Half-Time Summoning

Litany of the Américas

Litany of the Américas

I almost dissolved into a tidal wave of sobs at the end of Bad Bunny’s half-time offering. My body was quaking. I felt a portal open up and swell after swell of ancestors rushing, pouring through. I don’t have many words for it, except the few that I offer below. Gracias Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. Tlazokamati.

Bad Bunny’s half-time offering wasn’t a performance; it was a summoning. It was ceremony—a ceremony that he closed by invoking the all-too-familiar refrain, “God Bless América.” But this was no ordinary refrain. It was something else entirely. He called into sacred view a litany of geographies—I suggest beyond the nation-states themselves and more about the aliveness and the intactness of the lifeblood that connects them all. From the salt flats of Chile to the tundra of Canadá and the tropical waters of the Caribbean. From the heights of the Condor to the flights of the Bald Eagle. From the Coquís to the Jaguares and the Monarcas. The heartbeats of these lands and waters and people have always been connected through exchange, movement, and migration. This knowing is alive in our cells.

Under the guise of entertainment, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio gathered over one hundred million of us into the liminal threshold of the Half-Time. Through song, music, dance, and love he summoned a deep ancestral reality: Turtle Island, Anahuac, Abya Yala, Borikén. In spite of over 500 years of maniacal efforts to fracture, consume, extract, and enslave the vitality of the so-called Américas, he called out into the night:

SEGUIMOS AQUí

It is a summoning on a scale befitting the magnitude of our longings—out under the blazing lights, incubated by the night sky, broadcast to the far reaches beyond our limitations. May it be so. OMETEOTL.