In the following chapters I attempt to answer these questions by tracing the social history of salsa in Cali and the unique practices through which Caleños made salsa an emblem of local popular culture. Key to the multiple theoretical perspectives framing this work is an emphasis on the everyday musical practices and subjective spaces through which Caleños have experienced and understood large-scale forces of modernization, urban development, and global capital flow. Using interviews, field observations, oral histories, archival resources, and musical analysis, I have tried to ground some of the current academic debates about power struggles over race and ethnicity, class hierarchy, gender roles, and generational difference. This book is also intended, however, as a case study in the localization of salsa. It traces the specific and sometimes fascinating practices through which salsa—a style with roots in the Caribbean—has come to hold great meaning for a particular South American city. My study hence unfolds through two interrelated stories. One is about the history of salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, specifically as they were localized in Caleño popular culture. The other is about the ways this localized transnational style served to anchor larger economic, political, and cultural processes that affected Caleños at several levels. Together, these two strands coalesce to reveal how dancing, listening to, collecting records of, and performing salsa have been central for the development of a contemporary urban, cosmopolitan culture in Cali.
Salsa’s Rise and Transnational Spread
Salsa music developed in New York City’s Latino barrios during the 1960s and 1970s. Based largely on Cuban forms popular in previous decades, such as son, guaracha, danzón, mambo, and bolero, salsa also incorporated elements of Puerto Rican bomba and plena and influences from North American jazz and rock. Salsa’s Cuban and Puerto Rican antecedents—referred to in Colombia as música antillana (music of the Spanish Antilles)—were themselves a fusion of African and European elements. I discuss these further in chapter 1 (see also Alén 1984; Echevarría Alvardo 1984; Dufrasne-González 1994). Most people agree that salsa’s primary musical foundation is Cuban; in particular, salsa generally follows the same two-part structure and rhythmic base of Cuban son. Yet, several Puerto Rican musicians on the island and in New York City made important contributions to this tradition, including Rafael Hernández, Noro Morales, Daniel Santos, Pedro Flores, Rafael Cortijo, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri and it would be inaccurate to define this style as exclusively Cuban (Glasser 1995). The stylistic innovations accompanying salsa’s development in the 1960s and 1970s moved this tradition significantly beyond its Cuban roots. In Cali, people include both Cubans and Puerto Ricans when they refer to música antillana. In the Caleño context, hence, this makes it impossible to define música antillana solely as Cuban or even Cuban based—despite the fact that the influence of Cuban musical elements clearly outweighs Puerto Rican contribu-tions overall. In this volume, I use the term “Cuban and Puerto Rican music” in conjunction with “música antillana,” with the caveats out-lined above. In chapter 1 I explore elements of style and structure in música antillana in greater detail.
There is considerable debate over the origins of the term “salsa.” The word literally means “sauce,” invoking culinary references to the spicy mixture found in to most Latin American and Caribbean cuisine. Cuban son musicians in the first half of this century frequently used to say, “Toca con salsa!” (roughly, “hit it!” or “swing it”) when the excitement and energy of the music began to rise. This metaphor was first used in a commercial setting by Ignacio Piñeiro in his famous 1933 composition “Échale salsita.” It is probable that a Venezuelan radio DJ, Phidias Danilo Escalona, was among the first to use the term “salsa” to denote Latin and Cuban dance music in the early 1960s (Rondón 1980: 33), although the New York publisher Izzy Sanabria claims to have coined the name at the end of the decade (Roberts 1979: 187).
During the early and mid-1960s two early prototypes of salsa emerged. One was the pachanga, a fast version of the Cuban guaracha that was usually performed on the flute-and-violin charanga ensemble. The other was bugalú or boogaloo, a fusion of Cuban son with African American soul that became an important crossover genre for New York blacks and Latinos (Flores 2000). Both of these genres had a huge impact in Cali, for reasons I analyze in chapter 2. But as experimental elaborations on earlier música antillana, pachanga, and bugalú also laid important groundwork for the dynamic, experimental edge now associated with the classic New York and Puerto Rican sound of the late 1960s and 1970s, known as salsa dura (“hard” or “heavy” salsa), salsa brava (“strong” or “wild” salsa), or salsa gorda (“fat” salsa). As I describe in the next chapter, several salsa dura artists returned to a more conservative approach that cleaved to Cuban and Puerto Rican models from the 1940s and 1950s, but in the dynamism between innovative and conservative schools, salsa music flowered. Importantly, by the early 1970s, “salsa” had become the standard term of reference throughout Latin America, owing in large part to its use by Fania Records as a commercial label under which to market this music.
Salsa’s development and international spread have given rise to much debate about its genesis and legitimacy as a musical category. Cuban specialists and musicians, in particular, have long contested the use of the term, claiming that salsa is nothing more than Cuban music, or a Puerto Rico adaptation thereof (Roberts 1979: 188; Manuel 1994). Some Puerto Rican musicians also support this argument—most notably Tito Puente, who often said, “The only salsa I know comes from a bottle. What I play is Cuban music” (Santana 1992: 17; Loza 1999: 40–41). Marisol Berríos-Miranda and other critics demonstrate, however, that significant stylistic and ideological characteristics differentiate salsa from its Cuban predecessors (see Waxer 2002). Even a casual listening to 1960s and 1970s salsa dura (e.g., Eddie Palmieri) and Cuban son bands from the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Arsenio Rodríguez) provides strong evidence for distinguishing between the two. While the rhythms and forms are the same, the stylistic treatment is quite different. Salsa uses more percussion and larger horn sections than do its Cuban antecedents.4 The arrangements are more aggressive, and the social and cultural milieu to which the lyrics refer is not Cuban. Although some might argue that such differences hardly suffice to categorize salsa and its Cuban roots as different styles, we should keep in mind that similar kinds of distinctions separate such closely related sounds as rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, and hip-hop—styles usually recognized as distinct without the vociferous debate that the salsa-Cuban music split engenders.
The New York community in which salsa developed was strongly Puerto Rican, and during the 1960s and 1970s salsa became a potent emblem of working-class Puerto Rican cultural identity both for islanders and for those living in the United States (Duany 1984; Padilla 1990). The use of the ten-stringed Puerto Rican cuatro, an icon of cultural identity, by Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars during the early 1970s underscored salsa’s Puerto Rican affiliations and marked a further difference between salsa and its Cuban roots.5 The music’s own interracial heritage was mirrored by the strong interethnic participation that marked the New York scene, with Jewish and African American musicians performing in several bands. The Jewish pianist Larry Harlow even became an important bandleader and producer in the New York scene.
During this same period, salsa music also spread to other parts of Latin America, especially Venezuela, Panama, and Colombia—countries with close geographic and economic ties to the Caribbean.6 Significantly, salsa’s lyrics reflected the experiences of the Latino and Latin American black and mixed-race working class, and—in distinction to its Cuban antecedents—the songs mirrored the violence and discontent of the inner city. Salsa and its predecessors were initially reviled by the Latin American and Caribbean upper classes for being the music of the dark-skinned working classes—often in grossly racist terms such as música de monos (music of apes). When salsa’s exuberant beat and social message caught on with Latin American leftist intellectuals from the middle and upper-middle classes in the early 1970s, however, salsa music began to shed its lower-class associations to establish a devoted following not only across national boundaries, but also across social