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 occurred beyond direct corporate control, and even now its production and distribution occupy a marginal position in the agendas of major record companies (Negus 1999: 140–45). Although salsa certainly retains strong indexical links to the Caribbean, the very fact that it has undergone diverse resignification in sites as far-flung as Cali, Tokyo, and Dakar points to a significant process that has direct links to what social scientists identify as globalization. Salsa’s glocalization in several world cities has primarily followed routes of dissemination and adoption between members of the so-called Third World, with relatively little manipulation by the corporate music industry.
Some scholars define globalization as the last of three stages of global transformation, beginning in the 1500s, shifting during the 1800s, and accelerating sharply in the post–World War II period beginning in 1945 (see Mignolo 1998; Wallerstein 1974). This timeline roughly accords with key points in Colombia’s own history: colonization, independence, and increased economic participation in world markets from the 1940s on (coupled with the onset of extreme political violence and civil war after 1948 resulting from unequal distribution of resources). Música antillana’s appearance in Cali in fact corresponds almost exactly to the 1945 date, since it was around this time that Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds began moving out of Cali’s red-light district to become a centerpiece of popular life in working-class neighborhoods.
The adoption and resignification of salsa in Cali offers us a particularly clear illustration of the ways in which localization of a transnational or global style anchors local experience and understanding of large-scale global flows, such as the urban explosion that accompanied the country’s economic entry into the world coffee, sugar, and cocaine markets.
It has also led to a transformation of salsa’s significance, sound, and cultural formation. While some of my colleagues might argue with me on this point, salsa no longer points to just New York, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Although Caleños certainly embraced some of the values articulated in salsa and its Caribbean roots, other meanings that they ascribed to this style were not necessarily present for the original producers and consumers of this music. They now, however, have become part of the symbolic and expressive apparatus that Caleño fans, dancers, and musicians have transmitted not only to other parts of Colombia, but back to New York, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the world beyond.
Subjectivity and Popular Identity in Cali
There is a striking paradox in Cali’s adoption of salsa: at the same time Caleños have become cosmopolitan, they have remained extremely localist, participating only secondarily in regional and national cultures, and using their participation in transnational salsa and música antillana to underscore their sense of local difference from the national. What does this suggest for our understanding of Caleño subjectivity, in relation to concentric spheres of popular culture? Within the Colombian context, Caleños form a very particular sort of subject, born out of the historical conditions that have positioned Cali both within and against the national grain. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter 1, the insular hacienda economy established in southwest Colombia during colonial times fostered weak economic and political ties between Cali and other regions. This contrasted with the Atlantic Coast region—oriented outward to Caribbean commerce and culture—and the wealthy, politically powerful interior regions of Antioquia and the capital of Bogotá, which had ties to Spain. By the twentieth century, Cali’s economic insularity had been radically transformed by shifts in Colombian export markets in coffee and sugar, but this change was not accompanied by a marked entry into national cultural and political life. Rather, Caleños continued to define and extend their insularity by adopting a musical style that stood outside of national genres and hence served to reposition Caleño difference from the national arena. The influence of salsa and its Afro-Caribbean roots served as the basis for the formation of an alternative cosmopolitical identity that expressed the local sense of disparity from the rest of the nation, without forcing them to sacrifice engagement with larger transnational processes.
My concern with social identities, spaces, and experiences in Caleño popular culture has not always provided clear answers to the question of how subjectivity is constructed in Cali. Where do we draw the line between context-specific subjective experiences, tied to certain moments, places, and people, and the larger “popular identity” to which these experiences accrue?14 Identity politics, mooring on the “interrelated problems of self-recognition and recognition by others,” have formed a crucial body of scholarship in recent social science. Identity, in turn, constitutes a crucial basis for the formation of subjectivity, which emerges not only from context-specific experience, but also from the way people are constituted as political and economic subjects within particular regimes of power (Calhoun 1995: 213). Subjectivity and identity are not always clearly distinguished in contemporary ethnography, although philosophical work on human beings as historically constituted subjects has been developing since the early-nineteenth-century writings of Hegel. It is beyond the scope of this work to outline the theoretical debates on subjectivity and identity (see Foucault 1978–88; Habermas 1987; Derrida 1967, 1978; Bourdieu 1990). The issue is rooted in the age-old philosophical debate between universalism and particularism,
