No, I’m not going to talk about hips and lip-syncing and pole-dancing, or the quality of their performances. Or football. I’ll let the buzz-feeds handle that. But, as you know, performance can be used as a platform for politics. And yes, I’m finding the politics, the commentaries, and the Trump tweets rather fascinating.
For instance, kudos to whoever was in charge of choosing the protagonists of the halftime show, knowing that whoever they hired could (if done strategically) make a political statement in a highly volatile United States of America, on perhaps the most American terrain (the Superbowl field) and patriotic day of the year (Superbowl Sunday).
Kudos for choosing two women. Two Latina women. At a time when xenophobia is not only rampant but encouraged, and when being an "expat" is cool but being an "immigrant" (especially of colour) is criminalized.
As a disclaimer, I’m speaking as an immigrant Canadian, white woman, born in the US, expat living in Latin America.
Comments are devouring articles about why Shakira and JLo didn’t only sing in English. "This is America!" they say. (No, in fact, this is not America. This is the USA. "America" includes all of North and South America that, surprise, includes Latinxs. USA is but one of 35 countries in the Americas.)
And, to respond to those comments, the Constitution of the United States of America doesn’t have an official language. English is the most widely spoken, with Spanish being a close second, among many other languages spoken across a beautifully multicultural country.
And if people really want to argue about which language is the original language of US soil, it would be an Indigenous language. Not English.
Photo by Kevin Winter | Getty Images, of Shakira and Jennifer Lopez performing at the 2020 Superbowl Halftime Show.
#superbowl #halftimeshow #shakira #jlo #xenophobia #latinx #immigration #impeachtrump #performanceaspolitics