Identity sovereignty begins in the refusal to let dominant narratives define your moral worth, your masculinity, your intelligence, your danger, your legitimacy.

I am not Puerto Rican.

I am Brazilian.
I am Latino.
I am also someone who has learned how easily other cultures get flattened inside the dominant culture’s spectacle.

So when I watched Bad Bunny take over the Super Bowl halftime stage, I did not see just a performance. I saw something far more delicate and far more powerful.

I saw joy occupying a space that has historically demanded translation.

Palm trees. Domino tables. The casita. Everyday Puerto Rican life staged not as caricature, but as normality. Spanish not translated, not softened, not apologised for. Hawaii invoked, not as paradise, but as colonial memory.

For fifteen minutes, joy did not ask for permission.

That is why backlash was inevitable.

Antonio Gramsci wrote about cultural hegemony, the idea that power survives not only through force, but through what feels natural. Through what becomes common sense. Through what is rarely questioned because it looks neutral.

The Super Bowl is not neutral. It is ritualised Americanness. Corporate symmetry. English as default. Masculinity as performance. Commercial spectacle dressed as unity.

When a Puerto Rican artist fills that stage with unapologetic language, aesthetic softness, colonial memory, and diasporic pride, it does not merely entertain. It interrupts the blueprint.

Stuart Hall would describe this as a struggle over representation. Who gets to define normal. Who gets to be legible without explanation. Who decides what counts as mainstream.

The discomfort many expressed was not only about understanding the lyrics.

It was about understanding that the stage was no longer centred around them.

What interested me most was not the predictable outrage from ideological media spaces. It was the internal discomfort.

Some Latinos argued that he does not represent them. That his aesthetic is too soft. Too artsy. Too unmasculine. That his Spanish is difficult to understand. That he is embarrassing.

This is not ignorance. It is adaptation.

Frantz Fanon wrote about how colonial systems shape psychological landscapes. When proximity to dominant norms offers safety, mobility, and belonging, those norms begin to feel protective.

Assimilation becomes survival strategy.

So when someone resists dominant masculinity, resists linguistic hierarchy, resists the need to translate themselves into comfort, it can feel destabilising even to those who share the same heritage.

Individual kindness and structural inequality can coexist. Many of us have good American friends. Many of us have benefited from opportunity.

But structural power does not dissolve because interpersonal warmth exists.

Foucault reminds us that power operates through discourse, through what is considered normal, professional, respectable. It is rarely loud. It is embedded in tone, in expectation, in what goes unquestioned.

When joy disrupts that embedded norm, it becomes political.

One of the most striking references in the performance invoked Hawaii, not as tourism, but as warning. Colonial memory placed inside entertainment.

What happened to Hawaii is not distant history. It is a living condition shaped by land dispossession, cultural erosion, and economic displacement.

When Puerto Rico and Hawaii are symbolically aligned, development and erasure appear in the same frame.

This is not hostility toward a nation. It is literacy about power.

And literacy can look like joy when joy refuses to shrink.

I also watched a Latino comedian invert crime stereotypes, exaggerating them until they collapsed under their own absurdity.

He was not analysing headlines. He was not writing a policy critique. He was simply performing.

But in that exaggeration, he revealed something important. Narratives about danger are authored. They are constructed. They attach themselves to bodies before those bodies speak.

Humour became sovereignty in that moment.

Identity sovereignty begins there. In the refusal to let dominant narratives define your moral worth, your masculinity, your intelligence, your danger, your legitimacy.

This is not abstract to me.

It is why I wrote Migrant of the Quiet Star.

I chose a fantasy world not to escape reality, but to make its wounds readable.

In the novel, Arise arrives in a new land already interpreted. His accent is read before he speaks. His posture is decoded before he explains himself. Rumours shape his moral reputation before he can defend it. Others narrate him in advance.

His journey is not only geographical. It is interpretive.

There is a moment in the story where Arise realises that every name placed on him, immigrant, suspicious, lesser, morally ambiguous, has been spoken louder than his own voice. He carries them like dust on his skin.

And then something quiet happens.

He stops rehearsing explanations.

He stops shrinking his gestures.

He stops translating himself into safety.

He does not conquer the system. He does not overthrow power.

He simply refuses to internalise its script.

That refusal becomes his first moment of joy.

Not loud joy. Not celebratory spectacle.

But a grounded, internal recognition.

He belongs to himself before he belongs to anyone’s interpretation.

That moment mirrors what I saw on the Super Bowl stage.

Joy not as entertainment, but as reclamation.

Joy as the visible expression of narrative autonomy.

When culture survives loudly and unapologetically, it unsettles those who believed neutrality was theirs to define.

When an individual survives quietly and refuses imposed names, it unsettles internalised hierarchy.

Joy becomes resistance because joy signals self-definition.

Sometimes resistance is not shouted from a stage, it is worn quietly across the chest, a simple declaration: I am still here.

And sometimes sovereignty is not a manifesto. It is a sentence you carry on your body.

Migrant of the Quiet Star is available globally through major bookstores and library distribution channels.

It is not written as accusation. It is written as invitation.

An invitation to recognise the names that have been placed on us.

An invitation to wash them away gently.

An invitation to understand that belonging does not require erasure.

When joy appears on a national stage, backlash reveals the blueprint.

When joy appears in a migrant’s interior life, sovereignty begins.

And perhaps that is the connection.

The stage was never neutral.
The body was never neutral.

But the right to define ourselves always was.