and their commodification in the vinyl furrows of record discs. Cali’s case embodies the theoretical links mapped out by Keil and Feld in a particularly vivid fashion that I am not sure even they could have imagined when they coauthored this book. The strong role of recordings in Caleño popular life cannot be read merely as an instance of cultural massification through media technologies—an argument often raised in debates about cultural imperialism or global homogenization. Expressive record-centered practices (dancing, collecting, listening, and talking) have provided the basis for collective social activities, reaffirming community bonds and values that could be called upon in times of need. The fetishization of recordings in local popular culture—probably the most striking feature of salsa’s localization—is far too complicated to explain by a simple equation of cultural homogenization. The actual uses that Caleños have made of mass media technology over the past three generations indicate a highly original and creative approach in which transnational sounds and objects are adapted to local expressive practices.
These developments, while in many ways unique to Cali, are also markers of contemporary dynamics in Latin American culture and urban experience. Rowe and Schelling observe that the massive migration and urban development in Latin America have blurred the boundary between rural and urban cultures and moved cities to the fore of regional and national cultures.
Almost all cultures in Latin America are now mediated to some extent by the city, both in the sense of its massification of social phenomenon and of the communication technologies which it makes available. To see the city as a corrupting and contaminating force, in opposition to a pure and authentic culture rooted in the rural areas, is to indulge in nostalgia. On the other hand, the city is the place of entry of transnational culture, of TV programmes, comic-strip heroes and advertisements, whose references are to a different environment, that of the advanced capitalist countries. Is it possible, given the configuration sketched out here, to continue using the term “popular culture” as designating a distinctive area? The answer given in actual usage is yes: the term popular culture, according to common usage in Latin America, evokes the possibility of alternatives to currently dominant cultural patterns. (1991: 97)
The rise of a salsa-centered popular culture and record-centered cultural practices in Cali is part and parcel of that city’s urbanization, a means Caleños found for “negotiating the transitions” (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 98) from a small provincial town to a major urban center. Record-centered cultural practices became the modality through which Caleños first experienced and made sense of the city’s rapid urbanization, and they continued to serve to rekindle and reaffirm Caleños’ subjective experiences through successive waves of urban development. These experiences, in turn, became the basis for the development of popular culture and identity in Cali, upheld by its majority working-class, mixed-race population while alternately repudiated, contested, or embraced by members of the middle and upper classes.
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,
