On this evening, Dangerous Bunny would develop into the first-ever Latino to win the Artist of the 12 months award on the MTV VMAs, a prize he accepted stay from the stage on the Yankee Stadium in a speech fully in Spanish. “I all the time knew that I may very well be one of many largest artists on the planet with out altering my tradition, my language, my slang,” he mentioned. For a era of Latinos who’ve been informed they need to strip their native languages off their tongues to climb to the highest, Dangerous Bunny is a mannequin of cultural pleasure. As such, the conejitos marched into Yankee Stadium carrying their cultures with them: Puerto Rican flags, baseball caps from the Dominican Republic, bikini tops bearing the Brazilian flag. The evening earlier than, after I attended the live performance, I sported a T-shirt that includes the face of Puerto Rican salsero Frankie Ruiz and a leather-based jacket with the Puerto Rican flag on its again, a glance that, simply as Dangerous Bunny mentioned onstage throughout his speech the next evening, screamed, “From Puerto Rico to the world.”
