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Andrea Prado: “When I saw the album cover, it just, it feels like home.”
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On January fifth, Bad Bunny released his sixth studio album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and it has since risen to the number one spot on the Billboard 200. Since the release, Bad Bunny has been on the press circuit calling the album his ‘most Puerto Rican album ever.’ But perhaps the most Puerto Rican thing, the most Latino about the album isn’t the music, maybe it’s the album cover itself.
Merida Rua: “Those are the chairs that you saw on the Marquesinas of people’s houses or in the backyards or when you think about people playing dominoes. I actually grew up learning how to play briscas, a card game in Puerto Rico, on those chairs.”
The album cover is two empty white plastic chairs that are positioned in front of plantain trees. The chairs, officially known as monobloc chairs, date back to the 40s. When a Canadian designer developed the first prototype. They’re light, cheap and stackable.
Merida Rua is a director of undergraduate studies and professor in Northwestern’s Latino & Latina Studies program. She looks at the everyday lives of Puerto Ricans in Chicago.
Merida Rua: “It really is kind of the mixture of that with reggaeton and dembow and bomba and plena and salsa, right? And so that for me it’s also about like that is actually what it sounds like when you’re in Puerto Rico or if you’re at a family gathering. It’s always all of those musics combining in one way or another. He kind of connects that with this album.”
Her mother, who was in her 80s, recently passed away. She was the one to introduce Rua to Bad Bunny.
Merida Rua: “She was somebody that was just fascinated by him because of the ways in which he connected being Puerto Rican and also the kind of political and social commitments that he connected to his music.
For her, the chairs mean so much more than just convenient seating options.
Merida Rua: “The first thing that I think most people might think of is the fact that they’re empty. So much of that is about the political and the economic situation on the island, the fact that so many Puerto Ricans have had to leave Puerto Rico, that there’s more Puerto Ricans living in the US now than there are in Puerto Rico, and so this idea of loss, right?
Crediting creators of a Bad Bunny college class, she says the chairs also mean something more urgent.
Merida Rua: “While it’s a warning, it’s also kind of like a wake up call of what’s the possibility, who do we want in those chairs? So those chairs could also be an invitation to come back or to see yourself as part of that.”
Sophia Nelson is a senior at Syracuse University. She grew up in California, miles away from her mother’s birthplace of Chile. Today, her parents have retired to the country and she spends her breaks going to the place, she calls, home.
Sophia Nelson: “‘Wait, I forgot the album dropped,’so then I listened to it when I was with my sister, we we’re just chilling by the pool. It’s like the ultimate summer album and it’s obviously summer down in Chile right now.
She knows the chairs all too well.
Sophia Nelson: “So we’re literally sitting by the pool at my grandma’s house and there’s like 30, like 20 of those chairs stacked up, ready to be whipped out at any party.”
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While Nelson isn’t Puerto Rican, she sees her experiences in the album. Just like the more than 50 thousand posts of people on TikTok, sharing cherished memories of loved ones or videos of places that they once called home as the title track of the album plays in the background.
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Sophia Nelson: “We still get to have had a childhood of returning home even if it’s once a year or every couple of years just to even be able to take pictures and have that because for a lot of people that’s not the reality. So it’s just a powerful album that kind of embodies so many experiences, but yet it’s still vague enough to have it be applicable to everyone’s story.
Andrea Prado is 23-years-old. She left Caracas,Venezuela with her family when she was 12 years old. For her, the cover reminds her of a simpler time when holidays were spent with generations of grandparents and any worries seemed so far away.
Andrea Prado: “Although I am from the city in Venezuela, when I would go to my grandparents or great grandparents..that’s just kind of what their backyards look like.”
She has memories of family events that turned into large family parties.
Andrea Prado: “It brings me back to a place of nostalgia and peace, and just a time where in a way I didn’t know that will also be kind of the last time that I will be with my whole family before, you know, we had to leave the country and what not.”
While the people and places of home might be unreachable for so many listeners, Rua reminds us the memories are just an album away.
Merida Rua: “It really was about what do you do when what you have is just the people that are sitting in those chairs with you, right? That is the connection, that when I see those chairs, what I think about.
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For WNUR News, I’m Naya Reyes.
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