The Brief

News that Loyola Marymount University offered a class titled “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico” spread quickly.

“LMU posted a Reels on Instagram. My mom sent it to me and she goes, ‘you need to take this class right now!’” said Carolina Acosta, a junior at LMU who took the class last year.

Acosta was born and raised in Puerto Rico and her mother lives in San Juan, the capital. She’s majoring in entrepreneurship with the goal of earning a bachelor’s in business administration.

She was skeptical about taking the class.

Bad Bunny attends the Los Angeles Premiere Of Columbia Pictures' "Bullet Train" at Regency Village Theatre on Aug. 1, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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Jon Kopaloff

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“I didn't really think it was going to be about the island itself,” she said. “And then I remember my first day talking about it. I was just like, wow, it's [about] a lot more than the artist.” The class taught her aspects of Puerto Rico’s history and culture that she didn’t learn while growing up there.

Talking to students who are taking the class now and who took the class in past semesters opens a window into how this class engages college students and has transformed some students’ views of their college work and what they want to do after college.

That impact is by design.

‘There's so much to cover, and so much to talk about’

Bad Bunny has a lot of firsts under his belt. He’s broken streaming records on Spotify and his concert tours break ticket sales.

(Editor's note: He also knows how to enter a WWE ring.)

But the doors of academia have opened because of the cultural impact of his song lyrics and videos; how he leads his personal life; and how he challenges established ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. territorial dominance over Puerto Rico.

“I want to make my students feel engaged in their learning. I want them to feel connected to the curriculum and I want them… to want to come to class,” said professor Vanessa Díaz.

Díaz first taught the class at LMU last year. She drew inspiration from a similar Wellesley College first offered two years ago.

Díaz’s doctorate is in cultural anthropology. Her dissertation is titled "Manufacturing Celebrity and Marketing Fame: An Ethnographic Study of Celebrity Media Production." She worked as a red carpet reporter for People Magazine.

The three-month class begins with the basics about the artist Bad Bunny and his career. Then students learn about Puerto Rico’s history as a colony, modern day natural and political crises, resistance movements, and how reggaeton comes on the scene using innovative as well as toxic elements of Caribbean identity.

Student Ana Garcia speaks during class at Loyola Marymount University.

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Díaz said she’s seen those topics engage these young adults because of how profoundly some of these issues affect their lives. Number one on that list: how gender and sexuality are represented in popular media.

“My students’ generation are much more likely to identify as queer, or non-binary, or kind of fluid in these different ways,” she said.

For instance, the class watched how Bad Bunny bends images of gender and sexuality in his music video for “Yo Perreo Sola.” It's given students plenty to talk about, including whether the singer should or shouldn’t be considered a queer icon.

“I just remember week two of the course just immediately being like, ‘Oh, my God, this course is kind of going to change my entire perspective,’” said Ashley Buschhorn, a senior majoring in journalism who’s taking the class this semester.

That perspective, she said, has been shaped by being a “white American from Texas” who grew up with people of Latin American descent but who didn’t know how colonialism shaped those cultures.

“As a queer person I've seen the ways that queer groups in Puerto Rico have been oppressed, and ... discriminated against,” Buschhorn said.

The class lectures and readings on gender and sexuality led Buschhorn to think about if she in any way is contributing to violence against women and queer people in Puerto Rico and how she could help stop that violence.

Students Ana Garcia and Ashley Buschorn pose for a portrait at Loyola Marymount University.

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And subsequent discussions about Bad Bunny as a political activist and crafty manipulator of authentic and manufactured personas has helped Buschhorn think about the work she wants to do after graduation: documentary filmmaking.

“I think that's something that this class kind of directly combats is that you can't look at something just [through] one perspective. In this class there's probably five different perspectives that you have to look at something through,” she said.

Higher education’s student engagement problem

Colleges and universities in the U.S. are facing many challenges, among them how to engage growing proportions of students who are from non-white backgrounds with classes that combine academic rigor and speak to students’ various lived experiences. Increased student engagement is good for the student and good for the college.

Ana Garcia is a senior majoring in marketing. She knew a lot about reggaeton but very little about Puerto Rico before taking this class. In the class she learned there was solidarity across social classes in Puerto Rico when a major hurricane hit the island the same year as the 2017 Mexico City earthquake, which she lived through.

“I took it from a very personal experience that I saw this first hand, and just like seeing what it was for Puerto Ricans to go and do the same thing and a very different point of their history,” she said.

Garcia and most of the rest of the class enjoyed an epic class opportunity that connected theory to practice. Professor Díaz was able to secure funding to pay for the students to attend the Bad Bunny concert on March 14 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

The assignment was to create a video-reflection based on the lessons in the class.

Parallels to ethnic studies classes in high schools

The Bad Bunny class is a course in both Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and Film, Television, and Media Studies. It’s a class that looks at media, race, and representation.

“People want to know about what's happening in the world and they want to know about why artists, musicians, etc. feel so much need to put that into their art,” said Emily Penner, a UC Irvine professor who studies K-12 student engagement.

The class syllabus for Díaz’s Bad Bunny class, Penner said, shed light on parallels with the high school ethnic studies classes she looks at in her research. Some of those hallmarks include curriculum as counter narrative (the challenging of dominant views), intersectionality (the overlap between topics such as race and gender), and students as intellectuals, which can be the most transformative part of the student experience.

“Anything that students can bring to the table to demonstrate their prior knowledge and their expertise, I think always is useful for orienting students toward what they're about to do for the rest of the semester,” Penner said.

Professor Vanessa Diaz teaching a class on Puerto Rican culture and Bad Bunny at Loyola Marymount University.

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That prior knowledge doesn’t have to be an exact match with the class topic, in this case Puerto Rico and the pop music icon. Effective teaching will engage students of different races and socioeconomic status. For some students who have taken the Bad Bunny class, what they bring to the table is sometimes challenged and transformed in ways the students didn’t expect.

'I've never had a class teach me about my history'

Political science major Mateo-Luis Planas brought a strong sense of identity to the first day of the Bad Bunny class last year, citing his appreciation for dancing salsa, bachata, and merengue.

“I was born and raised in Connecticut but my entire family's from the island of Puerto Rico,” he said. Many of his relatives still live on the island. He pointed to his grandmother’s pride in the Puerto Rican flag.

“I just thought my grandmother was really happy to be Puerto Rican. But turns out there was a point in history when it was actually illegal and punishable to even have those flags out in your house,” he said.

Puerto Rican history is American history.

“I've never had a class teach me about my history, which is something that the average American has never had to say,” he said.

What engaged him the most is the overlap between centuries-old racial policies in Puerto Rico and how race was and was not talked about within his own family. The Bad Bunny class is leading him to rethink whether law school is the best move for him after college.

“I have the rest of my life to study law,” Planas said, but people in Puerto Rico now need to achieve rights to their land and need a functional government that’s responsive to people’s needs.

Planas now feels he wants to go to the island to help people achieve those goals.

Just last week California’s secretary of state officially certified that nearly two-thirds of Californians voted to pass Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to temporarily gerrymander the state’s congressional maps in favor of Democrats.

Nevertheless, Republicans and the Trump administration are hopeful a federal district court panel meeting in Los Angeles this week will intervene to bar the state from using the new maps next year.

California Republicans, who sued Newsom and Secretary of State Shirley Weber the day after the election, are staking their challenge on the argument that California’s primary mapmaker illegally used race as a factor in drawing district lines, giving Latino and Hispanic voters outsize influence at the expense of other racial and ethnic groups, including white voters.

This, the Republicans argue, means the maps amount to an illegal racial gerrymander and a violation of the 14th and 15th amendments. Although Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act allows for race-conscious redistricting, they add, case law and judicial precedent have set a strict standard that requires a minority group to prove they have been systematically outvoted by a majority that consistently votes together to deny the minority their chosen candidate.

But the Prop. 50 opponents’ odds look slim, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority recently blessed Texas’ new maps, overturning a lower court’s finding that Republicans there had engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

“It is indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,” wrote conservative Justice Samuel Alito in a concurring opinion supported by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas.

And then there’s the looming possibility that the Supreme Court, in a separate case, could outlaw entirely the use of race in the redistricting process, which could render California’s new maps — as well as the previous ones drawn by the independent citizens commission — unconstitutional. That would also give Republicans a major advantage in Southern states, where several districts drawn to increase Black Americans’ voting power currently are represented by Democrats.

Despite the long odds, the ailing California GOP has run out of other options for resistance. The passage of Prop. 50 is likely to mark the beginning of the end for several of California’s Republican House members, who have been forced to decide whether to run in their current, now less favorable Republican districts, switch to new seats or drop out entirely.

One of them, Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents parts of San Diego County, even considered relocating to Texas and running for a Dallas-area seat that would be more friendly to Republicans, but the president reportedly refused to endorse him for the already contested Texas seat, so he decided to stay.

The legal challenge claims the Prop. 50 maps cause “stigmatic and representational injury” by placing certain candidates, such as Republican Assemblymember David Tangipa of Fresno, who is Polynesian, into districts drawn with a specific racial or ethnic minority group in mind.

Case is in Los Angeles court this week

The challengers, who include Tangipa, the California Republican Party, several Republican voters and the Trump White House, are asking a three-judge panel for the Central District of California to grant a preliminary injunction on the maps before Dec. 19, the date when candidates can start collecting signatures to get their names on the 2026 primary ballot. A preliminary injunction would temporarily prevent the maps from being used in an election.

On Monday in court, the Republican challengers presented their case, arguing that since supporters of Prop. 50 publicly touted that the maps increased representation for Latino voters, state lawmakers and consultant Paul Mitchell, who was hired to draw the maps, took race into account. Therefore, they must justify how their new districts meet the standard for permissible racial gerrymanders, attorneys argued.

“It is legal to race-based redistrict under the Voter Rights Act. Section 2 protects it. But it also gives you guidelines,” Tangipa told CalMatters in an interview after testifying in court on Monday in Los Angeles. “In Sacramento, they did not follow those guidelines.”

Tangipa asserted that even though Democratic lawmakers intended primarily to increase their party’s ranks based on political ideology, “They used race to justify that end goal.”

The plaintiffs sought to have Mitchell testify, but the court denied a request to force him to take the stand to explain whether he intentionally tried to increase the voting power of specific racial and ethnic groups. Since Mitchell lives more than 100 miles away from the court, he was out of the reach of a subpoena. Still, the judges questioned his blanket use of “legislative privilege” to resist producing documents the plaintiffs requested.

At one point, as a redistricting expert testified, the plaintiffs focused on a line from Democratic former Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire’s public statement after the Legislature passed the package of bills paving the way for the Nov. 4 special election.

“The new map makes no changes to historic Black districts in Oakland and the Los Angeles area, and retains and expands Voting Rights Act districts that empower Latino voters to elect their candidates of choice,” McGuire’s statement said.

McGuire announced last month that he will challenge Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa in one of the newly configured Prop. 50 seats.

But proponents of the new maps argue they intended purely to create a partisan advantage for Democrats, and any increase in voting power for certain ethnic or racial groups was incidental.

Ultimately, 'it was endorsed by the voters'

Also complicating the GOP’s challenge is that California voters overwhelmingly approved the maps.

“Even if we assume that the Legislature improperly considered race, ultimately it went into effect because it was endorsed by the voters,” Emily Rong Zhang, an assistant professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, previously told CalMatters. “They would have to show that the voters had the intent to create districts that disproportionately favor the voting power of a racial group over another.”

One unknown is how the Supreme Court will rule on a case that questions whether it’s constitutional to even consider race as a factor when redistricting.

The justices are weighing in another ongoing case, Louisiana v. Callais, whether to strike down a part of the federal Voting Rights Act that requires the creation of districts in which racial and ethnic minorities have a chance to elect their preferred candidate. If the ruling is retroactive, a decision to strike it down could invalidate both California’s old and new maps.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, other states have jumped into the redistricting effort or are contemplating entering the fray. In addition to Texas and California, four other states have already implemented new congressional maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Virginia, Maryland and Florida have also taken some steps toward redistricting.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

FIFA said on Tuesday it plans to sell $60 tickets for each of the 104 games of the 2026 World Cup — an announcement that comes after an outcry over prices for the tournament that will be held next summer across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

"Fans of the national teams that have qualified for the FIFA World Cup 2026 will benefit from a dedicated ticket pricing tier, which has been designed to make following their teams on football's greatest stage more affordable," FIFA said in a statement.

But these tickets — called "supporter entry tier tickets" by FIFA — will be available only to supporters of qualified teams and are limited in quantity.

Only 10% of the total number of tickets provided to each qualified team would be available at $60 per game, including the final. Given that each team gets 8% of the available tickets per game, the effective number of tickets available at that price would be only 0.8% of the stadium capacity for that game, or 1.6% for both teams combined.

But the actual number of $60 tickets could vary. Each country would determine which of its fans qualify for the cheaper tickets. In the statement, FIFA requested that countries "ensure that these tickets are specifically allocated to loyal fans who are closely connected to their national teams."

Some fans had called prices 'a betrayal'

FIFA's announcement comes after many fans reacted with outrage at the prices for the World Cup next year, which range from $140 for a handful of initial-round games to as much as $2,735 for the U.S. opening match against Paraguay that will be held in Los Angeles next year.

Prices for knockout rounds surge even more, with FIFA charging charging $4,185 for the cheapest ticket for the final that will be held in July next year in New Jersey — and $8,680 for the most expensive seats.

That's much higher than previous World Cups. For example, the most expensive ticket for the 2022 final at the last tournament held in Qatar was about $1,600.

Unlike previous World Cups, FIFA has yet to publish a list of prices, instead adjusting them across different sales windows without an announcement. Fans found out about the price changes after FIFA opened its latest lottery window last week, which allows fans to apply for tickets until Jan. 13.

And many fans were upset. The Football Supporters Europe, a group that represent fans across the region, called ticket prices "a betrayal to the most dedicated fans." On Tuesday, the group said on X it welcomes FIFA's latest announcement, but added it was not enough.

"Based on the allocations publicly available, this would mean that at best a few hundred fans per match and team would be lucky enough to take advantage of the 60 USD prices, while the vast majority would still have to pay extortionate prices, way higher than at any tournament before," Football Supporters Europe said.

Demand appears high, however

FIFA has defended its pricing policy, saying it's adapting to prices in the North American market. It has also consistently responded by saying it's a non-profit organization that steers the majority of its revenues from the World Cup "to fuel the growth of men's, women's and youth football throughout the 211 FIFA Member Associations."

Despite the outrage over its prices, FIFA is seeing strong demand for next year's World Cup. On Tuesday, FIFA added it had already received 20 million ticket requests during this current sales window, with weeks still to go before the lottery window closes.

But for supporters, following a team throughout the tournament could be prohibitively expensive in 2026 — and not only because of high ticket prices.

The cost of travel across the three countries has also surged, including hotel prices, making it likely that next year's tournament will be among the most expensive World Cups ever staged for fans.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Huntington Beach appears to be running out of options in its effort to stave off state housing mandates after a recent California Supreme Court decision.

California requires cities to plan and zone for housing to meet the needs of the population at all income levels. In the most recent planning cycle, Huntington Beach was told it had to plan for 13,368 new homes.

The city balked, and the state sued Huntington Beach in 2023 for failing to comply.

The city’s argument, in a nutshell

The city has argued it doesn’t have to comply because it’s a charter city, which gives it more autonomy in some areas of governance than non-charter cities.

Huntington Beach also has said that planning for such a large number of units would force it to violate state environmental laws. A state appeals court in a September ruling didn’t buy either argument.

What’s next?

A San Diego court now must determine penalties against Huntington Beach, even as the city has vowed to keep fighting the housing mandate. An appeals court has ordered the lower court to give the city 120 days to approve a housing plan.

Other remedies the court will consider include:

• Suspending the city’s ability to approve building permits — essentially bringing all development in the city to a halt; or, on the opposite end of the spectrum,

• Forcing Huntington Beach to approve any and all applications to build homes — in other words, completely removing the city’s discretion to plan for development. 

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 16.

More animals are being run over on Los Angeles streets than ever before, and the lingering effects of the pandemic may be partly to blame.  

Through November of this year, the city’s MyLA311 service has fielded 31,093 requests for “dead animal removal,” an increase of more than a thousand from the same time last year. It marks a 37% increase from five years prior, and is the fifth straight year of increases.  

Fraser Shilling of the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis, studies the impact of transportation on animal populations. While one of the drivers of the increase is the continual loss of habitat from urban development, Shilling says the after effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are also playing a role. The protracted lockdown sparked a boom in pet adoptions, which he says has now transformed into an increase in animals being let go by their owners.  

“Basically, pandemic pets are being abandoned,” Shilling said. “Before they get picked up by animal control, they’re out on the street getting hit.” 

Cats made up nearly a third of animals picked up last year, according to the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation. Dogs accounted for 17%. Raccoons and opossums were the third- and fourth-most common. The vast majority of pickup requests are for animals that have been struck by vehicles. Others include requests to collect pets that have died at their owner’s home.

Want to know the number of requests in your neighborhood? Sign up for the Crosstown Neighborhood Newsletter and get stats about crime, traffic, housing and more for where you live.

Overstuffed animal shelters

Los Angeles has a massive feral cat population, estimated to be close to one million.

In 2020, the Los Angeles City Council approved the Citywide Cat Program aimed at trapping and spaying or neutering stray cats to prevent unwanted litters. But the program’s progress is facing constraints due to local funding challenges, as well as a nationwide veterinarian shortage. 

In August, the City Council unanimously approved a motion increasing the dollar amount pet owners are reimbursed by the city for spaying and neutering their pets, for an estimated cost of $9 million. A proposal from the city administrative officer recommended giving the higher reimbursement rates to shelter-based programs like the Citywide Cat Program, which would have cost an estimated $21 million over three years. That plan was not adopted.  

At the same time, the city’s shelters are overflowing with intakes. Through October of this year, Los Angeles Animal Service shelters took in 36,330 cats and dogs, per the department’s Woof Stat reports, a 6% increase from the same time last year and a 46% increase from the entire year of 2020. Its dog shelter program currently is operating at 123% capacity.  

San Pedro, Los Angeles’ southernmost neighborhood, had the highest number of dead animal removal requests in the city this year, with 922 as of Nov. 30, a 15% increase over the same period in 2024. 

As of Dec. 9, the animal shelter in San Pedro also had the highest dog occupancy rate of any of the six shelters in the city at 159% capacity. 

“Like many shelters across the country, LA Animal Services continues to experience overcrowding and operates at overcapacity, despite the department’s ongoing efforts to promote spaying and neutering, encourage pet adoptions and fostering, and working with rescues to help place animals,” Animal Services said in a statement. 

Where the city meets the wild 

The highest rates of wild animal collisions occur in dense urban areas surrounded by natural vegetation. Van Nuys and Northridge — ringed by the Santa Susana, Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains — were the neighborhoods with the second- and third-most dead animal reports. While cats were still the most common animals being picked up in Northridge zip codes, according to data from the Department of Sanitation, the region had numbers of opossums, squirrels, coyotes and deer that were higher than the citywide average 

Requests for removals in 2024, the most recent year for which the animal breakdown is available, included 366 coyotes, 191 chickens, 27 turtles and four turkeys. 

The number of dead deer last year was 63, around half of what it was in 2020. While that sounds like an improvement, it actually indicates a dire trend.  

“The population of deer in California is going down by 10% a year, and the population killed by traffic is about 8% or 9% per year, suggesting that the decline in deer in California is directly tied to roadkill,” said Shilling of the Road Ecology Center.  

Habitat loss from urban development is typically accompanied by an increase in traffic, according to the Road Ecology Center’s annual roadkill report. The city has been fast-tracking new development under Mayor Karen Bass’s directive focused on affordable housing, and over 5,600 units have been approved in the San Fernando Valley since 2023, according to the city planning website.  

The best solution to curb wildlife roadkill, Shilling said, is for people to drive more slowly. The second best is fencing along major roads and highways that have become hotspots. He said wildlife crossings — like the slated Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills — are ineffective at stopping roadkill unless accompanied by deliberate fencing.  

How we did it: We examined more than eight years of reports from the city’s MyLA311 service data. In addition, we broke down the requests by neighborhood. We also analyzed data from the Department of Sanitation and the city’s Animal Services Department. Have questions about our data or want to ask a question? Write to us as askus@xtown.la.