Reggaeton in the 2010s: Global Mainstreaming and Identity Construction

Reggaeton is an Afrodiasporic urban dance music rooted in Puerto Rico and made for the club and the dancefloor; across the 2010s it moved from a largely Caribbean and diasporic following into worldwide consumption and broad global accessibility.^[1] Scholarship treats this decade as a phase distinct from the genre's origins, separating the performers who emerged once reggaeton was being consumed globally from its early pioneers, and it reads the period's "identity construction" through two linked registers — the sound of the singing voice and the performance of gender.^[1] What distinguished the global era was not only its reach but the way its leading artists kept encoding local belonging, phonetically and visually, while addressing audiences far beyond Puerto Rico.^[1][2]

The voice: lateralization as an audible Puerto Rican signature

A sociophonetic study of eight male Puerto Rican reggaeton artists isolated one feature in particular: the lateralization of word- and syllable-final /ɾ/ as [l], a salient marker of Puerto Rican Spanish — the tendency for a syllable-final -r to surface as an -l.^[1] The study found that this lateral variant appears more frequently among global-era performers such as Bad Bunny and Ozuna than among earlier artists such as Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam, so that the feature most associated with local identity is voiced most insistently by the very artists with the widest international audiences.^[1] The pattern runs the other way for the pioneers: among artists whose careers began in the early 2000s, before the genre's global consumption, usage of the lateral variant is documented as decreasing — interpreted as a deliberate move to differentiate their work from the younger cohort.^[1] Read together, the rising and falling counts describe a conscious modulation of vocal identity, with phonetic detail functioning as an audible badge of in-group belonging in an expanding Latin urban market.^[1]

The body: camp and the limits of hegemonic masculinity in Latin trap

The dominant masculine script across mainstream Afrodiasporic urban Latin music is one of hyperbolic virility — violence-oriented, sex-driven, and wealth-flaunting themes carried through both lyrics and music videos.^[2] Against that baseline, scholarship reads Bad Bunny's camp aesthetics as a strategy that makes visible the artificial naturalness of hegemonic masculinity in Latin trap, exposing as constructed what the genre otherwise presents as given.^[2] The same analysis is careful about how far that critique reaches: the camp performance is transgressive yet self-limiting, a gesture that neither disrupts nor expands the very limits it renders visible, and that in the act of exposing them also reinforces them.^[2] Bad Bunny's individual flamboyance, on this reading, does not dismantle the patriarchal framework of the genre so much as lay bare its performative edges.^[2]

Local belonging in a global market

The two registers — the lateral in the voice and camp in the visual field — work as parallel acts of identity construction during reggaeton's global decade.^[1][2] The phonetic feature anchors the singing voice in a specific Puerto Rican tradition precisely as the music reaches listeners with no such linguistic intuition, while the camp performance reworks the genre's masculine script from the inside; one signals continuity with a local sound, the other a reinterpretation of inherited gender norms.^[1][2] Scholars situate both within reggaeton's broader passage into international charts, festivals, and streaming, where local symbols are retooled for global consumption — newer artists reinforcing a Puerto Rican pride legible to diaspora listeners, Bad Bunny's gender performance inviting debate over the limits of subversion.^[1][2] The decade's central question, in this scholarship, is how mainstream reggaeton held local identity affirmation and worldwide market integration in tension at once — a line of inquiry that continues as the genre extends into new markets and collaborations.^[1][2]