Holding onto What's Mine: Bad Bunny, Winning, and Cultural Power

In this urgent and incisive reckoning, bestselling author Julissa Arce uses Bad Bunny’s rise to challenge what success really means—and makes the case that it only counts when we bring our community with us.Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime was viewed more than four billion times across broadcast, digital, and social media platforms. But to Latinos, it was bigger than viewership. It was proof that global success does not require cultural erasure. On the contrary, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio put the beauty and power of Puerto Rican, and Latino, culture front and center. Award-winning, bestselling author Julissa Arce argues that Benito’s rise carries a lesson, and an obligation, for all of us. In Holding onto What’s Mine, Arce blends memoir, cultural criticism, and political insight to examine how the global superstar’s unapologetic embrace of his Puerto Rican identity offers all of us a radical new model for holding power. In her uniquely incisive and unflinching voice, Arce examines how Bad Bunny’s career, his joy, his language, his historical acumen, and his political savvy have transformed him from global superstar to something rarer: a cultural icon. Along the way, she speaks with historians, journalists, and key cultural figures to show exactly why success stripped of history and culture risks replicating the very inequities Latino communities are actively fighting to dismantle. Benito’s ascension points to larger truths about how the rest of us can navigate the tensions, costs, and compromises at every stage of success. We may not all be global icons, but we have the same responsibility: to bring our communities into the spaces we’ve fought so hard to enter. Otherwise, what is the point? Through vivid storytelling, detailed analysis of Bad Bunny’s catalog, and pivotal moments in our community’s history, this book insists that success cannot be measured by the individual alone, but by how it is leveraged to achieve better economic, political, and social outcomes for our community. Read more