Influence from the margins

Abstract Shortly after Super Bowl LX, in which Bad Bunny headlined the most‐watched halftime show in Super Bowl history, the editors of American Ethnologist sat down to interview anthropologists Crystal Abidin (author of books including TikTok and Youth Cultures and Child Influencers: How Children Become Entangled with Social Media Fame ) and Vanessa Díaz (author of the books Manufacturing Celebrity and P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance ). The wide‐ranging discussion covered the changing structures of celebrity promotion, including Hollywood paparazzi and J‐pop and K‐pop fan clubs, genres of parasociality and shifting social media trends, the rise of influencers and new pathways to achieving and marketing celebrity, and the performances of child influencers. Even though they work in different regions of the world and study different celebrity industries, both Díaz and Abidin focus on what and who are made invisible in the production of celebrity, and the ways that pop culture icons from minority groups have achieved global mainstream success by coding forms of critique and political commentary within catchy tunes.