The playful stage design on the 'Debí tirar más fotos' tour nods to the buildings of Humacao, an eastern Puerto Rican town with a long anti-colonial history.
This week’s social debate seems, on this occasion, to revolve around the controversy surrounding the huge Spanish-language music phenomenon. We are talking, of course, about the Casita of Benito Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny: a segment of his concert in which several public figures (until recently mostly women) dance live in front of the cameras.
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The event has been criticised by conservative feminists such as Paula Fraga (are the women in the audience who appear in it – Marta Ortega, Ester Expósito and others – being objectified?) but defended by journalists such as Ana Requena and Alejandra Martínez. They argue that there is a deliberate attempt to shine a light on feminism’s contradictions in order to instrumentalise it and, in particular, to scrutinise the women who attend the concerts of a genre which, although less and less, is still disparaged today: reggaeton.
At the heart of the controversy, though overshadowed by the ideological clash, is the physical building itself. And, like every detail of the touring project ‘Debí tirar más fotos’, it carries a strong, identity-affirming message linked to Boricua, or Puerto Rican, identity.
The Caribbean island belongs to the United States as a self-governing, unincorporated territory – an issue addressed in the tracks on ‘DTMF’ and in Bad Bunny’s public discourse. In practice, this means that its citizens have fewer rights than US citizens living in the states: they have no vote in presidential elections and no voting representation in Congress, and several activists campaigning for the island’s independence have been imprisoned.
From Indigenous peoples to enslaved labour on the sugar plantations
The building, ‘Architecture Digest’ explains, is based on a real house in Humacao, a town on Puerto Rico’s eastern coast where the short film of the same name as the album was shot. The municipal anthem makes clear its history, tied both to the island’s original inhabitants, the Taínos, and to the diaspora and enslavement of its Afro-Caribbean population up to the 19th century.
Modern-day Humacao was founded in 1722 on the ruins of the old Macao by settlers from the Canary Islands and Jíbaro Taínos, those who came from the mountainous region in the centre of the island. It takes its name from Jumacao, one of the last Indigenous leaders to fight the Spanish. His descendants kept this combative tradition alive when the Canarians arrived, protesting against the redistribution of farmland.
Because of its relative isolation until the 18th century, its architecture is distinctive. Humacao’s urban layout follows the grid laid down by the Laws of the Indies, based on the spatial relationship between square and church –as historian Norma Medina recounts (source in Spanish)– but its inhabitants continued to use materials such as straw, tiles and local timber.
From the 19th century onwards, elements of European neoclassicism, such as masonry, were introduced thanks in part to the boom in the sugar trade, built on enslaved Black labour that extended beyond Puerto Rico to the rest of Latin America. This style was incorporated into public buildings such as the town hall, the prison, the barracks and the cemetery.
From 22 September 1898, Humacao was transferred from Spanish to US government control (in what Spanish-speakers of the time knew as the Disaster of ’98, brought about by the loss of other colonies such as the Philippines and, finally, Cuba), changing the island’s status quo – it never achieved full independence – and shaping its architectural development.
It is through this fusion of Taíno, Spanish, Afro and US influences that the creator of the Casita, Mayna Magruder Ortiz, realised the potential of Humacao’s buildings beyond the feature-length film that Bad Bunny’s team originally produced.
Her inspiration for reinventing the house from the video for the purposes of the tour, ‘AD’ reports, came from houses that drew on their 19th-century heritage to create the housing estates for US expatriates in the 1950s. Specifically, the structure – built by the team led by Rafael Pérez – imitates a home in the white Levittown community in Toa Baja, the first development on the island planned for Second World War veterans. Fusion upon fusion.
The interior decoration of the house also draws on Antillean pieces and works by Puerto Rican artists such as Lorenzo Homar (co-founder of the Puerto Rican Art Centre after an early spell in the United States and known as ‘El Maestro’) or Alexis Díaz, an artist and muralist who should not be confused with baseball player Alexis Omar Díaz, himself born in Humacao.
Bad Bunny, who follows in the anti-colonial tradition of other Puerto Rican artists such as Residente and his siblings, singer iLe and producer Eduardo Cabra, all former members of Calle 13, will continue his tour of Spain and the rest of Europe until mid-July.
