Jíbaro Taínos also dance at Bad Bunny's Casita
This week’s public debate seems to revolve, on this occasion, around the controversy affecting the great phenomenon of Spanish‑language music. We are talking, of course, about La Casita of Benito Martínez...
This week’s public debate seems to revolve, on this occasion, around the controversy affecting the great phenomenon of Spanish‑language music. We are talking, of course, about La Casita of Benito Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny: a segment of his concert in which several public figures (until recently mostly women) dance live in front of the cameras.
The segment has been criticised by conservative feminists such as Paula Fraga (are the women in the audience who appear in it – Marta Ortega, Ester Expósito and others – being objectified?) but defended by journalists such as Ana Requena and Alejandra Martínez. They argue that there is an interest in shining a light on feminism’s contradictions in order to instrumentalise it and, in particular, on the women who attend the concerts of a genre that, although less and less so, is still disparaged today: reggaeton.
At the centre of the controversy, yet overshadowed by the ideological dispute at play, stands the physical building itself. And, like every detail of the touring project “Debí tirar más fotos”, it has a strong campaigning element linked to Boricua, or Puerto Rican, identity.
The Antillean island belongs to the United States as an unincorporated territory with commonwealth status – an issue addressed in tracks on “DTMF” and in Bad Bunny’s public discourse. This means, in practice, that its citizens enjoy fewer rights than federal US citizens: they have no vote in presidential elections or voting representation in Congress, and several activists campaigning for the island’s independence have been imprisoned.
From Indigenous peoples to enslaved labour on the sugar plantations
The building, “Architectural Digest” explains, is based on a real house in Humacao, a town on Puerto Rico’s eastern coast where the short film of the same name as the album’s title was shot. The municipality’s anthem makes clear its history, linked both to the island’s original inhabitants, the Taíno, and to the diaspora and enslavement of its Afro‑Caribbean population up to the 19th century.
Today’s Humacao was founded in 1722 on the ruins of the old Macao by settlers from the Canary Islands and Jíbaro Taíno, those who came from the mountainous region in the centre of the island. It takes its name from Jumacao, one of the last Indigenous leaders to fight the Spanish. His descendants kept this tradition of resistance alive when the Canarians arrived and protested against the redistribution of farmland.
Because of its relative isolation up to the 18th century, its architecture is distinctive. Humacao’s urban planning follows the grid laid down by the Laws of the Indies, based on the spatial relationship between square and church –as historian Norma Medina recounts (source in Spanish)– but its inhabitants continued to use materials such as straw, roof tiles and local timber.
From the 19th century onwards, elements typical of European neoclassicism, such as masonry, were introduced thanks in part to the boom in the sugar trade, built on enslaved Black labour that extended beyond Puerto Rico to the rest of Latin America. This style was incorporated into public buildings such as the town hall, the prison, the guardhouse and the cemetery.
From 22 September 1898, Humacao was transferred from Spanish to US governmental administration (in what Spanish‑speaking contemporaries of the time knew as the “Disaster of ’98”, prompted by the loss of other colonies such as the Philippines and, finally, Cuba), altering the island’s “statu quo”, which never achieved full independence, as well as its architectural development.
It is through this fusion of Taíno, Hispanic, Afro and US influences that the creator of La Casita, Mayna Magruder Ortiz, realised the potential of Humacao’s buildings beyond the featurette that Bad Bunny’s team originally produced.
Her inspiration for reinventing the house from the video for the purposes of the tour, “AD” notes, comes from the houses that carried 19th‑century heritage into the housing estates built for US expatriates in the 1950s. Specifically, the structure – built by the team led by Rafael Pérez – imitates a home in the white community of Levittown in Toa Baja, the first development planned for Second World War veterans on the island. Fusion upon fusion.
The interior décor of the house also draws on Antillean pieces and works by Puerto Rican artists such as Lorenzo Homar (co‑founder of the Puerto Rican Art Centre after an initial period in the United States and known as “El Maestro”) and Alexis Díaz, an artist and muralist who should not be confused with baseball player Alexis Omar Díaz, born precisely in Humacao.
Bad Bunny, who follows the anti‑colonial tradition of other Puerto Rican artists such as Residente or his siblings, singer iLe and producer Eduardo Cabra, all former members of Calle 13, will continue his Spanish and wider European tour until mid‑July.
