BAD BUNNY'S DTMF: THE MEANING BEHIND HIS MOST POLITICAL LYRICS ABOUT PUERTO RICO

Since Bad Bunny's sixth studio album, titled DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (Spanish for “I should have taken more photos"), came out in January 2025, the project has been collecting rave reviews from critics and historic firsts, deepening its significance even further.

From viral social media trends to chart-topping feats, the legacy of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is etched in Latin music history. Just over a year after its release, the album became the first all-Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, breaking down even more boundaries than it first set out to.

Ahead of Bad Bunny's momentous Super Bowl halftime show, Genius reported a 467% spike in page views for the English translations of the album's song, with more and more non-Spanish speakers seeking to unpack the full meaning behind the lyrics resonating all across the world.

“I've always dreamed that my music would be heard all over the world,” Bad Bunny told Apple Music's Zane Lowe shortly after the release of the album. “This project is a deeper journey to show people who I really am and where I come from.”

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is, without a doubt, Bad Bunny’s magnum opus, and it’s also an ode to his native Puerto Rico; every single detail, from its cover to its genres, pays homage to the island where he was born and raised and its culture, which expands beyond the insular borders. “This project is dedicated to Puerto Ricans all around the world,” the back of the album read alongside another stamp: “From Puerto Rico to the world.”

To further emphasize the message, the artist announced that before embarking on a world tour, he would be doing a 30-date residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico; only island residents could purchase tickets for the first nine shows, with the rest open to the general public.

Throughout the 17 tracks in the album, Bad Bunny paints a picture of Puerto Rico for those who call it home. Sonically, he taps into the sounds of the island with salsa, plena, bomba, and, of course, reggaeton. He interpolates and samples Puerto Rican artists, from Gary Núñez and Héctor y Tito to El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico and Andy Montañez. But DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is more than just an idyllic postcard; it is also an act of activism and cultural reclamation.

Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, knows his music knows no borders, so, alongside the project, he also released visualizers going over the history of Puerto Rico with the help of Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“I’ve always wanted to take academic knowledge outside the ivory tower, and this project has allowed me to share our history on a global platform,” Meléndez-Badillo told Teen Vogue in Spanish, which I have translated here. “Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced. There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”

For the non-Spanish speakers unable to read the visualizers, which give the album an added layer of context, Meléndez-Badillo recommends looking up the English works of the Puerto Rican Studies Association and Hunter College’s CENTRO: Center for Puerto Rican Studies. However, some of the history and politics are also embedded in the album itself.

“There’s a lot of political lines that you can’t tell are political,” Bad Bunny himself admitted in an interview with the New York Times. “I’m a normal human being, and I have feelings, and I get mad, and I get happy, and that’s how I make my music. Sometimes you want to cry, sometimes you want to dance, sometimes you want to fall in love, and sometimes you want to talk about political things.”

Below, we take a closer look at 10 of the most political lines in Bad Bunny's DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS—explicit and otherwise—and explain their meaning.

1. “En mi vida fuiste turista”

Though the first half of the album contains references to multiple elements and people in Puerto Rican culture, it's towards the latter half of the album that we start finding the most outwardly political references. In track 11, “Turista,” Bad Bunny sings about heartbreak while also subtly denouncing uninformed mass tourism.

The song's chorus goes: “En mi vida fuiste turista, tú sólo viste lo mejor de mí y no lo que yo sufría. Te fuiste sin saber el porqué, el porqué de mis heridas, y no te tocaba a ti curarlas. Viniste a pasarla bien, y la pasamos bien," which translates to: “In my life, you were a tourist. You only saw the best of me and not when I was suffering, you left without knowing the why, the reason for my wound, and they weren't yours to heal. You came to have a good time, and we had a good time.”

While the chorus is clearly an analogy for transient love, it also sheds light on the tourism Puerto Rico receives yearly. People go to the island to have a good time, unaware of the battles locals are fighting and the problems they are facing, and not caring about leaving it in the best condition.

2. “Te fuiste como la luz”

It wouldn't really be a Bad Bunny album if he didn't call out electricity blackouts. In the Christmas song “PIToRRO DE COCO,” (track 13) in reference to the quintessentially Boricua alcoholic beverage of the same name, Bad Bunny sings: “Tú eres mala, te fuiste como la luz,” which means “You're bad, you left like the light.”

Power outages are the order of the day in Puerto Rico. On New Year's Eve, just days before Bad Bunny released DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS and a couple of days after “PIToRRO DE COCO” came out as a single, the nation suffered an islandwide blackout that left millions without electrical power. Per CNN, on Jan. 1, 25% of the island remained in the dark. The reason? “Long-lasting structural issues with both generation and distribution, involving GeneraPR, one of the companies operating the power plants, and LUMA Energy, the Canadian-American company responsible for transmission on the island," according to the outlet. To make matters worse, CNN notes Puerto Ricans pay twice as much for electricity as customers in the mainland U.S.

Though this reference is quick and chirpy, blackouts are a recurring motif in Bad Bunny's oeuvre—take, for example, the 2024 single “Una Velita" or Un Verano Sin Tí's “El Apagón," which literally means “The Blackout."

3. “No quería irse pa' Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó”

Without a doubt, the most politically charged song in the album is “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii"—which Bad Bunny introduces as “a dream," or more like a nightmare. From the get-go, the song starts off by personifying the island of Puerto Rico. “She looks so pretty even though she's doing badly,” he sings in the opening verse. By the end of the first, we find the first lines alluding to gentrification and the displacement of Puerto Ricans.

“No quería irse pa' Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó," which he sings about a crying jíbaro—the word used in PR to describe natives who live in the mountain range and are often farmers—literally translates to, “He didn't want to go to Orlando, but the scoundrel pushed him out.”

Though the majority of the Puerto Rican diaspora resides in New York, Orlando has also been a main migration destination for Puerto Ricans since the 1900s, with many jíbaros moving under government-sponsored agricultural worker programs. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time, the number of Puerto Ricans living in Florida had surpassed 1 million due to the island’s economic recession, forcing people to seek job opportunities in the mainland. In 2017, shortly after Hurricane María, the worst in Puerto Rican history, The New York Times reported that more than 168,000 people had landed in Florida from Puerto Rico, escaping not only the immediate aftermath but the political climate and “el corrupto”—i.e., corruption, perpetuated within the government and from outside forces.

4. “Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa”

In the chorus for “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii," Bad Bunny openly denounces the gentrification of Puerto Rico. “They want to take the river and the beach away from me,” he sings, referring to the many outside investors buying property on the island. “They want my neighborhood and my grandma gone,” he continues, later changing the latter half to “They want your children to leave.”

This “influx of the affluent new settlers,” as the New York Times calls it, is exacerbated by tax breaks under Act 60 and also serves as inspiration for the short film starring Jacobo Morales and an adorable toad concho, an endangered native species threatened due to habitat loss and “introduced species”—an analogy of the native Puerto Rican.

5. “No sueltes la bandera ni olvides el lelolai, que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái”

Also from “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii," with this line, Bad Bunny encourages Puerto Ricans to be unapologetically Puerto Rican while also renouncing statehood. “No sueltes la bandera ni olvides el lelolai” translates to “Don't let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai.” For many Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Rican flag is a symbol of not only pride but also independence. As Meléndez-Badillo explains in the visualizer for “NUEVAYoL,” the Puerto Rican flag as we know it today was created in 1895, mirroring the Cuban one with inverted colors as “a sign of solidarity between both Caribbean nations in their struggle for the longed-for independence.” The “lelolai,” a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas song, is also mentioned as a reminder to never let go of Puerto Rican idiosyncrasies.

The second half of the line translated to: “I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawaii." After losing their monarchy and years of annexation, Hawaii officially became the 50th state on August 21, 1959—and the statehood changed not only the islands' economy but also its customs and livelihoods. As the New York Times noted, as a state, Hawaii was one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. in the '70s, with beachfront land being especially coveted to exploit for tourism.

“There was an illegal seizure of all of our national lands, followed by settlement over the next century that has displaced Hawaiians. And after statehood in 1959, there’s been nonstop housing development and hotels," Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, a professor and chair of the Department of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, told Teen Vogue in 2021, when Native Hawaiians comprised just around 10% of the state’s population.

6. “Ojalá que los míos nunca se muden”

“DtMF” is making the rounds for inspiring people to treasure memories with those who left us too soon on social media, but the song also features lines that serve as an ode to those forced to move out of Puerto Rico for the aforementioned reasons. “Another beautiful sunset I see in San Juan,” Bad Bunny sings in the first verse. “I'm enjoying all the things those who leave miss,” he continues.

In the song's chorus, after the uber-popular “I should have taken more photos,” Bad Bunny sings: “Ojalá que los míos nunca se muden," or “I wish my people would never move," manifesting that outside circumstances will never force his loved ones to leave the island.

7. “Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera, por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera”

To close off the album, Bad Bunny gets outwardly political again in “LA MuDANZA,” a highly personal track of his and his family's journey in Puerto Rico and, ultimately, being unapologetically Boricua. “They killed people here for waving the flag, that's why I bring it anywhere I want now," he sings to close off the song's first verse.

The verse refers to Law 53 of 1948, better known as the Gag Law or la Ley de La Mordaza in Spanish. Signed by Jesús T. Piñero, the law aimed to suppress the independence movement and, as such, criminalized the ownership and display of the Puerto Rican flag, among other things. It remained in place until 1957, when it was declared unconstitutional for violating freedom of speech, a right protected by both the Puerto Rican and the U.S. constitutions.

8. “Pongan un tema mío el día que traigan a Hostos"

In the song's second verse, Bad Bunny references Eugenio María de Hostos y de Bonilla, a scholar, lawyer, and advocate for Puerto Rican independence. Hostos died in the Dominican Republic in 1903 and is buried in the National Pantheon of Santo Domingo. Famously, his last wish is for his remains to be returned to Puerto Rico when, and only when, Puerto Rico is granted independence. “If I die, I hope you never forget my face and that you play one of my songs when they bring Hostos back,” the line in “LA MuDANZA" goes.

9. “En la caja la bandera azul clarito"

Immediately after the Hostos reference, and still with the analogy of his own death, Bad Bunny references his “caja” (slang for coffin) adorned with the Puerto Rican flag—but in “azul clarito,” meaning light blue. Meléndez-Badillo explains that the original Puerto Rican flag featured a sky blue color that was later changed to navy, similar to the one in the U.S. flag, by the Government of Puerto Rico. To this day, the Puerto Rican flag with light blue colors is preferred by those who are pro-independence.

10. "De aquí nadie me saca, de aquí yo no me muevo”

The outro for the song summarizes Bad Bunny's feelings, and Puerto Ricans' as a whole, towards the island: “Nobody can take me out of here, I'm not going anywhere. Tell them this is my house, where my grandpa was born. I am from P f*ckin' R."

This anti-gentrification call is a constant in Bad Bunny's songs, not only in this album. “El Apagón" also features an outro sung by Gabriela Berlingeri with the same sentiment. “I don't want to leave; they should be the ones to go. What belongs to me, they keep,” she sings.

Meléndez-Badillo, this is the key message of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS as a whole. “The album marks a political moment in Puerto Rico in which we are thinking about the struggle to exist in the face of displacement and cultural co-optation,” he tells Teen Vogue. "It is an album that reaffirms our existence and cultural legacy. More than an album, it is a proposal to affirm that we do not want to leave Puerto Rico and that many of those who have left have done so out of necessity, not free will."

Editor's note: This article was originally published in January 2025. It has since been updated to reflect the milestones of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.