Reggaeton Goes Global: 'Despacito' and the Crossover Era

Reggaeton moved from the margins of early-1990s Puerto Rico to near-saturation of the world's pop charts within roughly a single generation, an arc that the late-2010s triumph of 'Despacito' came to embody for a broad public. The genre's very name belongs to that Caribbean beginning, for the term 'reguetón' is attributed to the San Juan performer Daddy Yankee, who is said to have coined it in 1991 to label the emerging island style that would, in the decades that followed, spread well beyond Puerto Rico.^[1] The path toward that global moment, however, did not run in a straight line. It passed through an earlier Latin-pop crossover conducted largely in English, and it depended on a bilingual lyrical practice that gave Anglophone listeners a foothold in a Spanish-dominant music. Understanding how reggaeton went global therefore requires holding several histories together: a commercial precedent, a genre's self-naming, and a distinctive manner of mixing languages.

The commercial ground for a Spanish-language genre's worldwide reach had been partly prepared, comparativists note, by the Latin-pop surge of the late 1990s. Ricky Martin's ascendancy in the closing years of that decade is commonly identified as the opening of the so-called Latin explosion, the period in which Latin pop entered the Anglophone mainstream.^[2] His 1999 English-language single 'Livin' la Vida Loca' reached the summit of the Billboard Hot 100 and likewise topped the United Kingdom's singles chart, demonstrating that a Puerto Rican artist could command the centre of global pop.^[3] Observers have credited Martin with carrying Latin pop into mainstream recognition and opening a route by which numerous Hispanic performers subsequently reached worldwide audiences.^[4] Yet a crucial contrast separates that moment from the Despacito era: Martin's breakthrough recordings were sung largely in English, whereas the reggaeton wave that crested two decades later carried predominantly Spanish lyrics to the same charts.

If Martin personified the first crossover, Daddy Yankee became the figure most closely identified with reggaeton itself as it matured into a global commodity. Critics and fans of urban music widely regard him as the 'king of reggaeton', a designation that registers both his seniority in the form and his part in defining it.^[5] His commercial standing is considerable, for he ranks among the Latin music artists credited with more than thirty million records sold, a scale that placed him well beyond any regional niche.^[6] That stature mattered for the genre's globalization, because reggaeton's widest mainstream successes tended to route through established figures rather than newcomers, and Daddy Yankee supplied both the credibility and the recognizability that a worldwide hit demanded.

The mechanism that allowed reggaeton to cross linguistic borders has been examined most closely through the lens of code-switching, the alternation of two languages within a single stretch of discourse. In a 2020 corpus study of the genre's most popular songs, the linguist Magdalena Jade Monteagudo found that reggaeton is characterized by its reliance on Spanglish, the interleaving of Spanish and English.^[7] Crucially, the English elements tended to operate in symbolic and discursive registers rather than carrying the literal sense of a lyric, recurring in such uses as boasting, the introduction of an artist or track, and the building of excitement, while Spanish bore the semantic weight.^[8] Monteagudo further argued that the very practice of Spanglish had become indexical of reggaeton, so that the language mixture itself signalled the genre to its listeners.^[9] This bilingual surface offered Anglophone audiences recognizable anchors even when they could not parse the Spanish verses, easing the music's passage across markets.

Reception of that bilingual practice, however, diverged sharply along linguistic lines, a divergence that complicates any single story of universal appeal. Drawing on two hundred questionnaire responses divided between American English-speakers and Spanish-speaking Hispanics, the same study reported that the American respondents regarded Spanglish favourably overall, whereas the Hispanic respondents proved markedly more critical of it.^[10] Monteagudo interpreted this gap as a matter of identity, suggesting that Spanish-speakers viewed their language as a heritage to be guarded against the dominance of English, while English-speakers tended to find the foreign element novel and appealing. Scholars disagree about how far such reported attitudes predict actual listening behaviour, yet the finding tempers triumphal accounts of crossover by showing that one song could carry opposite cultural meanings for different audiences.

The late-2010s breakthrough, with 'Despacito' as its most visible emblem, can thus be read as the convergence of these threads rather than a sudden rupture. By that point reggaeton had been absorbed into the broader vocabulary of Latin pop to such a degree that even Ricky Martin's own discography had come to incorporate the genre alongside Latin pop, dance, and salsa.^[11] The Despacito phenomenon placed Daddy Yankee, the performer most associated with reggaeton, at the centre of a worldwide hit, and in doing so it realized on a global scale the international diffusion that the genre's early naming had already anticipated. The familiar crossover device of pairing a Spanish-language record with an Anglophone pop guest, in turn, echoed both the earlier Martin precedent and the code-switching logic that the scholarship describes.

Reggaeton's institutional and commercial consecration followed quickly, confirming that the global moment was structural rather than a passing novelty. Daddy Yankee was inducted into Billboard's hall of fame in 2022 and acclaimed by Rolling Stone as a legend of the genre, recognitions that lodged reggaeton within the established canon of popular music.^[12] The genre's full arrival as an industry asset was underscored when, in 2024, he sold his catalogue to Concord Records for a reported two hundred and seventeen million dollars, a transaction unimaginable for the marginal island style of the early 1990s.^[12] Seen in long perspective, the road that Ricky Martin had helped open at the close of the 1990s reached, by way of reggaeton and its global hits, a destination far broader than its origins would have suggested.