Reggaeton Goes Global: 'Despacito' and the Crossover Era

Reggaeton is the Puerto Rican urban genre that, within roughly a single generation, traveled from the margins of early-1990s San Juan to near-saturation of the world's pop charts and dancefloors—an arc that the late-2010s triumph of 'Despacito' came to embody for a broad public. Its presiding figure is Daddy Yankee, the San Juan performer whom critics and fans of urban music widely call the 'king of reggaeton.'^[5] The genre's very name belongs to that Caribbean beginning: 'reguetón' is attributed to Daddy Yankee, who is said to have coined the term in 1991 to label the emerging island style that would, in the decades that followed, spread far beyond Puerto Rico.^[1] Audibly, the genre is marked as much by language as by rhythm—its lyrics interleave Spanish and English in a Spanglish that listeners came to hear as the sound of reggaeton itself—and that bilingual surface helped carry a Spanish-dominant dance music across the world's markets.

The road to that global moment did not run straight; it passed first through an English-language Latin-pop crossover a generation earlier. Having come up through the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo and built a Latin-American following with ballad-centered albums, Ricky Martin broke through internationally with 'María,' from A Medio Vivir (1995), before his ascendancy at the close of the decade came to be identified as the opening of the so-called Latin explosion—the moment Latin pop entered the Anglophone mainstream.^[2] His 1999 single 'Livin' la Vida Loca,' from his first English-language album, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the United Kingdom's singles chart as well, proof that a Puerto Rican artist could hold the center of global pop.^[3] Critics have credited Martin with carrying Latin pop into mainstream recognition and clearing a path that many Hispanic performers would later follow to worldwide audiences.^[4] One contrast, though, separates that breakthrough from the Despacito era: Martin's crossover records 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 that first crossover, Daddy Yankee became the figure most closely bound to reggaeton itself as it matured into a global commodity. His commercial reach is substantial: he ranks among the Latin-music artists credited with selling more than thirty million records, a scale that lifted him well beyond any regional niche.^[6] That standing mattered for the genre's globalization, because reggaeton's largest mainstream hits tended to route through established names rather than newcomers, and Daddy Yankee supplied both the credibility and the recognizability a worldwide hit required.

The means by which reggaeton crossed linguistic borders has been studied most closely through code-switching—the alternation of two languages within a single stretch of discourse. In a 2020 corpus study of the genre's most popular tracks, the linguist Magdalena Jade Monteagudo found that reggaeton is characterized by its reliance on Spanglish, the interleaving of Spanish and English.^[7] The English elements, she observed, tended to work in symbolic and discursive registers rather than carry a lyric's literal sense—recurring in boasts, in the introduction of an artist or track, and in the building of excitement—while Spanish bore the semantic weight.^[8] Monteagudo argued further that the practice of Spanglish had itself become indexical of reggaeton, so that the language mixture signaled the genre to its listeners.^[9] That bilingual surface gave 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 diverged sharply along linguistic lines, complicating any single story of universal appeal. Drawing on two hundred questionnaire responses split between American English-speakers and Spanish-speaking Hispanics, the same study reported that the American respondents viewed Spanglish favorably overall, while the Hispanic respondents were markedly more critical of it.^[10] Monteagudo read the gap as a matter of identity: Spanish-speakers tended to treat their language as a heritage to be guarded against the dominance of English, whereas English-speakers more often found the foreign element novel and appealing. How far such stated attitudes predict actual listening behavior is uncertain, but the finding tempers triumphal accounts of crossover by showing that a single song could carry opposite cultural meanings for different audiences.

The late-2010s breakthrough, with 'Despacito' as its most visible emblem, is best read as the convergence of these threads rather than a sudden rupture. By then reggaeton had been absorbed into the broader vocabulary of Latin pop so thoroughly that even Ricky Martin's own discography had come to incorporate the genre alongside Latin pop, dance, and salsa.^[11] The Despacito phenomenon set Daddy Yankee, the performer most identified with reggaeton, at the center of a worldwide hit, realizing on a global scale the international diffusion that the genre's early self-naming had already anticipated. Its familiar crossover device—pairing a Spanish-language record with an Anglophone pop guest—echoed both the Martin precedent and the code-switching logic that the scholarship describes.

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 hailed by Rolling Stone as a legend of the genre—recognitions that lodged reggaeton within the established canon of popular music.^[12] The genre's arrival as an industry asset was underscored in 2024, when 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 the long view, the route Ricky Martin 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.