The morning after the 3 January US military action in Venezuela, in which Nicolás Maduro was captured, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily closed airspace in parts of the eastern Caribbean, and my stay in St Kitts stretched into an unexpected extra week. At the mercy of the systems that determine which corridors open and when, and who gets routed where, an overwhelmed customer service agent suggested I charter a boat to nearby St Maarten, fly to Amsterdam, and then stitch together a series of flights to avoid the affected airspace. I understood the Caribbean, then, less as a string of proximate islands and, instead, as a set of routes connected by powers elsewhere.
Power doesn’t just regulate airspace, it also governs cultural transmission – who gets broadcast, who gets heard, and on what terms. That’s why the handwringing over the Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, and the characterization of his almost exclusive use of Spanish in his music as an intrusion, feel so disingenuous. The drama isn’t about understanding the lyrics. Rather it’s a claim about Bad Bunny and his music as fundamentally un-American, stemming from a fear of feeling left out, or the more colloquially known fear of missing out (Fomo).
