Currently, there are five principal “schools” or transnational styles of salsa performance: New York, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Cuban, with the development of timba or “Cuban salsa” in the early 1990s.7 Some observers might add Miami to this list, although the common pool of arrangers and studio musicians used in New York, Miami, and even Puerto Rico has made much contemporary salsa produced in these places sound very similar (Washburne 1999). Cross-cutting these transnational schools is another stylistic matrix that correlates to salsa’s historical development. Negus (1999: 138–39) characterizes these as: (1) the “old school” (salsa dura), which follows the classic 1960s–70s sound; (2) salsa romántica, a continuation of 1980s salsa erótica (sensual salsa); (3) “soulful salsa,” incorporating Top Forty pop, rhythm ’n’ blues, and soul harmonies and arrangements (e.g., Luis Enrique and Victor Manuel); and (4) “dance club salsa,” which fuses salsa romántica with elements of hop-hop, R & B, and Cuban timba (e.g., Marc Antony and La India). In each of the five transnational schools of salsa, there are bands that follow one or another of these four stylistic matrices, hence combining a regionally or nationally defined way of playing salsa with these broader categories.
Salsa research to date has focused primarily on salsa’s Cuban roots and its development in New York and Puerto Rico (Blum 1978; Roberts 1979; Rondón 1980; Arias Satizábal 1981; Singer 1982, 1983; Duany 1984; Alén 1984; Padilla 1989, 1990; Gerard 1989; Arteaga 1990; Boggs 1992; Santana 1992; Manuel 1991, 1994, 1995; Quintero Rivera 1998; Washburne 1999). Colombian writers, mainly journalists and sociologists, have also produced a notable body of work on salsa and música antillana, mostly detailing the impact of Cuban and Puerto Rican artists in Colombia (e.g., Valverde 1981; Arias Satizábal 1981; Arteaga 1990; Jaramillo 1992; Betancur Alvarez 1993). A definitive history of Colombian salsa remains to be written, although journalists in Cali and Bogotá have contributed important commentaries about Colombian artists and fans to local newspapers and magazines.8 While my own work in this book and other publications attempts to redress the gap, I do not focus on Colombian salsa from a complete national perspective, and I omit discussion of artists and developments in other parts of the country.
Alejandro Ulloa’s detailed sociological study La salsa en Cali (1992) stands as the only extant book-length exploration of salsa’s impact in urban Colombia written by an insider of Cali’s salsa scene. Indeed, the work can be seen as a product of the self-image as the world salsa capital that was being widely circulated in Cali by the late 1980s. Although Ulloa’s frequent shifts between sociological analysis and nostalgic rhapsodizing make the book difficult to follow for readers unfamiliar with his inside references, the work is invaluable and has served as a basic reference for my own research in Cali. Ulloa conducted his study on salsa in Cali during the mid-1980s, when Cali was emerging on the international scene as an important salsa center. My research, coming at the close of this epoch, serves as an extension of the themes planted in Ulloa’s research, updating his discussion of musical venues, local bands, and radio stations. I also address issues that he does not deal with, such as the stylistic components of Colombian salsa, the artistic and commercial processes that shape the lives of contemporary Caleño musicians, and salsa’s impact in the region around Cali. Sections of Valverde and Quintero’s recent work on Cali’s all-woman bands, Abran paso (1995), also deal with local salsa history and serve as an additional reference for my work.
This book represents an attempt to go beyond the New York-Cuba-Puerto Rico focus of current salsa scholarship, particularly that published in English, by focusing on a South American case. My study follows recent scholarship on Latin American and Caribbean music (e.g., Guilbault 1993; Pacini Hernández 1995; Glasser 1995; Averill 1997; Austerlitz 1997) that systematically examines the links between popular music, race, class, the music industry, transnational flows, and local and national identity. Ulloa 1992, for example, despite recognizing social differences of class, race, and gender in Cali, does not always clarify where or how or even why these lines are drawn, nor does he analyze the fluidity of these categories with regard to key developments in Cali’s scene. I attempt to highlight such processes by exploring how salsa’s local adoption intersects with shifting lines of class, racial and ethnic identity, gender, and age. I am also influenced by recent research in Latin American and Latino/Latina studies about dancing and listening bodies as sites for the internalization and enactment of social difference (e.g., Savigliano 1995; Fraser Delgado and Muñoz 1997). In the following sections, I outline the key theoretical concerns that shape my study.
Recordings and Popular Memory
The centrality of recorded music for Caleños challenges the privileging, in most scholarly work, of live performance as more “real” or “authentic” than its mediated versions.9 Indeed, for many decades “playing music” in Cali literally meant putting on a record, as a source of music for other social and expressive activities. The term disco (literally, a record disc) still exists as a local synonym for “song,” even when it is a live rendition of a song—as in “Vamos a tocar ese disco” (Let’s perform that song). Despite the presence of a few local ensembles before 1980 and the flowering of live salsa bands after this point, recordings still constitute a central source of musical sound in Cali’s scene. (In chapter 1 I discuss early musical activity in Cali and also describe regional genres in the rest of Colombia.) At the same time that local orquestas, or salsa bands, began to flower, so did salsotecas and tabernas, small specialty bars where people went to listen to records of classic salsa and música antillana; I discuss these at length in chapter 2. When the live scene collapsed in 1996 (owing in part to the fall of the Cali cocaine cartel), the early record-centered dance scene was revived, in the viejoteca phenomenon that I analyze in chapter 2. The rise of the viejotecas, which was paralleled by a resurgence of activity by salsoteca owners and record collectors, represents a surprising recuperation and reaffirmation of Cali’s record-centered popular culture.
Although recordings and other media have contributed to new musical hybrids and identities around the globe (Lipsitz 1994; Taylor 1997), recent research suggests that the appropriation of such technology to local musical practice and creativity is an area in need of more attention than it has conventionally received. Studies of Japanese karaoke (Keil 1984; Mitsui and Hosokawa 1998) and cassette cultures in India (Manuel 1993) demonstrate that the appropriation of media technology to local musical practice and creativity calls for a more thorough analysis of this complex development. The predominance until recently of records over local musicians in Cali is an unusual social phenomenon that requires a different perspective. Jeremy Wallach suggests that records should be treated as actual music and not just a document (in the way notation is), since recordings generate a “sonic presence” that provides a basis for musical sound and meaning just as live performance does (1997). Although the experiences created through recorded music are often different from those of live music (for one, face-to-face interaction between performers and audiences is absent), they can be equally powerful.
Recordings, as sound vehicles, serve as powerful tools for fostering new, hitherto unimagined sources of memory. Through their capacity to reproduce past moments, recordings also become potent triggers for memory in the present. George Lipsitz observes that “[i]nstead of relating to a past through a shared sense of place or ancestry, consumers of electronic mass media can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen, they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection” (1990: 5). This schizophonic (Schaeffer 1977) displacement of time and space has particularly strong ramifications for considering the consumption of recorded music in Cali. In his study of the links between phonographs