When Spanish Took Over the Super Bowl — And Spain’s Far Right Didn’t Know How to React
For fifteen minutes during the Super Bowl halftime show, Spanish took center stage in one of the biggest cultural spectacles on the planet. Across Spain, many viewers felt a surge of pride. But for parts of the nationalist and far-right political sphere, the moment also exposed an uncomfortable contradiction: celebrating the global success of the Spanish language while supporting political rhetoric and policies that target many of the Latin American communities driving that success.
The performance didn’t create this tension — it simply made it visible. The worldwide rise of Spanish today is being powered less by governments and institutions than by migrants, diasporas, and global pop culture. And for some observers in Spain, that reality is harder to celebrate without reservations than it might first appear.
Below is the full English translation of the article originally published in Spanish in El Salto.
Does Anyone Know Who Won the Game?
The mental gymnastics required for these cerebral contortions must be exhausting. The sheer cognitive dissonance alone should leave you more drained than the dancers who gave everything during the quarter hour that briefly hijacked American television on Sunday. To be at once so proud to hear your native tongue be spoken and celebrated throughout one of the world’s biggest media spectacles, and at the same time vaguely uncomfortable because their accents aren’t from the peninsula can’t be easy.
Because there it was, detonating across Spanish living rooms and half-asleep bars at three in the morning: Spanish—undeniable, impossible to subtitle away. Bad Bunny in an oddly fitting Zara outfit, trading dance steps with Lady Gaga over a stage that looked like a San Juan plantation had been airlifted to Brooklyn. This was not the granite-cut Spanish of royal speeches and school grammars, but the rolling, syncopated, joyously unbothered Spanish that usually gets filed under problematic by certain members of the Real Academia. The Spanish that arrives by plane, by boat, by WhatsApp voice note, and—if you listen to certain politicians—by “invasion.”
This is, after all, the same political ecosystem in which senior figures have spent years warning about delincuencia importada, about neighborhoods supposedly lost to “foreign cultures,” about migration from Latin America framed less as human movement from former colonies and more as an unsanitary leak. The same voices that applaud when Donald Trump talks about building walls and making English the official language of the United States. The same political current that celebrates his promise to deport millions of Spanish speakers while simultaneously demanding that Spanish be respected as a world language.
Let that contradiction marinate for a moment. The Spanish far right loves Trump—his walls, his deportation promises, his theatrical nationalism. They retweet him, imitate his rhetoric, and treat him as a working prototype for how to “protect” national identity. And yet here they are, chests swelling with pride because Spanish—the Spanish of the very migrants he wants expelled—just dominated the biggest American cultural event of the year.
The irony is so thick you need to microwave it before spreading it on toast. They adore Trump’s wall and desire Spanish prestige. They want border enforcement and linguistic conquest. They support América for Americans (meaning white English speakers) and América for Spanish (meaning global cultural dominance). These positions cannot coexist, but that’s never stopped nationalism before.
And yet—there it was. Spanish conquering the Super Bowl. Spanish as spectacle. Spanish as cool. Spanish as global currency. Suddenly the language that needs constant “defending” from migrants here in Spain turned out to be thriving precisely because of them. An uncomfortable revelation, like discovering that the party you despise has been paying the rent on your cultural relevance.
What the halftime show exposed was not a new contradiction, but one Spain has been rehearsing for years.
The cognitive whiplash was visible in real time. Social media accounts that normally reserve their bile for “sudacas“—a word that still circulates with alarming casualness—found themselves performing emergency rhetorical surgery. Twitter users gushed about “our language finally getting the recognition it deserves” while their previous tweets from two days earlier complained about “too many Latam accents in Madrid.” Others celebrated the “global triumph of Spanish culture” in between posts endorsing immigration raids. This Spanish was acceptable, even admirable, because it was winning. Because it was international. Because it was on an American stage, validated by the empire of screens. Pride surged in the chest, while suspicion lingered in the gut.
This is the peculiar schizophrenia of modern Spanish nationalism: a desperate hunger for global recognition paired with a deep resentment toward the very people who carry that recognition on their backs. Latin Americans are framed, depending on the hour, as either cultural ambassadors or demographic threats—celebrated when they export Spain’s language abroad, scolded when they bring their lives here with them. Celebrated when they make Spanish cool in America, resented when they introduce new words in Madrid.
And the Trump worship makes it all more grotesque. Because what are they cheering for, exactly? A man who represents everything they claim to want—linguistic purity, closed borders, cultural protectionism—applied against the very people who just made their language sound like the future. If Trump had his way, Spanish would be as marginal in America as Basque is in France. And yet they love him anyway, because the cruelty is the point, and coherence is optional.
You could almost hear the internal negotiations playing out across the country. This is good for Spanish. Yes, but whose Spanish? This makes us visible. Yes, but not like that. We should be proud. Yes—but let’s not get carried away and forget who is supposed to be grateful. We love Trump. Yes—but wait, doesn’t he hate everything we’re celebrating right now? Shh. Don’t think about it. Just enjoy the moment.
For fifteen minutes, the borders dissolved. The language escaped its keepers. The accents that usually get corrected, mocked, or quietly excluded were suddenly untouchable, protected by bass, lights, and global applause. And somewhere between the choreography and the confetti, the far right was forced to confront a truly grotesque possibility: that Spanish does not belong to Spain alone, and really hasn’t for a long, long time. That it thrives not because of their immigration policies but in spite of them. That the future of their language is being written by people they’d rather see deported.
By the time the lights went out and the Instagram and TikTok reels were finished, nobody here could say with confidence who won the game. But plenty of people knew they had lost something else—a little certainty, a little ownership, a little illusion of control. The language danced on without them, indifferent, alive, and very much unconcerned with their immigration policies or their American idols. It had outgrown the peninsula centuries ago. Sunday night just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
And in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump—whose Super Bowl the Spanish far right claims to admire, whose country just celebrated in Spanish for a quarter of an hour—was wondering why nobody was speaking English. The people cheering loudest in Spain didn’t seem to notice the contradiction. But then again, noticing contradictions has never been a requirement for reactionary nationalism. Only volume—and a very short, selective memory.
