The much-anticipated video for Bad Bunny’s song “NUEVAYoL” premiered on the Fourth of July, an auspicious release date from Puerto Rico’s biggest global star, who has long served as a powerful political voice across the archipelago and its diaspora. The track is part of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), an album released on the eve of Three Kings Day (January 5), which has since remained a fixture on global music charts. Benito’s historic summer residency at El Coliseo José Miguel Agrelot, Puerto Rico’s largest venue, affectionately known as “El Choli”, was inaugurated shortly after, on July 11.
In “NUEVAYoL,” Afro-Dominican photographer and director Renell Medrano crafts a visual homage to Puerto Rican life, culture, and kinship. Shot in the Bronx and across New York City, the video unfolds like a Nuyorico palimpsest; a past that collides with the eternal present of our living memory. The cultural vibrancy, the texture of language, the sounds and smells of un verano en nueva yol flicker just beyond our reach in this ever-accelerating city. Together, Benito and Medrano revisit the tense and tender histories of Puerto Ricans in NYC, histories always under threat from erasure and displacement. Their collaboration delivers a clear message against gentrification and forced migration, both for the island and for the diaspora. While the song “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii” decries the displacement of abuela (“quieren que abuelita se vaya”), NUEYAYol telegraphs this message to the diaspora, underscoring the vulnerability of our abuelita, and ourselves, in the rapidly gentrifying contemporary New York City landscape.
The video resonates deeply with viewers raised in New York. It enshrines the histories we inherited, the ones we lived through, and the ones we are still struggling to archive. To watch “NUEVAYoL” is to be flooded by grief, pride, and the tender ache of nostalgia; for what we survived, what we documented, and what we may not have cherished enough in the moment. For me, the most arresting moment arrives around the 3:15 mark: four young men sit talking atop a car, framed by the golden light of a summer afternoon.
This scene echoes a powerful personal and public image: a photo of my late cousin Danny with three friends in Williamsburg’s Los Sures neighborhood in the early 1980s. This iconic image, captured by Diego Echeverría in his 1984 film Los Sures (later remastered and re-released through the UnionDocs project Living Los Sures), seems to serve as a visual reference in the “NUEVAYoL” video. The afterlife of this photograph, the afterlife of those young men, testifies to a time when violence and poverty threatened to kill off each generation of Puerto Ricans who touched US soil. Instead, new generations grew in their place, remaking the city, reconstituting their lives, and carrying forward the rooted resistance that is truly evocative of the Puerto Rican experience.
The image of Danny and his friends gained renewed significance in Los Sures when the community created a mural in their memory, weaving Danny and his friend Tito into the social fabric of this historic Puerto Rican neighborhood. Over the years, I have dedicated myself to exploring Danny’s story, conducting interviews with family members, and uncovering the rich histories of Los Sures. Through this work, I have come to realize how Puerto Ricans, as colonial subjects of both the United States and Spain, have persistently resisted erasure and dispossession by capturing their own stories and those of their communities. Inspired by the images produced by Black, Nuyorican, and community photographers, NUEVAYoL offers its own archive of afterimages. Medrano’s carefully composed visual language creates a haunting sense of déjà vu—a re-remembering of the intimate and collective moments that shape our diasporic lives.
When the famed salsa orchestra El Gran Combo released their chart-topping song in 1973, they likely did not imagine that more than half a century later, generations around the world would still be singing its iconic lyrics, or that a young man from Vega Baja would sample the song in an indelible tribute to Puerto Rico’s diasporic mecca. Like Benito, my family also traces its roots to Vega Baja, a municipality steeped in histories of slavery and resistance. Known as la ciudad del melao melao, the city of sweet molasses, due to its sugarcane legacy, Vega Baja is a critical yet understudied site of Afro-Puerto Rican history. While Bad Bunny’s relationship to Blackness has been publicly examined and debated, NUEVAYoL offers space to reflect on his ongoing engagement with Puerto Rico’s African ancestry, Black cultural creativity, and Afro-Caribbean life in the diaspora. With its homage to Black photography and its casting of Afro-Latinx leads and extras, NUEVAYoL centers Black Puerto Rican culture and the blend of Black diasporic cultures that make up New York City, placing the Puerto Rican diaspora firmly within the broader archive of Black Caribbean and diasporic history.
In many ways, the “NUEVAYoL” music video is a tribute to the pioneros, those who traveled to New York by steamer and by air from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century to become farm and factory laborers. Puerto Ricans migrated to New York in droves, co-creating iconic cultural forms alongside other migrant communities, including those shaped by the Great Migration of African Americans, co-creating iconic cultural touchstones with other migrant communities like Jazz, Salsa, Hip-Hop, and other genres and artistic movements. Puerto Ricans also established political, cultural, and social clubs, as well as casitas, across New York City, though few have withstood eradication efforts. This legacy helps explain why Benito’s tribute to Toñita’s Caribbean Social Club resonates so deeply with both the diaspora and those on the archipelago. Toñita’s stands as one of the last remaining social clubs in Los Sures, the same neighborhood where the iconic photo of my cousin Danny was taken.
This homage to the Nuyorican struggle arrives at a moment when the Puerto Rican population in New York is declining due to gentrification, aging communities, and the upward-and-outward mobility of newer generations. The looming erasure of our histories and political achievements demands that we return to our archives, remix our resistance strategies, and confront the uncertain futures that face us in both the United States and Puerto Rico. Just one day before the release of the “NUEVAYoL” video, the United States Congress passed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a legislative initiative that will serve to undercut the social safety net for millions. Among its many consequences, the bill will drastically reduce Pell Grant access for low-income students, threatening educational equity and access. Not coincidentally, the institutions most heavily impacted are in New York and Puerto Rico, including Hunter College and the University of Puerto Rico.
Despite this bleak backdrop, “NUEVAYoL” insists on remembering the beauty and struggle we have inherited, survived, and continue to embody. The video opens with the celebration of a quinceañera, a sweet fifteen, a rite of passage for many Puerto Rican and Latina girls as they mark their transition into womanhood. What follows are scenes of young and old alike, joyful, street life, dancing scenes, and resistance.
In another scene, a boombox crackles with static as a voice eerily mimicking Donald Trump’s cadence pours through the radio, offering an apology to Latinos and lauding immigrants including “Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Columbians, Venezuelans, Cubans….” The listeners, the same four young men from the car scene, turn it off without hesitation, brushing away the hollow words of a president who has repeatedly demonstrated a virulent hatred toward immigrants and minorities. This outdoor scene is followed by private scenes at home: families tending to children, nursing, soothing crying babies. The juxtaposition of public spectacle and intimate care weaves a layered collage of Puerto Rican life in the diaspora. The video, filled with Latinos of all ethnicities, insists that we remember a fundamental truth: together we are stronger. This is also the message, written in Spanish, that lingers as the screen fades to black.
This layered movement between public noise and private care sets the stage for one of the video’s most powerful gestures of collective memory and political defiance; the recreation of two iconic acts of political protest: the draping of the Puerto Rican flag over the Statue of Liberty. The first occurred in 1977, in response to the imprisonment of Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores Rodríguez, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Oscar Collazo, all members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement. The second took place in 2000, when Tito Kayak and five other Vieques activists climbed the statue to protest the US military’s toxic presence and the routine bombing of the island town of Vieques. These acts of public and symbolic defiance have become indelible markers of Puerto Rican resistance and the ongoing fight for self-determination. In revisiting these afterimages, we are invited to reflect on how the supposed symbols of liberty, refuge, and abolition have been used to expose the hypocrisy of US imperialism and its anti-immigrant policies.
More than nostalgia, the ethos of “NUEVAYoL” offers the possibility of reclaiming our rightful place in history and remembering our ties to each other. The video is a prompt toward coalition with one another and other Latinos, an essential politic, especially in this political moment. Particularly salient now, when Black, Latino, and other marginalized peoples are being detained, deported, and disappeared without due process and through a system ripe with racism, bigotry, and nativism. Just a few weeks ago officers from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE entered the National Museum of Puerto Rican History and Culture in Chicago, leading to a rapid response from cultural and political leaders from Humboldt Park and beyond. This poof in the flesh of the strength of Puerto Rican coalitional politics, because even though Puerto Ricans have US citizenship and would technically not be subject to detention and deportation, the Puerto Rican community refused to allow ICE and the state to terrorize their friends and neighbors who are made vulnerable by these anti-immigration measures.
By revisiting iconic photographic images and intimate moments, Medrano and Benito remind us that DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is more than an album title. It is a call to recognize that we are living history. Our photographs, whether public or private, hold evidence of our love, our lives, and our struggles. These afterimages are important keepsakes and political tools. They incite us to action and demand that we pause and reflect. They help us retell our past and inspire us to craft futures for ourselves and our communities.
References
Medrano, Renell, director. BAD BUNNY – NUEVAYoL (Video Oficial) | DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Youtube, Rimas Entertainment, 4 July 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU5V5WZVcVE&list=RDKU5V5WZVcVE&start_radio=1. Accessed Aug. 2025.
Ruiz Vega, Omar. “New York, Puerto Rico and Cuba’s Latin Music Scenes and the Emergence of Salsa Music: A Comparative Analysis.” CentroPR, Centro Journal 32, no.2 (SUMMER 2020), 10 Apr. 2024, centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/publications/vol-xxxii-no-2-summer-2020/.
Rivera, Raquel Z. “Boricuas from the Hip Hop Zone: Notes on Race and Ethnic Relations in NYC.” CentroPR, Centro Journal 8, no. 1 & 2 (1996), 10 Apr. 2024, centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/publications/vol-viii-no-1-2-spring-1996/.
Serrano, Basilio. “Puerto Rican Musicians of the Harlem Renaissance.” CentroPR, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37719206.pdf. Accessed Aug. 2007.