Puerto Rican Sign Language is making history in Super Bowl halftime shows. The show performed by Bad Bunny is the first of its kind in the history of the game to have an interpreter speak in the LSPR language (also called PRSL), allowing Deaf and hard-of-hearing Puerto Ricans to experience the show in the language constructed around their own slang, rhythm, and cultural indicators.
The focus of that moment is Celimar Rivera Cosme, a Puerto Rican interpreter and performer, a deaf person who has been working with Bad Bunny since 2022. Her journey to the halftime stage started with a literal request: in one of the videos she shared on Instagram, she called the artist by name and indicated the divide between fandom and access of Deaf people on the island. She was shortly interpreting his performances and the work continued to grow out of concerts to become much more visible.
The reason why that visibility is important is that LSPR can be perceived as a close relative of American Sign Language as opposed to an actual living language that has its own set of rules. It started as a result of the influence of ASL in the early 20th century, however, it has island-pacing, expressions, and words that change according to region and community. The distinction between the correct and the living can be determined by a single decision, such as whether a word like Tití can be used to refer to the strictly Puerto Rican meaning despite sharing the meaning with the normal Spanish. The culture fluency belongs to the reasons why supporters demanded an interpreter on the island rather than falling back to the ASL.
Cosme told The New York Times that we have been struggling to retain our language, and not to lose it.
The stakes are not just symbolic. An estimate in 2022 showed that approximately 7 percent of the Puerto Rican population are Deaf or hard of hearing, totaling 220,000 individuals, and scholars have termed LSPR as being at risk with ASL taking over more mainstream coverage. In a halftime performance that focuses on Spanish lyrics and Puerto Rican identity, it is not an addition, but rather the language choice of the halftime show.
The assignment, Cosme has termed, was physical and linguistic: to be able to transfer flow, attitude and emotion to a complete body performance that can keep up with the set. Her training was in line with the size of the stage as evidenced by the fact that she practiced her songs every day, which took hours and months of living with the song list. I said in the words to KQED, I am so excited. And the Deaf in Puerto Rico are glad that they can now access the Super Bowl in their own language, the sign language.
The performance was meant to be viewed in the stadium, although not all broadcast views of it made it clear. Another option was also provided by NFL, such as the split-screen stream of this service on the Internet where the interpreter and artist were shown at the same time. The interpretations were screened at one of the screens in the venue making what is usually seen as accommodations to be spectacle.
To Deaf music listeners, such a transition is in line with a bigger truth that outsiders usually overlook: Deaf listeners do not perceive music as a lack. They perceive it in a different way, vibration, visual rhythm and the interpretive decisions that enable the literacy of the body through the lyrics, tone and cultural notations. In that regard, the LSPR milestone of the halftime show reminds as well that accessibility can be a work of art, and that language (more so, a language that is threatened to be eliminated) can be a headline in itself.
