His remarks came after recent data found that 75% of all newly eligible voters under age 21 in the U.S. territory hadn’t registered to vote and amid a decline in voter turnout.
Global reggaeton star Bad Bunny almost never bares his feelings outside of his songs. But the artist recently stunned fans — and critics — after he did exactly that during an interview in which he pleaded for voters in his homeland of Puerto Rico, who have become increasingly apathetic about the U.S. territory’s upcoming election, to not downplay the election’s importance.
“I really care about Puerto Rico and I don’t know if it’s the weight of … I want to cry and everything,” the singer said in Spanish as he attempted to swallow back tears in a clear effort to contain himself from crying. “It’s good to go out on the streets to protest, to let ourselves be heard as people, but I think that the biggest act of protest is to vote against the people who have led us to this mess on Nov. 5.”
Bad Bunny made the statements as part of a wide-ranging interview with Puerto Rican YouTuber El Tony posted on Labor Day.
Since then, clips of the interview have become the source of countless memes on social media, from people posting what outfits they’ll wear on Election Day to fan-generated jingles echoing some people’s discontent with the political party that’s currently in power.
It also seems to be having an early effect in empowering disenfranchised voters frustrated with local party politics and motivating newly eligible young voters to register to vote before the Sept. 21 deadline.
“Voting is very important, especially if you are young. Deciding the future of the place where we live, where we grew up, don’t let others decide it,” Bad Bunny, 30, said in Monday’s interview.
A day after the interview was posted online, college students at the University of Puerto Rico were hosting a voter registration event on the Río Piedras campus when the entire school lost power, serving as a bleak reminder of Puerto Rico’s new normal: one in which widespread power outages have only become longer and more recurrent in recent years as permanent reconstruction of its hurricane-ravaged electrical grid has been pending since 2017.
Hundreds of students who had attended the event were unable to register to vote Tuesday following the outage, but organizers urged people to return Wednesday. About 300 students became newly registered voters and dozens more updated their existing voter registration with their latest address.
