Culture & Leadership
Sugar Cane at the Fifty-Yard Line: How Boricua Pride Builds Economic Stamina
The first thing I noticed was the sugar cane.
Laura Camila Rivera · February 11, 2026
The first thing I noticed was the sugar cane.
Before Bad Bunny sang a word, before the bass dropped on "Tití Me Preguntó," the camera panned across a field of workers in pava hats, cutting stalks with machetes under stadium lights. A young Dominican man with a guitar looked into the lens and said, in Spanish, "Qué rico es ser latino." How wonderful it is to be Latino.
I was sitting in Levi's Stadium when this happened. I was inside the building, close enough to feel the sound in my chest, surrounded by tens of thousands of people who were about to witness something that I think many of us will be processing for a long time.
I work within the NFL ecosystem. As a Marketing Operations and Career Development Advisor at the NFL Player Care Foundation (PCF) , I help retired players navigate one of the most difficult transitions a professional athlete faces: building a life after football. Just days before the halftime show, I helped organize the 8th Annual Super Bowl Career Fair, connecting over 200 attendees with opportunities across industries. I understand the machinery behind that stage. I understand how deliberate every element of this event is, from the advertising rates to the camera angles to the selection of who gets to stand at the center of it all.
So when a Puerto Rican artist stepped onto the most commercially significant cultural platform in the United States and performed thirteen minutes of music almost entirely in Spanish, I understood it as more than a concert. I understood it the way I understand workforce data and migration patterns, and the policy research I studied during my graduate years. I understood it as a signal.
And I felt it the way you feel something when it finally confirms what you have spent your whole career believing.
In case you missed it, let me tell you what happened on that field, because the details matter.
Bad Bunny opened by walking through those sugar cane stalks, past domino tables and piragua carts and women getting their nails done, which is to say he opened by walking through the texture of everyday Puerto Rican life. Sugar cane is not just a crop on the island. It is the material record of centuries of colonial labor, from Spanish plantations worked by enslaved Africans to the American corporations that took control after 1898 and extracted enormous profits from Puerto Rican land and hands. To begin the show, there was history. No apology, no translation, but with an acknowledgment that the ground we build on has always been complicated.
From there, the stage transformed into La Casita, the pink cement house that has become a symbol of the Puerto Rican homes now being displaced by gentrification and overdevelopment. Pedro Pascal, Young Miko, Cardi B, Karol G, and Jessica Alba danced on its porch like guests at a marquesina party, the kind where someone's tío falls asleep in a plastic chair, and a cousin wakes him up when the good song comes on. Lady Gaga appeared and sang a salsa arrangement of "Die With a Smile" while the crowd roared. Ricky Martin joined for "Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii," a song that draws deliberate parallels between Hawaii's and Puerto Rico's colonial histories. During "El Apagón," dancers climbed electrical poles, and sparks exploded across the field, a direct reference to the blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico since Hurricane María devastated the power grid in 2017, made worse by a privatization deal that has left the island's infrastructure fragile and its people resourceful out of necessity.
And then, at the end, Bad Bunny spoke in English for the only time. He said, "God bless America." But before anyone could reduce it to a simple patriotic gesture, he began naming countries. Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Colombia. Venezuela. Panama. Costa Rica. Nicaragua. Honduras. El Salvador. Guatemala. Mexico. Cuba. Dominican Republic. Jamaica. Haiti. United States. Canada. Puerto Rico. Flag bearers sprinted across the field behind him. He spiked a football that read "Together, We Are America." And on the screen above the stadium, in letters large enough for 140 million viewers to read, appeared the words he had spoken at the Grammys one week earlier: "The only thing more powerful than hate is love."
I want to be precise about what I saw in that stadium, because precision matters when people try to reduce a moment like this to content. This was not content. This was a cultural argument made in real time, on the largest stage available, without compromise or translation, and received by one of the largest audiences in American broadcast history.
I have spent the last couple of years studying what happens when Puerto Rican talent leaves the island and does not come back. My capstone research (shoutout Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy and National Urban Fellows ) examined the economic, political, and social dimensions of Puerto Rico's brain drain, a phenomenon that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has been tracking for over a decade and that the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College has documented with particular rigor. Centro's research estimates that between 114,000 and 213,000 Puerto Ricans relocated to the mainland in the years following Hurricane María alone, accelerating a demographic inversion that had been building for over a decade. There are now more Puerto Ricans living stateside than on the island itself, roughly 5.8 million in the diaspora compared to about 3.2 million at home. The numbers are staggering beyond that single wave. Puerto Rico's labor force contracted by 24 percent between 2007 and 2019. Participation rates remain among the lowest of any U.S. jurisdiction. Sixty percent of Puerto Rican graduates with advanced degrees end up underemployed or working outside their field. The wage gap between the island and the mainland means that a professional can often double their salary simply by moving, a disparity that the Center for a New Economy (CNE), Puerto Rico's foremost policy think tank, has argued cannot be addressed through fiscal austerity alone but requires a fundamentally reimagined industrial strategy that invests in local talent and productive capacity.
Migration scholars like Beine, Docquier, and Rapoport describe brain drain as a feedback loop. Skilled workers leave. Local institutions weaken. The weakening accelerates further departure. And once that cycle begins, reversing it requires more than economic incentives. It requires something harder to quantify.
It requires the belief that staying is worth it.
This is something I have thought about for most of my adult life. As the president of ALPFA Puerto Rico , I work every day to build professional pipelines and leadership development on the island, because I know from experience that when talented people do not see a future for themselves in the place they come from, they leave. And when they leave, the ecosystem contracts. And when the ecosystem contracts, the next generation of talented people has even less reason to stay.
What I learned from my research, from working with retired NFL players navigating career transitions, and from building a marketing studio that serves minority-driven businesses is that economic decisions are never purely financial. They are also emotional. They are shaped by whether someone feels like a valued participant in the story being told about their community, their country, their future.
Scholars at Stanford and Harvard have studied this phenomenon extensively. Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen found that brief interventions reinforcing a sense of social belonging significantly improved academic persistence and health outcomes among students from underrepresented backgrounds. The mechanism is not complicated: when people believe they belong, they invest more. They persist longer. They build where they are rather than searching for somewhere else.
The World Bank's 2023 World Development Report on migration found a parallel dynamic in diaspora communities. Emotional attachment to homeland increased the likelihood of transnational economic participation, including remittances, investment, and knowledge transfer.
Pride, in other words, is not a feeling you display at a parade and then put away. Pride is infrastructure. It is the material that sustains effort over time, across setbacks, through the slow, frustrating work of building something in imperfect conditions.
Pride builds economic stamina.
I want to be careful with that phrase, because I do not mean it as a slogan. I mean it as something I have observed repeatedly in the communities I serve.
Economic stamina is the sustained willingness of a community to invest in itself even when the structural environment is hostile. It is the young professional in Bayamón who chooses to stay and open a practice rather than accept a higher offer in Orlando. It is the entrepreneur in Santurce who applies for a loan she is not sure she will get. It is the teacher who shows up for another school year despite salary freezes, because the students need her and she is not ready to give up on the system that needs her too.
That willingness does not come from nowhere. It comes from seeing yourself reflected in the story of what your society values. It comes from evidence that your identity is an asset, not an obstacle. It comes from watching someone who looks like you, sounds like you, and carries the same history you do, standing on the largest stage in the country and performing without apology.
I watched 137.8 million people tune in to a Spanish-language performance. I watched the NFL, an institution I know from the inside, center Puerto Rican and Latino culture at the peak of its commercial calendar. I watched the market speak. And markets are behavioral evidence. They do not lie about what audiences want.
Nielsen has reported that Latino consumers command more than two trillion dollars in purchasing power, with outsized representation among younger demographics. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that Latinos will remain one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population for decades to come. And the scope of that economic presence is even larger than most people realize. The Latino Donor Collaborative's 2025 U.S. Latino GDP Report found that U.S. Latino GDP has reached $4 trillion. If counted as a standalone economy, that would rank fifth in the world, on pace to surpass Germany and Japan by 2027. Latino-owned businesses have grown 57 percent over the past decade, compared to just five percent for non-Latino-owned businesses. These are not projections about a distant future. They describe what is already happening.
Cultural centrality often precedes capital allocation. Once an audience is recognized as central rather than niche, investment patterns shift. Talent pipelines open. Brand partnerships diversify. The question of who belongs in the room stops being theoretical and starts being economic.
I have moved between Puerto Rico and the mainland more times than I can count. I have been the only Latina in rooms where decisions were being made about the communities I come from. I have founded organizations and built coalitions and written policy recommendations and organized career fairs and run a business and still, in quiet moments, wonder whether the systems I am working within actually see the people I am working for.
I do not say this for sympathy. I say it because I think many people in my position carry that question around with them, and it is heavy, and most of the time, we do not talk about it because there is always more work to do.
What happened in that stadium gave me something I do not experience often enough. It gave me a glimmer. A moment of pure, specific, embodied confirmation that the trajectory is real. That the work is not isolated. That the future we are building is coming into view not just in policy papers and strategic plans but in the largest, loudest, most visible arenas of American life.
I have built my career on strategic optimism, which I define as disciplined belief paired with sustained action. It is the practice of interpreting progress as momentum rather than anomaly. It is not naivety. It is a choice rooted in evidence and reinforced by the stubborn decision to keep building even when the conditions are uncertain.
That night in Santa Clara, strategic optimism did not feel like a discipline. It felt like joy.
Let me be clear about what a halftime show cannot do. It cannot restructure Puerto Rico's debt. It cannot restore the power grid. It cannot reverse decades of austerity or fix the wage gap or bring back the hundreds of thousands of professionals who have already left.
But it can reshape what people imagine is possible. And imagination is not a soft variable in economic development. It is a leading indicator. When young Puerto Ricans see cultural excellence rooted in their identity rewarded at the highest level of visibility, the boundaries of what feels attainable expand. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that exposure to role models from similar backgrounds increases educational attainment and long-term career ambition among young people from underrepresented communities. Representation does not just feel good. It alters the calculus of investment, risk, and commitment that every aspiring professional makes when deciding where to build their life.
Imagination influences investment. Investment shapes institutions. Institutions determine outcomes.
If pride builds economic stamina, then what happened on that field is not a footnote in Puerto Rico's story. It is part of the infrastructure of its future.
I do not know what the long-term effects of this moment will be. I do know what I felt. I know what I saw on the faces around me. I know that somewhere on that island, and in neighborhoods across New York and Chicago and Orlando and Boston, young people watched a man named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio introduce himself by his full name, wear his mother's last name on his back, and tell the world in Spanish that we are still here.
Aquí seguimos.
And for those of us doing the daily work of building pipelines and writing policy and organizing communities and believing in a future we cannot yet fully see, that confirmation matters. It sustains us. It is stamina.
Sources referenced in this essay:
Abel, J. R., & Deitz, R. (2014). Population Outmigration and Aging in Puerto Rico. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Current Issues in Economics and Finance, 20(4).
Beine, M., Docquier, F., & Rapoport, H. (2001). Brain Drain and Economic Growth: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Development Economics, 64(1), 275-289.
Center for a New Economy (CNE). Publications and Policy Analysis on Puerto Rico's Economy.
Fairlie, R., & Robb, A. (2008). Race and Entrepreneurial Success. MIT Press.
Latino Donor Collaborative. (2025). The 2025 Official LDC U.S. Latino GDP Report, Part One. Produced in partnership with W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
Meléndez, E., & Hinojosa, J. (2017). Estimates of Post-Hurricane Maria Exodus from Puerto Rico. Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.
National Bureau of Economic Research. (2018). Role Model Effects and Minority Achievement. NBER Working Paper Series.
Nielsen. (2023). Diverse Intelligence Series: Latino Consumer Report.
Pew Research Center. (2017). Key Findings About Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico Workforce Development Plan 2020-2023. Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act State Plan.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2023). Population Projections.
Walton, G., & Cohen, G. (2011). A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. Science, 331(6023), 1447-1451.
World Bank. (2023). World Development Report: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies.
Originally published on LinkedIn on 2026-02-11.