"Despacito" again broke a record this Sunday. The super-success of Puerto Ricans Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee exceeded 3,000 million hits on YouTube in just seven months. The theme of reggeaton has been dancing for months all over the world, but why? And above all, how did he succeed in the United States in the time of Donald Trump?
The song is also now the most played in history on streaming platforms and has been 12 weeks at number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Beyond the sexual or erotic content of the song, "Despacito" has broken borders and has also imposed itself on a country whose president belittles Latin Americans.
Reggaeton has its roots in Jamaica and has long driven people crazy on the dance floors of Latin America and Spain. In the United States, it cost him more to enter, until Daddy Yankee published "Gasoline" in 2004. But by now reggaeton seems to have arrived to stay in the Anglo-Saxon world.
"Despacito" follows a trend, says Petra Rivera-Rideau, who studies identity and pop culture in Latin America at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "There are a lot of Latin pop singers - such as Enrique Iglesias, Shakira or Ricky Martin - who have been there for a long time and have recently integrated the reggeaton into their music," he said in an interview with "Atlantic" magazine.
For Rivera-Rideau, the incredible thing is that the boom has been unleashed with Fonsi and not with someone like Enrique Iglesias, whom the American and English-speaking public knows best.
Part of the success may be due to the Canadian star Justin Bieber, who versioned the song with an intro in English. That collaboration was the leap into Latin fashion of one of the most popular white pop singers in the West. Although Fonsi is already on his eighth album, it often seems that Bieber has discovered him, regrets the Rivera-Rideau.
In Trump's time, of debates about immigrants, the wall and borders, the success of "Despacito" may surprise even more. "It's promiscuous, it does not respect borders or stick to racial categories," the New York Times wrote in an article on the subject. Instead, "it encourages the cross-fertilization of cultures and styles," the text added. "Music has no borders," said Fonsi on Instagram.
Latinos in the United States are often considered inferior and under the Trump Government they have become the target of racist and extreme right-wing detractors of migration. But the YouTube record points culturally in the opposite direction.
"Despacito" reveals "our paradoxical age in which Latinos have much more to fear than ever before, but also in which we are enjoying an unprecedented level of cultural and demographic influence in the United States," he wrote to "The Guardian" John Paul Brammer, American of Mexican origin.
It remains to be seen how much Fonsi's success will endure. It's only been a couple of weeks since Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" and Charlie Puth overtook Psy's "Gangnam Style" as the most watched video in YouTube history. "Who knows, something else could dethrone 'Slowly' in a week," warned "The Verge."
