“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is Bad Bunny’s Latest Decolonial Text

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Bad Bunny’s latest album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is a direct challenge to the idea of tropical paradise—especially as defined by the tourism industry that profits from coastal destinations like Puerto Rico. A massive success since the album dropped on Jan. 5, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is an ode to a colony that may lose everything to its colonizers if something doesn’t change soon. With the help of historians and ethnographers, Bad Bunny traces the history of Spanish and U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and connects the current tourism boom on his beloved island to its continued colonization, bringing a call for decolonization to the mainstream global stage.

Bad Bunny is an incredibly talented singer-songwriter and his ability to make the Puerto Rican equivalent of “crying in the club” music is surely a part of his global appeal. However, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is firmly situated in the material conditions of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony, and its message resonates with people beyond the island, both inside and outside of Latin America. There is a deeper reason for this, particularly in this cultural moment: The album focuses on the principal result of colonization for the colonized: loss.

The Dystopian Future is Now 

The nostalgic title of Bad Bunny’s latest album, which translates to, “I should’ve taken more photos,” is a promise for the future, during a present when Puerto Rico’s continued colonization by the U.S. threatens to erase everything Puerto Ricans hold dear about their home and culture. At the same time that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—aka Bad Bunny—fears the loss of current Puerto Rico, he also retrieves the history that got us here, emphasizing PR’s struggle against U.S. colonialism both sonically and lyrically, by spotlighting traditionally Puerto Rican genres of music like la plena, bomba, and 1990s reggaeton beats as a backdrop for songs about the historical colonization of his homeland and a potential future where Puerto Rico is merely another resort for Americans. 

Benito exposes a pressing generational concern: “They want to take away the river/And also the beach/They want my neighborhood/And for my grandmother to leave,” he sings on “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii.” The intent of these actions is also clear: “Nobody will take me from here/I’m not moving from here/Tell them this is my home/Where my grandfather was born,” he sings in LA MuDANZA. The enemy is colonialism, and all the consequences it brings to the colonized—past and present. 

To live in a so-called tropical paradise in Latin America is to witness the afterlife of colonialism and the impacts of imperialism up close, while also navigating your life the best you can. For tourists, the tropical paradise is far less complicated. It’s merely a place where they get drunk and sunburnt on the beach, blissfully ignoring the realities that created the piece of heaven on earth they are enjoying.

Poverty and dispossession are not for tourists to care about. Rather, tourists are there to enjoy the results of these realities, to be served by people who need to make a living by the coast, to ignore the foreign sounds of a language they do not speak as they fall asleep on the sand. These problems do not belong to the tourists. In fact, the tourists have come a long way to ignore the issues in their own countries, in their own lives, and to rest from their own labor. That’s all your tropical paradise will ever be for them.

“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is a declaration that Puerto Rico is more than a tropical U.S. colony, a point that is further driven home by the album’s visuals and a short film that accompanies the album. In these materials, the history of Puerto Rico is written out on powerpoint slides developed by Jorell Meléndez Badillo, a Puerto Rican professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 

Through this artwork, those unfamiliar with Puerto Rican history learn that the island was only free from colonial rule for a short period of time. In 1897, Puerto Ricans fought for freedom and won after 400 years of colonial rule by the Spanish Empire. In 1898, the U.S. invaded, occupied, and annexed the island during the Spanish-American war. This history also plays out in Benito’s 12-minute short film, where an older version of Bad Bunny played by Jacobo Morales finds himself in a Puerto Rico he doesn’t recognize, gentrified by English speakers. In this dystopian future, kids no longer blast reggaeton while driving through their neighborhood and cash is no longer an option for the inflated prices of traditional Puerto Rican food. 

The continued colonization of Puerto Rico as America’s tropical playground has already resulted in displacement of communities, as well as the illegal destruction of essential ecosystems that are culturally significant to local residents. The increase in the cost of living—driven by wealthy tech investors and digital nomads referred to as “crypto colonizers” by locals—has driven thousands of Puerto Ricans away from the island. The beaches, which should be accessible to all, are in danger of being privatized. And to add insult to injury, wealthy newcomers to the island get a tax break as an incentive to move to PR. 

It isn’t a coincidence that as the Trump administration ramps up immigration raids and deportations to Latin America, the most prominent and successful cultural product in the world right now is “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.” The album is a recognition of the current political moment, and it is an indictment of the past colonizers want to erase. Today, Benito’s projection for the future of Puerto Rico feels less dystopian and more like a realistic prediction for the future. 

Loss in Tropical Paradise

Each colony has a specific history, but loss—of culture, of home, of land—is the common denominator. As the ceasefire in Gaza has allowed Palestinians to return to their destroyed homes, the song “DtMF,” an acronym of the album’s nostalgic title, has become a soundtrack for their homecoming. The lyrics are about lost love: “I should have taken more photos when I had you/I should’ve kissed you and hugged you more when I could,” But online, the lyrics are interpreted as an anthem for a more general sense of loss—of home, of people who were home to someone, of a time where colonization wasn’t so blatantly knocking at the door. When you’re from a colonized country, there is something about home that colonizers will never understand.

Online, videos of Gaza as it once was before the current genocide blur together with footage of Puerto Rico. Immigrants in the U.S. post videos of their homelands, with DtMF as a soundtrack, mourning their displacement in a country that might displace them again. This displacement is inextricable from the afterlife of colonization that defined Latin American migrants as inferior to the Americans eating the fruit the immigrants picked.

Bad Bunny’s narratives of lost love translate the colonized’s feelings of loss into a universal language. The same can be said about his previous studio album, “Un Verano Sín Tí,” where Benito recast Puerto Rico as a place where life and lost love happen, rather than a tropical paradise for beach-going tourists. The same is true for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.” By situating his loss in a tropical paradise, Bad Bunny fucks up the very paradigm of paradise, demonstrating that paradise is not free of pain. This approach also brilliantly conveys the idea that a use of force was required to build that paradise and real people with real lives navigating the aftermath actually inhabit your vacation spot. 

This is a message for more overt colonizers too.

For most of my adult life, I have lived in what most people would call an idyllic holiday destination—Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Rio is a vibrant coastal city famous for its natural beauty, a place where tourists famously come to seek pleasure and leisure. Rio is also the city where I got my first job as an administrative worker while I figured out my writing career. It’s the city where I experienced my first really bad breakup, where I cried in bed as I cursed the blinding sunlight coming through my angrily-shut curtains. It’s the city where I had my first drink, in a dodgy now-defunct dive bar where buying tequila didn’t require an ID. It’s the city where I have experienced love, music, violence, euphoria, depression, and everything in between. 

But for many people, Rio is nothing more than a five-day vacation where they can let go of stress, work, and sometimes, even their shame. I’ve written about this before for Bitch Media (RIP), the strange paradox of living permanently in a place many people see as a temporary stop for rest and enjoyment. “Tourist destinations in the Global South have been historically constructed as paradise or as places of idyllic wilderness, where tourists are free to explore their more hedonistic side and truly let go,” I wrote. “Noel B. Salazar calls these types of constructions ‘tourism imaginaries,’ which Jennifer Devine and Diana Ojeda argue materially and symbolically ‘reflect the stereotypes, ideas, ideals and desires of their designers, rather than the multiple and often conflicting place-based identities overlapping in any given space characterized by tourism development.’” 

In other words, when a place is considered to be a paradise worthy of visiting or of taking, the native life and culture is expelled, destroyed, and sometimes even co-opted for the sake of paradise. The pain and the loss of the people who were already there is a slight to the construction of paradise.

But for Benito and other colonized people, this pain is a part of their home, and this pain is also instructive. In working with historians and ethnographers to emphasize Puerto Rican history, Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” bridges a generational gap, giving older generations their flowers for resisting the colonizers of the past and calling on the youth to do the same. As an artist that appeals to younger generations, Benito burst his own reggaeton bubble by sampling "Un Verano en Nueva York" by Andy Montañez and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, a salsa song that most Puerto Rican parents danced to in the 1970s. As Bad Bunny, he transformed the song into a more current dembow beat in “NUEVAYoL,” a phonetic spelling of how Puerto Ricans say “New York.” He also included his own six-minute long salsa song about lost love with “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” 

Reaching across generations and current and previously colonized nations, Benito invites us to rethink and appreciate our place in the world. What have we already lost to colonialism? What have we salvaged? And how can we fight so we don’t lose anything else?

Thank you for the support of Dr. Jillian Baez in writing this piece, who I interviewed on background. I also want to shout out the Bad Bunny Syllabus, a public education resource on Puerto Rico and Bad Bunny’s political art.

This piece was edited by Tina Vasquez and copyedited by s.e. smith.