Cosmopolitan Culture and Globalization
Perhaps the most significant factor in the adoption of música antillana and, later, salsa in Cali, over and above regional or national musical styles, was the symbolic significance this music had as a transnational and hence cosmopolitan style at a time when the city itself was becoming increasingly tied to world markets. A central theme of this book concerns the formation of an imagined bond between Cali and the Caribbean (including Hispanic Caribbean migrants in New York City). Despite Cali’s location hundreds of miles away from the Caribbean—let alone New York—Caleños claim unity with Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and New York Latinos by virtue of having adopted salsa and its Afro-Caribbean roots as their own, over local and national musical styles. The consequences of this sensibility are profound and point to a cultural identity that is simultaneously local and global.
The term “cosmopolitan” denotes being “of the world” (from the Greek kosmo [world] and polites [citizen]) and is usually associated with those from elite social ranks, who have more resources for travel, education, and accumulation of goods from different parts of the planet. This common usage, however, often ignores people from less privileged ranks who are also tied to cosmopolitan flows. As Cali’s case clearly indicates, people can have cosmopolitan values, tastes, and lifestyles no matter what their socioeconomic rank. In contrast with its usual connotations, by “cosmopolitan” I specifically mean the ways in which increased transportation and communications links, colonialism, mass media, and other channels have helped to spread practices and values around the globe, so that actual or symbolic ties to a specific point of origin are weakened or complicated by cultural formations in multiple sites (Turino 2001: 8–10). The term is more useful than the Eurocentric notion of “Westernization” in understanding issues of globalization and modernity, since it does not grant Europe or (white) North America an a priori position as the source of all modern or transnational processes. Throughout this book I will trace the role of salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican predecessors in forging the emergence of cosmopolitan identity in Caleño popular culture.
In analyzing the social history of salsa in Cali, I understand globalization to deal primarily with large-scale economic and political shifts at the international level and related flows via which cultural images, ideas, and products circulate in an increasingly deterritorialized fashion. I invoke the term “cosmopolitanism,” on the other hand, to describe the ways in which people at the local level (home, neighborhood, and city) began to react to and internalize the effects of these changes through their belief systems, values, outlooks, tastes, cultural choices, and expressive practices. Unlike those who see cosmopolitanism to be an “inauthentic,” voyeuristic, shallow pose that allows people only superficial participation in the local realities of others (Friedman 1995: 78), I maintain that—at least in Cali’s case—cosmopolitanism provides a dynamic resource for negotiating and authenticating new cultural and social processes that cannot easily be contained within localist, regionalist, or nationalist models. For Caleños, cosmopolitanism has been part of the forging of an authentic sense of self and group amid the escalating ruptures and struggles that shaped Cali’s transformation into a major urban center. Indeed, the neologism “cosmopolitics” aptly characterizes Caleños’ agency and deliberate use of transnational sounds, images, and styles to formulate a response to local and national realities through connections to the world beyond.
This process is not the opposite of nationalism (a common misunderstanding) but is produced dialectically within the context of the nation. As the essays in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins’s volume Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998) show, the active formation of transnational sensibilities and allegiances as a way of working out difference from national processes and cultural norms is a defining characteristic of the mid-to late twentieth century. This is especially so in the Americas, where nationalist independence struggles and the rise of republican nation-states occurred much earlier than in Africa or Asia. Indeed, the emergence of cosmopolitan dynamics during the second half of the twentieth century, as a renegotiation of nationalism in various parts of the world, parallels what Fredric Jameson has called “late capitalism” (1991). Borrowing from Jameson’s concept, perhaps we can think of contemporary cosmopolitics as a sort of “late nationalism.” In Cali, local culture before the twentieth century had been dominated by norms emanating from the economically and politically powerful interior of the country, despite the fact that Cali had an otherwise insular and distant relationship from the rest of Colombia. As the city’s economic ties to world markets began to emerge between 1940 and 1990 through the growing coffee, sugar, and, later, illegal cocaine markets, salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots provided a way for Caleños to articulate their continuing sense of difference from the rest of the nation, while it was simultaneously becoming caught up in transnational economic flows. The rhythms of salsa and its antecedents became the soundtrack for a city in flux, where Caleños developed a cosmopolitan identity that did not ignore nationalist trends but dialectically emerged from opposition to them.
The terms “cosmopolitanism” and “globalization” have increasingly been linked in much recent scholarship (Hannerz 1990; Held 2000). Indeed, salsa’s rapid spread through Latin America during the 1970s, followed by its adoption in Europe, Japan, and Senegal during the 1980s and 1990s, necessitates including this genre in discussions about globalization. Salsa in Africa, a recent trend related to the earlier popularization of Afro-Cuban music in West and Central Africa—particularly Congo (Zaïre)—during the 1930s through the 1960s (see Stewart 2000), must be considered a new branch of salsa’s international flowering. Salsa’s multiple sites of production and reception around the globe flow directly into its status as a significant popular style.11 Mayra Santos Febre observes that salsa’s potency hinges on a cultural enterprise that “is larger than national and broader than ethnic. . . . [T]his [can] be understood as multinational.” The very fluidity with which salsa has been enjoined to oppositional, counterestablishment ideologies (from the black and mixed-race working-class margins), at the same time that it plays into dominant modes of production and consumption, has further facilitated its transnational spread (1997: 179). While salsa’s international diffusion is not the same kind of globalization spawned by McDonald’s, MTV, Microsoft, and Michael Jackson, the distinction between “transnational” (cutting across national boundaries) and “global (truly worldwide) is not always clear in salsa’s case. Although salsa’s spread to different countries within Latin America might best be classified as transnational, its adoption in Europe, Japan, and Africa certainly approaches global proportions. Furthermore, the increasing presence of the Big Five record companies—EMI/Virgin, Warner/WEA, Universal/Polygram, and especially Sony and BMG—in the salsa industry during the 1990s clearly ties salsa to globalizing forces in the music business, even when these companies’ products are not necessarily promoted with the same emphasis in different world markets. The dozens of salsa-related Web sites that have emerged on the Internet also speak to increasing globalization in this medium.12
My specific concern with studying globalization processes has to do with the global within the local—that is, the way in which the trend toward globalization is manifested and understood as part of Cali’s emerging local reality. Much recent discourse tends to pit the local against the global, as if the two concepts were polar opposites constantly in tension with each other. Scholars such as the sociologist Roland Robertson caution us against this type of thinking, observing that globalization is intimately and simultaneously bound up with local processes and experiences. Robertson uses the neologism “glocalization” to describe this relationship.13 According to him, it is precisely in the localization of internationally diffused images, ideas, and forms that globalization actually occurs (1995: 31). Whether we can qualify salsa’s glocalization as being a transnational or a truly global phenomenon does not concern me here. Even a superficial familiarity with salsa activity in different transnational sites reveals two important processes. The process of “cultural homogenization” by dominant countries and/or multinational organizations feared by globalization’s critics (Barber 1992) is not operative in the case of salsa. This is primarily because salsa and its roots emerged from racial and socioeconomic opposition to the dominant colonial and neocolonial order (Quintero Rivera 1998). Furthermore, salsa’s transnational diffusion initially