This week’s social debate seems to revolve, on this occasion, around the controversy affecting the huge Spanish‑language music phenomenon. We are talking, of course, about the 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 event has been criticised by conservative feminists such as Paula Fraga (does it objectify the women in the audience – Marta Ortega, Ester Expósito and others – who appear in it?) 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, in focusing on the women who attend the concerts of a genre which, albeit less and less so, is still disparaged today: reggaeton.
At the heart of the controversy, but overshadowed by the ideological battle around it, stands the physical building itself. And like every detail of the touring project “Debí tirar más fotos”, it has a strong, assertive dimension linked to Boricua, or Puerto Rican, identity.
The Caribbean island is a United States unincorporated territory: an issue addressed in tracks on “DTMF” and in Bad Bunny’s public statements. In practice, this means that its citizens have fewer rights than US citizens living in a federal state: they cannot vote in presidential elections, have no voting representation in Congress, and several activists campaigning for the island’s independence have been jailed.
From indigenous peoples to enslaved labour on the sugar estates
The building, “Architecture Digest” explains, is based on a real home in Humacao, a town on Puerto Rico’s east coast where the short film bearing the same title as the album was shot. The municipal anthem makes clear its history, rooted both in the island’s original inhabitants, the Taínos, and in the diaspora and enslavement of its Afro‑Caribbean population up to the 19th century.
Modern‑day Humacao was founded in 1722 on the ruins of the old Macao by settlers from the Canary Islands and Jíbaro Taínos, who came from the mountainous region at 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 spirit of resistance alive when the Canary Islanders arrived and protested against the redistribution of farmland.
Because of its relative isolation until the 18th century, its architecture is distinctive. The urban layout of Humacao follows the grid established by the Laws of the Indies, based on the plaza‑church spatial relationship – as historian Norma Medina recounts (source in Spanish) – but residents continued to build using materials such as thatch, 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 far beyond Puerto Rico within Latin America. This style was incorporated into public buildings such as the town hall, the prison, the barracks and the cemetery.
From 22 September 1898 onwards, Humacao was transferred from Spanish to US governmental administration (in what Spanish contemporaries of the time knew as the disaster of ’98, triggered by the loss of other colonies such as the Philippines and, ultimately, Cuba), changing the island’s “statu quo”, which never achieved full independence, as well as its architectural development.
It is through this fusion of Taíno, Spanish, African and US influences that the creator of the Casita, Mayna Magruder Ortiz, came to see the potential of Humacao’s buildings beyond the feature film that Bad Bunny’s team had originally produced.
Her inspiration for reinventing the house from the music video for the purposes of the tour, “AD” reports, comes from homes that carried over 19th‑century heritage to build the housing estates for US expatriates in the 1950s. Specifically, the structure – built by the team led by Rafael Pérez – imitates a house in the white community of Levittown in Toa Baja, the first development on the island planned for Second World War veterans. 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”) or Alexis Díaz, an artist and muralist who should not be confused with baseball player Alexis Omar Díaz, himself born in Humacao.
Bad Bunny, who follows in the anti‑colonial tradition of other Puerto Rican artists such as Residente and his siblings, singer iLe and producer Eduardo Cabra, all former members of Calle 13, is continuing his Spanish and European tour until mid‑July.