The First Spanish Album of the Year

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, 31, sat in his seat and cried. The Crypto.com Arena was on its feet. His name had just been called for Album of the Year — the biggest prize in music — and Bad Bunny couldn't move. The son of a truck driver and a retired schoolteacher from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, had just done something nobody had done before: win the Grammy for Album of the Year with an album entirely in Spanish.

He'd already been up on that stage once. Earlier in the night, accepting Best Música Urbana Album, he opened with two words that landed like a grenade: 'ICE out.' Then he kept going. 'We're not savage, we're not animals, we're not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.' This was February 1, 2026. Seventy-three thousand people sat in immigration detention centers across the country. Bad Bunny was not interested in being polite about it.

Bad Bunny, the son of a truck driver and a retired schoolteacher from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, who became the first artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year with an album entirely in Spanish.© Toglenn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Album of the Year speech was different. Quieter. He dedicated the award 'to all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams.' And then the line that will outlast the meme of him crying: 'The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So please, we need to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love.' The clip of him weeping in his seat hit 8 million views on X in four days.

The album itself — 'DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,' which translates to 'I should have taken more photos' — is a love letter to Puerto Rico that doubles as a history lesson. Bad Bunny called Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at UW–Madison, after reading his 2024 book 'Puerto Rico: A National History.' Meléndez-Badillo wrote roughly 75 pages of handwritten notes on Puerto Rican history, and those notes became the text running through all 17 of the album's track visualizers. The lead visualizer alone has been watched more than 115 million times. A professor's handwritten history notes, reaching an audience most academics can't imagine.

Tainy, the San Juan-born producer of Costa Rican and Dominican heritage who signed with Luny Tunes at 15 and helped build the sound of 'DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,' braiding traditional Puerto Rican genres into reggaeton.© Jpneon16, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The production team behind the sound — Tainy, a San Juan-born producer of Costa Rican and Dominican heritage who signed with Luny Tunes at 15; MAG, a Puerto Rican-Dominican producer raised in Brooklyn; and La Paciencia, Billboard's No. 1 Latin Producer of 2025 — built something that braided plena, bomba, and salsa into reggaeton without making it sound like a genre exercise. One track, 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,' draws a direct line between what happened to Hawaii after statehood and what's happening to Puerto Rico now — gentrification, displacement, colonialism with a friendlier name.

Bad Bunny beat seven other nominees for Album of the Year, including Kendrick Lamar, who had his own historic night. Kendrick, already the only rapper to win Record of the Year twice, took home five awards including Best Rap Album for 'GNX' and Record of the Year for 'Luther' with SZA. Any other year, that's the headline. This year, it was the second-biggest story in the room.

One week later, Bad Bunny walked onto the Super Bowl LX halftime stage at Levi's Stadium — the first Latino solo headliner — and performed almost entirely in Spanish for the biggest television audience of the year. Ricky Martin joined him for 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,' sitting in a white plastic chair under a plantain tree, recreating the album cover. Lady Gaga came out too. Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, Karol G, and Jessica Alba were spotted in the crowd. It was a victory lap disguised as a halftime show.

Through it all, Gabriela Berlingeri — the Puerto Rican jewelry designer who founded her brand Diciembre Veintinueve in 2020 — has been at his side. The two split in September 2024 but were spotted together at post-Grammy and post-Super Bowl events, and nobody who's paying attention thinks that's a coincidence. She's 32. He's 31. Puerto Rico is small enough that everyone knows everyone, and these two keep finding their way back.

In 2023, Bad Bunny's 'Un Verano Sin Ti' was the first Spanish-language album ever nominated for Album of the Year. He didn't win. Three years later, he came back with an album that wasn't just music but a cultural project — history lessons embedded in visualizers, colonialism critiqued in pop songs, a crying man on a Grammy stage telling an arena full of people to fight with love. His career Grammy count stands at nine. But it's the crying that people will remember.