When Patricia Martin stepped onto the field at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday and heard the roar of the crowd during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, she had to hold back her tears.
“It was so loud, so powerful,” Martin said, sitting on a bus from Santa Clara to Los Angeles on Monday, still reeling from the performance of her lifetime.
About five minutes into the Puerto Rican superstar’s highly anticipated halftime show, violinists in brown suits and bowties began to play the opening notes to the song “Monaco.”
Standing near the end of the aisle with a big smile on her face, Martin plays along as Bad Bunny shares a message. “Y si hoy estoy en el Super Bowl 60 es porque nunca, nunca dejé de creer en mí,” he says. If I’m at Super Bowl LX today, it’s because I never, ever stopped believing in myself.
The same could be said about Martin, a longtime mariachi violinist and special education teacher at Garfield High School, with roots all over the Eastside. Getting to the Super Bowl represented a lifelong fight for her place as a woman in mariachi.
“[Growing up] there were a lot of girls wanting to be a mariachi, but there wasn’t space for us,” Martin said. “It was predominantly for men. …We weren’t really respected, we would get paid less,” she said.
Born and raised in East Los Angeles, Martin began playing violin when she was 13 as a student at Belvedere Middle School and was inspired by her mariachi teacher, Adolfo Martinez. At 16, she was chosen to be an original member of the first, all-female mariachi ensemble in the United States, Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles.
Martin has played in big venues with Mariachi Reyna in the past, most notably at the Hollywood Bowl and at the White House for President Barack Obama’s Cinco de Mayo celebration in 2009.
But the pride she felt representing her roots and culture during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show was “unreal,” she said.
“As a Latina woman, I was out there not only representing me, but every Latina that does not have a voice or does not have that space,” Martin said, adding that stepping onto the field represented much more than a job. “In all my years of being a mariachi and everything that I believe in as a woman, all those years where we were underrepresented, the times when I got paid less because I was a woman…. It was just so unreal.”
How it came together
Martin played with Mariachi Reyna for 19 years and has previously been part of other all-female mariachi groups, including Las Colibrí, Mariachi Mujer 2000 de Marisa Orduno and Mariachi Divas de Cindy Shea.
Shea submitted her and other Mariachi Divas violinists, past and present, to be part of the halftime show in December, and by early January, Martin received an email that she had been chosen to participate.
“I think that Bad Bunny was looking for Latinas; he wanted Latinos in his show,” Martin said. “In terms of orchestra, all of us were Latinos, the majority.”
“Moments like these remind us that dreams, dedication, and cultura take you everywhere,” the Mariachi Divas wrote in a post congratulating the women who participated in the halftime show.
Feeling the love from back home
For Martin, the best part about performing at the Super Bowl was not being next to one of the biggest artists in the world or hearing the applause from tens of thousands of fans; it was the outpouring of support she received from former mariachi students she has taught and mentored as an educator in East LA and Boyle Heights over the years.
Martin spent 15 years teaching special education and mariachi at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School before moving to Garfield a year and a half ago to do the same. After the performance on Sunday, Martin said she received emails and messages from former students congratulating her and expressing their pride. Many of those students have gone on to create their own mariachi groups at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Irvine and UC Riverside, Martin said.
“More than anything, that’s very powerful for me — to be the role model for those students,” Martin said.
Correction, Feb. 9, 2026 4:44 pm: A previous version of this story incorrectly named the city Martin was traveling from.
