Bad Bunny Makes Grammy History With First All-Spanish Album of the Year Win

Bad Bunny ended the 68th Annual Grammy Awards speaking in Spanish.

Clutching the trophy for album of the year at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Sunday night, the Puerto Rican star switched between Spanish and English as he dedicated his win “a todas las personas que tuvieron que dejar su patria, su país, para perseguir sus sueños” — “to all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams.”

“Puerto Rico,” he added, “créeme cuando te digo que somos mucho más grandes que 100 por 35, y no hay nada que no podamos lograr.” Puerto Rico, believe me when I tell you we are much bigger than 100 by 35, and there is nothing we cannot achieve.

With that, a Puerto Rican artist closed music’s biggest night having done something no one ever had: win the Grammys’ top honor with an album performed entirely in Spanish.

A first for the Grammys’ top prize

Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos — a sprawling, 17-track project steeped in Puerto Rican folk traditions and political history — became the first Spanish-language album to win album of the year. The victory capped a ceremony that doubled as a nationally televised rebuke of federal immigration enforcement and a test of how far the Recording Academy is willing to move beyond its English-language, U.S. mainland center of gravity.

The 29-year-old artist, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, left the show with three awards: album of the year, best música urbana album and best global music performance for his reggaeton track “EoO.” The ceremony, hosted by Trevor Noah for a sixth and final consecutive year and broadcast on CBS, was the network’s last Grammys telecast before the awards move to ABC in 2027.

Released Jan. 5, 2025, on independent label Rimas Entertainment, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”) was recorded in Puerto Rico with local singers, percussionists and student orchestras. It layers reggaeton and house production over bomba, plena, jíbaro and salsa while tackling gentrification, colonialism and diaspora alongside love and loss.

The album had already swept critics’ lists, topped the Billboard 200 and won album of the year at the Latin Grammys in 2025. Sunday’s win placed it in a different category: a Spanish-language work from the Latin music market crowned not in a Latin-only show but in the Grammys’ general field, historically dominated by English-language pop and rock.

A crowded field — and a careful distinction

Bad Bunny’s album beat out Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, Lady Gaga’s Mayhem, Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia, Justin Bieber’s Swag, Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out, Leon Thomas’ Mutt and Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend. Several of those artists have been perennial nominees in the top category; none has yet won album of the year.

For Bad Bunny, the win was both a breakthrough and a continuation. In 2023, his blockbuster Un Verano Sin Ti became the first Spanish-language album ever nominated for album of the year, losing to Harry Styles’ Harry’s House. Since the Recording Academy created the best música urbana album category in 2022, he has won it three times.

In the hours after the show, some headlines billed Bad Bunny as the first Latin or Latino artist to win album of the year. That overlooks a key precedent: Mexican-born guitarist Carlos Santana, whose 1999 release Supernatural won the category in 2000.

What is unprecedented about Bad Bunny’s victory is the nature of the project: Debí Tirar Más Fotos is an all-Spanish-language, Puerto Rico-recorded album rooted in Latin urban music and traditional island genres. It is only the second Spanish-language album ever nominated in the category — and the first to win.

Onstage speeches turn toward immigration enforcement

Bad Bunny’s album of the year speech centered on Puerto Rico, grief and migration. But he had already opened a different front earlier in the night.

Accepting the award for best música urbana album, he stepped to the microphone and immediately veered into politics.

“Before I say thanks to God,” he told the arena, “I’m going to say ICE out.”

“We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” he continued. “We are humans and we are Americans.”

His remarks came weeks after federal immigration agents fatally shot two people in separate incidents in Minneapolis, and echoed chants from protests that have spread to cities across the country.

On Jan. 7, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers killed 37-year-old Renée Good during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis, firing into her car as she attempted to drive away. On Jan. 24, during an immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge, Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs who was filming agents and helping direct traffic near an immigration protest. Both deaths, captured on bystander and surveillance video, have prompted federal civil rights investigations and criticism from human rights groups.

Later in the broadcast, Billie Eilish accepted song of the year for her single “Wildflower” and said, “No one is illegal on stolen land… [expletive] ICE is all I want to say.” British singer Olivia Dean, named best new artist, called herself “a granddaughter of an immigrant” and dedicated her trophy to families whose decisions to migrate “made my life possible.”

Several performers and presenters wore pins or displayed messages referencing ICE, contributing to what amounted to the most sustained challenge to U.S. immigration enforcement yet seen on a major U.S. awards telecast.

An institution under pressure — and a shift in what counts

The Recording Academy did not directly address the political speeches in post-show statements, but repeatedly described Debí Tirar Más Fotos’s win as historic, highlighting its Spanish-language and Puerto Rican roots. In recent years, the academy has revised voting rules and expanded membership amid criticism that it has sidelined Black, Latin and non-English-language artists from its top categories.

Those efforts have coincided with high-profile wins. In 2025, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter earned her the album of the year trophy after years of losses. This year, Bad Bunny’s victory followed the category’s first-ever Spanish-language nomination three years earlier.

Still, the history remains sparse. Spanish-language music has been a commercial force in the United States for decades, from Los Lobos’ “La Bamba,” the first Spanish-language record of the year nominee in 1988, to Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” nominated for record and song of the year in 2018 but winning neither. The Latin Grammys, launched in 2000, were created in part to provide Spanish- and Portuguese-language artists a dedicated platform — even as their existence reinforced a divide between “Latin” categories and the Grammys’ general field.

Even within Latin music, institutional recognition has lagged behind popular reality: música urbana, the umbrella for reggaeton, Latin trap and related styles, did not receive its own Grammy category until 2022.

Debí Tirar Más Fotos responds to that history directly. On “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” Bad Bunny raps about gentrification and the fear that Puerto Rico could become “otra Hawaii” if it follows the path toward statehood. Visuals released alongside the album trace the island’s colonial past, independence movements and diaspora, produced in collaboration with historians and local artists.

On Sunday night, the artist who once bagged groceries in Vega Baja stood in downtown Los Angeles and thanked his mother “por haberme parido en Puerto Rico” — for giving birth to him on the island.

“To all the people who have lost a loved one and even then have had to continue moving forward,” he said as the telecast ran out of time, “this award is for you.”

In a show that began with a familiar red carpet and ended with a Spanish-language album at the center of American music’s biggest stage, the message was as much about where the industry has been as where it might be headed: an island 100 miles long and 35 miles wide, insisting it is larger than the map suggests, and an institution long rooted in English deciding, at least for one night, to listen.