America de Mi Corazon

2026-02-26 - 22:27

“I know it’s tough to know not to hate these days...The hate gets more powerful with more hate...The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So please, we need to be different if we fight, we have to do it with love.” Bad Bunny at the 2026 Grammy Awards If you never heard of Bad Bunny before Super Bowl 2026, now you know. The most-streamed global artist prior to the game, Bad Bunny has become a true global phenomenon since, with his hit “DtMF” rising to Number One on the Billboard 100 and his streaming numbers rising significantly. Immediately prior to the game Bunny won four Grammys, including Album of the Year with “DtMF (Debi tirar mas fotos” or in English, “I should have taken more photos”). The title song explores themes of nostalgia, love, and the importance of capturing moments with loved ones before they change. It also addresses existential issues faced by the people of Puerto Rico, his “Patria”, and issues a rallying cry of resistance for Puerto Ricans everywhere. To close his Super Bowl set Bunny addressed the question of “American” identity. The continent is called America because it is named after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The name was first used by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller who, inspired by Vespucci’s accounts of his journeys, decided in 1507 to name the continent after him. It was originally called “América” in the feminine form, as it was then common to name lands after women. For the last century, however, the name “America” has been monopolized by the United States, at least in the world outside of Ibero-America (the former Portugese and Spanish colonies in the Americas). Synonymous use of the two names became ubiquitous only in the twentieth century when the United States transformed itself into an imperial power. The first British colonies in North America were established in the early seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century colonists were calling themselves “American” subjects of the British Crown. Their revolutionary war against British rule (1775-1783) and their formal declaration of independence (1776) consolidated that sense of “American-ness”, but the rebel citizens of the new, independent republic did not take monopoly ownership of the word “American” and referred to their country by its official name – the United States of America. With revolutionary solidarity, the people of the United States enthusiastically welcomed the independence of Spain’s American colonies after their own war of independence, even naming some towns “Bolivar” after Simón Bolívar, liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Gran Colombia. Today, there are towns called Bolivar in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It was the United States’ leap into imperialism that changed the equation. By the late nineteenth century, having settled the issue of slavery by civil war (1861-1865) and after seizing the lands of native peoples in the so called “Indian wars” (1700s-1890) thereby spreading “from sea to shining sea”, the US turned its expansionist ambitions outward and successfully fought the Spanish-American War in 1898, annexing the Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico while making Cuba a protectorate, and also seizing the non-Spanish lands of Hawai‘i and American Samoa for good measure. This marked its entrance into the imperial club, previously the preserve of the great European powers. The twentieth century, particularly after World War 2 (1939-1945), saw the global expansion of US influence through military, economic, and cultural means. This period brought many US interventions in South and Central América. The Bretton Woods Conference, officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, held in 1944 in the United States, established