, but political neglect and environmental vulnerability in Puerto Rico is continuous—not episodic.

Dressing Climate: Botanical Aesthetics in a Time of Precarity

If Bad Bunny’s halftime performance stages Puerto Rico’s petro-state on the football field, he also reproduces this spectacle on his own body through his fashion choices. He wears both climate futurity and history. Bad Bunny consistently uses greenery and agricultural imagery to link fashion, ecology, and Puerto Rican life.

Plant life appears throughout Bad Bunny’s public appearances, from early award shows to high-fashion moments.

For the “Garden of Time” theme of the 2024 Met Gala, Bad Bunny carried a black Flor de Maga, Puerto Rico’s national flower. The flower serves as a material sign of vulnerability, though it signifies resilience because it continues to bloom vividly despite intense heat, humidity, and recurring hurricanes. In that sense, he isn’t just wearing nature; he’s placing himself inside climate precarity.

Bad Bunny’s climate-oriented self-fashioning becomes clearer in moments that initially appear unintelligible. Before a 2025 appearance on The Tonight Show, Bad Bunny appears to combine cold-weather attire, including a leather and shearling-lined aviator hat and a black scarf, with clothing suited for heat, such as flip-flops and light denim. He also carries a jíbaro pava hat, designed to keep wearers safe from the harsh sun. The look doesn’t make sense on purpose; it points to a climate where seasons no longer line up and dressing becomes improvisational. In that sense, his style isn’t just expressive, it’s diagnostic, tracking the uneven effects of climate and history in Puerto Rico.

From Rasquachismo to Eco-Rasquache

Bad Bunny’s aesthetic choices echo what Chicana/o/x cultural theory calls rasquachismo: a resourceful, materially grounded practice of “making do.” Rasquachismo is often described as an attitude, but it really makes more sense as something that comes out of material conditions themselves. As Laura G. Gutiérrez explains, the term rasquache has historically referred to what is “vulgar, poor, or of a lower quality, status, or value,” but also to the kind of creativity that comes from having to survive with limited resources. Scarcity becomes the very condition for innovation.

Chicano studies scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto writes that to be rasquache is to be “unfettered and unrestrained.” Rasquache favors the elaborate over the simple and the flamboyant over the severe, such that “the environment itself is shaped and articulated in ways that express the community’s sense of self.” In other words, improvisation born from scarcity does not simply respond to material limitation; it actively remakes space into a visible expression of cultural presence and communal life.

At first glance, it might seem like a stretch to read rasquachismo through the lens of a global figure like Bad Bunny, since his proximity to high fashion and global capitalism appears to place him outside the material conditions the term usually names. However, his aesthetic repeatedly stages a friction between the luxurious and the vernacular, pairing designer styles with gestures that recall DIY practices, agriculture, and everyday life. Rasquache does not disappear at the level of celebrity. It merely adapts and shifts form under different conditions of scale and visibility.

We might think of Bad Bunny’s aesthetic as eco-rasquache, a “[r]asquachismo of the twenty-first century” that takes shape amid climate instability, colonial histories, and the everyday reality of living through both. While rasquachismo has always meant making value out of what gets cast off, eco-rasquache extends that logic to plant life and the afterlives of both organic and inorganic matter, where cultivation and reuse are inseparable. It is less about repurposing objects than sustaining life within damaged environments, where making-do becomes an ecological practice. This agro-aesthetic centers the plants of everyday, material life.

Plastic, Plant, and the Agro-Aesthetic

In the album imagery for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), two plastic Monobloc chairs are set against dense greenery. Unlike most albums, the artist himself is absent. The composition instead foregrounds the materiality of everyday relations.

The chairs may appear generic and utilitarian, but their ubiquity carries an emotional weight across Puerto Rican and broader Latinx contexts, where they structure domestic and communal gatherings. To me, they evoke the many family parties that take place around them and the extended, intergenerational conversations they facilitate.

Behind the chairs, bushes, weeds, and unripe bananas suggest a kind of growth that is uneven, messy, and very much still in process. The plastic and the plants remain unresolved beside one another, inviting us to stay inside the tension rather than move beyond it. The result is not a polished sustainability, but an ecology built through contradiction and coexistence.

The tension carries into Bad Bunny’s broader eco-rasquache aesthetic: staging the environment as something lived-in and highlighting the tension between what persists and what breaks down, rather than what is restored or purified.

This same tension persists in the album’s short film with Jacobo Morales and his coquí frog companion, Concho. Jacobo Morales walks slowly through a neighborhood that is clearly changing around him. Aging and gentrification unfold together through cracked pastel homes, widened roads, and the intrusion of loud rock music and Anglophone speech drifting from the homes of white gentrifiers. Sidewalks give way to modern infrastructure stripped of local meaning, tripping up Jacobo as he continues to walk. Time appears to stretch outward in memory while speeding up everywhere around him. The film lingers on Jacobo’s movement from his home to the café, where he attempts to order a culturally popular food item, a quesito. The viewer sits with how familiarity turns strange as the environment shifts. Memory erodes alongside place. In that overlap, an eco-rasquache sensibility emerges alongside an agro-aesthetic.

Plant life and the coquí signal persistence rather than repair because they do not restore the neighborhood to what it once was or reverse the losses unfolding around Jacobo. Instead, they remain alongside damage and displacement, continuing to inhabit the space even as erosion, albeit in subtle ways, persists. Their presence marks survival within transformation rather than recovery from it.

Collective Ecology

In the stage design of his 2025 “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí” residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny scales up eco-rasquache without losing its focus on reuse and connection. Instead of looking sleek or polished, he uses backyard setups, home gardens, and lived-in spaces, with materials recycled, composted, or returned to community use through his collaboration with Caribbean Ecology. Even the “Environmental Plaza” outside the venue turns the show into something participatory, where watching becomes a form of doing, as concert-goers are invited to recycle their own materials and learn effective waste-management practices rather than remain passive consumers of the performance.

Bad Bunny’s work treats everyday scenes as his aesthetic. However, eco-rasquache isn’t only an aesthetic; it is also a collective practice. As María DeGuzmán suggests, the everyday is intimately tied to the botanical knowledge produced through labor and environmental instability. What emerges is a way of imagining plant life and environment that moves from the small and personal to the large and collective, all while staying rooted in reuse and the possibility of growth under pressure.

When multiple Latin American flags appear behind Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, it reads less as mere representation and more as a hemispheric map shaped by movement and displacement across borders, where people, objects, and also plants circulate as a shared ecology. Instead of offering repair or nostalgia, his work stays in the uneven present, where life continues on through recyclable care that already functions as sustainability outside the official language of sustainability.

Eco-rasquache is cultivated in backyards, on balconies, and in improvised containers, sustained by everyday practices that refuse disposability. What Bad Bunny makes visible is not another world to come, but the one already in motion: dense, makeshift, and interdependent, where Latinx communities continue to live and grow, even under conditions that insist otherwise.

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Featured Image: Bad Bunny performs at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. Photo courtesy of Apple, 2026.

Isaac Salazar is a fourth-year graduate student studying Latinx environmentalisms in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He received a B.A. in English from Cornell University, where he concentrated on Xicanx and Latinx literary and cultural productions. His undergraduate research explored the work of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and the pastoral as a literary and cultural form. Contact.