Daddy Yankee Took Reggaeton's First Person of the Year Honor in Las Vegas

The Latin Recording Academy's Person of the Year list runs through the whole history of Latin music. Until Wednesday night, nobody on it came from reggaeton. Academy CEO Manuel Abud said it plainly when he opened the gala at the MGM Grand Marquee Ballroom: "For the first time in history, the Academy honors one of the great pioneers of reggaeton."

The room understood what that meant. The Person of the Year gala is an invite-only dinner built out of other artists performing the honoree's songs, and this one ran more than three hours — Daddy Yankee seated with his parents, his son and his brothers while two generations of stars worked through the catalog he built, from the underground parties of San Juan to the biggest pop records on earth.

Three hours of his own songs

Jorge Drexler introduced the night and DJ Playero, who produced Yankee's earliest work, spun the old hits before the tributes started. Then the ballroom got its feet under it: Tito El Bambino, Jowell y Randy, Trueno and Feid performed "Gasolina" together, the 2004 record that carried reggaeton out of Puerto Rico and never really put it back.

The surprise of the night belonged to nobody's bingo card. The Sugarhill Gang — the group behind "Rapper's Delight," hip-hop's first hit — walked out unannounced to perform for a reggaetonero, a debt between genres paid in person. A new-generation medley followed, with J Noa, Paulo Londra, Trueno, Feid and Ryan Castro running "Rompe," "Gangsta Zone" and more of the records they grew up on.

J Balvin and LL Cool J presented the award. Yankee took it standing between them, and the composure that has carried him through thirty years cracked a little. "I am at a loss for words," he said, in Billboard's account of the night. "Never in my life have I felt an emotion as powerful as the one I felt today. I couldn't believe everything I had built, and it reminded me that these songs are not mine — they belong to you."

The receipts under the honor

The Academy does not hand this award out for longevity alone, and the numbers under Yankee's name are the argument. Barrio Fino, the 2004 album that carried "Gasolina," spent 24 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart. He has placed more than 100 entries on Hot Latin Songs, seven of them No. 1s. "Despacito," his 2017 collaboration with Luis Fonsi, spent 56 weeks on top of that chart. The Academy announced the honor in April, citing a career of nearly thirty years — and the genre he pioneered now fills stadiums on every continent, which is the part of the citation nobody had to argue about.

Retired, then not

Yankee announced his retirement in 2022 and meant it, until he didn't. He came back with the faith-based Lamento en Baile in 2025, and its "Sonríele" reached No. 1 on Latin Airplay last October. He is currently on the road behind a new album, La Postal — and on Wednesday he closed his own coronation the only way the room would have accepted, singing three of his own songs to finish the night: "Botz," "Sonríele" and "Lo Que Paso Paso."

The week is not finished with him. Tonight, Thursday, the 27th Latin Grammy Awards take over the MGM Grand Garden Arena, a short walk from the ballroom where he was honored, and Yankee is on the show's bill as a performer. Las Vegas has hosted plenty of victory laps. This one belongs to a genre that spent years being treated as a fad by the industry that now flies in to celebrate it — and to the man who outlasted the treatment.