women in Colombian society as a whole during the late twentieth century (see Velásquez Toro 1995). The image of Caleña women as beautiful flowers stems from a traditional patriarchal attitude in which women are objects of aesthetic and sensuous contemplation. Using new economic and social opportunities open to them, however, young Caleña musicians appropriated this objectifying gaze to their own benefit, gaining access to the male-dominated sphere of salsa performance. Cali’s orquestas femeninas, hence, upheld the image of Caleña women as delicate flowers but simultaneously transcended that stereotype by carving out a space for the women as respected professional musicians (see Waxer 2001a).
While my initial concern with gender issues has been rooted in my own response, as a woman, to the sexual stereotypes reproduced in salsa, in this book I am concerned with the gender dynamics that shape musical production and consumption practices in Caleño popular culture as a whole. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, salsa is enjoyed and consumed by both men and women. Frances Aparicio observes that salsa can be used both to reaffirm standard constructions of gender and as a point of contestation in struggles over traditional roles and identities (1998). In a groundbreaking study of gender and Latin popular music, she looks not only at how images of women have been constructed in Latin popular music, but also at how women musicians have responded to and negotiated gender portrayals through songs of their own. Importantly, Aparicio not only examines the ways in which processes of musical production bear a decidedly gendered stamp, but also looks at how salsa audiences filter their consumption practices and interpretations of salsa songs through their own understanding of gender roles and identities.
The rise of Cali’s orquestas femeninas raises two questions central to scholarship about gender and music. One issue concerns the processes through which gender has become a significant category of social difference for salsa performance in Cali. In other words, why are current local salsa orquestas divided into male and female categories, and what do these distinctions mean? How have recent international shifts in the definition of male and female musical roles affected local musical identities? Historically, Cali’s orquestas femeninas mark an important break with the predominance of male performers in Latin popular music. That Caleña women choose to become salsa musicians, bandleaders, and even composers illustrates their courage in challenging and reappropriating social conventions while struggling with men’s continued economic control over their sound and commercial image.
The second question concerns whether there is anything essentially “female” or “male” about the style of salsa performed by all-female and all-male bands, or in the styles of salsa listened to and purchased by Caleño men and women. Although these distinctions are easy to determine in societies where specialization of musical roles and repertoire is clearly assigned to the sexes,25 no such division exists in Cali. Musical sound and behavior do not convey inherently “male” or “female” properties. As Susan McClary (1991) and Marcia Citron (1993) have argued, the attribution of “male” or “female” characteristics to musical composition and performance is historically constructed. The categorization of music along gender lines grows out of (and feeds back into) the larger system of power relations prevalent at a given moment, and the ways in which differences between men and women are defined so as to maintain a particular social order.
In addition to examining how issues of race, ethnicity, and class have framed the Caleño adoption of salsa, we must also look at how gender roles and age differences have also shaped meanings and practices in local popular culture. The process through which salsa has been localized and resignified opens a wide window onto larger social dynamics in rapidly urbanizing Latin American cities. Although Cali’s case cannot necessarily be applied to the rest of Colombia, let alone other countries, the rise of all-woman salsa bands among the second generation of Caleño salsa fans, along with other developments in the local scene, points to a particularly clear instance of the difference that gender and generation, along with race and class, can make.
The City of Musical Memory
During the twentieth century, Cali grew from a minor town into Colombia’s second largest and second most powerful city. Several ruptures and struggles framed the city’s rise. As an elaborate archive of personal memoirs entitled Recuerdos de mi barrio (Memories of My Barrio) testifies, Cali’s sudden growth encompassed the mushrooming of new neighborhoods, the remodeling of the city center and the concomitant destruction of historical buildings, and—most vividly—the struggles of new citizens to find work, build homes, and win battles over running water, electricity, sewage, and paving for their streets (Recuerdos 1986).26 These are among the transitions that accompanied Cali’s transformation into a modern urban center. The rise of Cali’s recent urban culture—based on a new musical style adopted from abroad—points to a process of creative self-production among Caleño citizens as they strove to anchor their experiences of these tumultuous changes (Harvey 2000: 159).
The organization of this book, which documents and analyzes key stages in the emergence of salsa culture in Cali, is roughly chronological. I focus on the rise of Cali’s self-image as a world salsa capital and the ways in which this development is interwoven with deeper notions about Cali as the city of musical memory. My study traces three important spheres that encompassed Caleño popular culture by the early 1990s, each with a particular performative tradition, each with its own particular roots and routes back through Cali’s recent history, and each with a particular way of enacting the process of surrogation (Roach 1996) in local popular memory. I then draw these chapters together by exploring how these three spheres, or “scenes” (Straw 1991), come together in the most visible and exciting public event in Caleño life—the annual Feria.
Chapter 1 sets the general stage for my narrative. In it I outline Cali’s history in regional and national contexts, discuss the links between music and region in Colombia, and trace the general rise of música antillana in three overlapping spheres: the transnational (Latin America), the national (Colombia), and the local (Cali). The relationship of música antillana to the rise of Colombian música tropical—“tropical music” from Colombia’s own Caribbean coast—during the 1940s and 1950s is analyzed with regard to Cali’s relationship to national culture. Here I try to consolidate the complex historical reasons for Cali’s adoption of salsa and música antillana over and above regional and national musical styles.
In chapter 2 I focus on the rise of Cali’s record-centered dance scene as the first instance in which sound recordings were literally incorporated into local popular culture. I explore the routes via which recordings first entered Cali and how they acquired the cosmopolitan associations that entrenched their centrality in local expressive practices. The flowering of salsa dance culture in the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to a distinctly Caleño style of dancing to salsa—unique in Latin America and famous throughout Colombia. The revival of this scene in the viejotecas that mushroomed after the fall of the Cali cartel in 1996 points to a highly significant process of reactivating record-centered dance in local popular culture and memory.
The emergence of salsotecas and tabernas in the 1980s as public spaces for listening to records of salsa and música antillana points to another trajectory of local popular life that branched out from the record-centered dance scene. In chapter 3 I look at the development of the salsoteca scene in record collecting, a significant practice in local popular culture, and the rise of the melómano, or music aficionado, in Caleño life. In this sphere Caleño identity has become strongly tied to discourses about preservation, history, authenticity, and purity, in which record collections and salsotecas are constructed as vinyl museums for the active maintenance of Cali’s musical roots.
The third sphere of popular culture, and perhaps the one that succeeded best in placing Cali on the international salsa map, was the rise of a bustling live music scene in the 1980s and early 1990s—the subject of chapters
