Celimar Rivera Cosme will be the first Puerto Rican Sign Language (LSPR) interpreter in Super Bowl halftime show history.

How Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show sign language interpreter is making history

Celimar Rivera Cosme will be the first Puerto Rican Sign Language (LSPR) interpreter in Super Bowl halftime show history.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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February 8, 2026 8:27 p.m. ET

Bad Bunny in New York City on Aug. 26, 2025; Celimar Rivera Cosme in San Francisco on Feb. 5, 2026. Credit:

ANGELA WEISS / AFP/Getty;Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

- Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show performance will be the first in the big game's history to feature a Puerto Rican Sign Language (LSPR) interpreter.

- Celimar Rivera Cosme, who has worked with Bad Bunny since 2022, will interpret the musician's Super Bowl set.

- "We've been fighting not to lose our language, but to keep it," Cosme told *The New York Times*.

Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show performance is making history — in more ways than one.

In addition to being the first halftime show performed predominantly in Spanish, the "NuevaYol" singer's set will be the first in the game's 60-year history to be accompanied by a Puerto Rican Sign Language (LSPR) interpreter. (Super Bowl performers, including musicians who performed earlier at Super Bowl LX like Charlie Puth and Coco Jones, are ordinarily accompanied by American Sign Language interpreters.)

LSPR derived from ASL when it first developed in the early 1900s, but features cultural nuances, pacing differences, and other distinctions that make it unique to Puerto Rico.

Celimar Rivera Cosme at Super Bowl LX Pregame in San Francisco on Feb. 5, 2026.

Christopher Polk/Billboard/Getty

Celimar Rivera Cosme, a native Puerto Rican who is hard of hearing, has been hired by the NFL to interpret Bad Bunny's set. The interpreter began working with the musician in 2022, a week after she publicly implored him to include an LSPR interpreter at his shows in an Instagram video, according to San Francisco PBS member station KQED.

Although a 2022 report estimated that 7 percent of Puerto Rican residents experience deafness or hardness of hearing — approximately 220,000 of the island's population of 3.2 million — experts consider LSPR an endangered language.

"We've been fighting not to lose our language, but to keep it," Cosme said in an interview with *The New York Times*. "The Super Bowl will be an excellent platform for us to use our language."

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The Super Bowl will see Cosme in the biggest spotlight of her career by a significant margin.

"The stakes here are to show that we are friendly people, and also how we dance, our lyrics, our slang," she told the *Times*. "Puerto Rico — we might be a small island, but people here have a huge, huge heart."

Bad Bunny in Medellin, Colombia, on Jan. 23.

Jaime SALDARRIAGA / AFP/Getty

Cosme told KQED that she is thrilled by the opportunity to interpret at the Super Bowl.

"I'm so excited," she said. "And the deaf people of Puerto Rico are happy that the Super Bowl will be accessible to them in their own sign language."

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The interpreter also noted that her presence at the game marks a significant milestone for Puerto Rico's deaf and hard-of-hearing population: "I know I'm going to be the one standing up there, but it's the deaf community of my island that's going to shine."**

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