“Cali is the place to be!” they exclaimed—a salsa paradise with dozens of bars and nightclubs specializing in salsa, all-salsa radio stations, and many local bands. Later, I decided to relocate my research to Cali, using Caracas as a point of comparison for my Colombian research.
I conducted fieldwork for this book from November 1994 through June 1996, with follow-up trips in January 1997, December 2000–January 2001, and September 2001. During this time I resided and worked primarily in Cali, but I also made regular trips to towns near the city and out to the Pacific coast port of Buenaventura. I traveled to the Atlantic Coast region on various occasions and had the chance to observe Barranquilla’s Carnival and Cartagena’s Festival de Música del Caribe. I also made regular visits to the capital city of Bogotá and traveled to Medellín, Quibdó, Pasto, and other towns throughout Colombia in order to round out my sense of the country and its diverse geographic, cultural, and musical landscapes. Field trips to Cuba and Ecuador provided important perspectives for considering the projection and reception of salsa in other Latin American cities, under highly diverse historical conditions. The visits to Cuba, in particular, were important for my work in Cali, since Colombians have a strong sense of Cuba as the motherland of salsa music. Colombians who had been able to save money and travel to Cuba often spoke to me with pride about their trips and about the musical wonders they had seen on these pilgrimages.
My research in Cali and other parts of Colombia included intensive documentation of musical venues and salsa performances, as well as interviews with musicians, aficionados, collectors, radio disc jockeys, record producers, dancers, club owners and journalists. I myself needed to learn much about salsa history and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, which I compiled through investigation of books, newspapers, magazines, television archives, and conversations with writers and record collectors. I archived local newspaper and magazine articles and collected books written by Colombian authors on salsa and other local popular genres. Thanks to some street vendors who sold salsa records in downtown Cali, I was able to accumulate a large collection of secondhand LPs of Colombian salsa, which I listened to and studied in order to determine components of local musical style.
Although I eventually began participating in the local musical scene as an active musician, my first—and what became predominant—avenue for understanding the mechanisms of Cali’s salsa tradition was to participate in the weekend rumba (partying) that is the hallmark of local popular culture. Social dancing, usually spiked with generous amounts of aguardiente (anise-flavored cane liquor) or rum, is a tremendously important part of Caleño cultural life. Not being much of a drinker or partyer before I arrived in Colombia, I often found the weekend rumba to be exhausting and would complain to my amused friends that the good life was wearing me thin. What those sessions did provide, however, was a view of the immense passion with which Caleños have adopted salsa as their own: head thrown back, arms spread wide, singing loudly and earnestly (if not always in tune) along with the song playing at the moment.
Halfway through my sojourn in Cali, I began to perform as pianist with an all-woman Latin jazz ensemble called Magenta. (The name was chosen by the band’s cofounder Luz Estella Esquivel to characterize the group’s self-identity as integrally female and feminine, but stronger and deeper than the usual feminine color association of rosy pink.) The six-member combo was formed by musicians from various all-woman salsa bands in Cali who were interested in Latin jazz and wanted a break from the diet of commercially oriented salsa tunes they had been playing. Having heard that I could play a bit of jazz piano and hold a salsa piano montuno (groove), I was invited to join them. My musical debut in Cali surprised many of my research informants, who, despite my explaining that I was an ethnomusicologist conducting fieldwork on salsa, usually pegged me somewhere between journalist and hippie. My participation in Magenta Latin Jazz served considerably to establish my acceptance among local musicians and also provided an invaluable tool for understanding the resources and restraints that shape musicians’ lives in this city.
During the course of my research, I came to know people from a wide range of socioeconomic sectors in Colombia. Since salsa was first adopted in Cali by working-class people and is still largely identified with these populist roots, much of my work was with aficionados, fans, and musicians from this sector. My friendships and closest working relationships tended to be with university-educated people from working- and middle-class backgrounds—people with dispositions and values very much like my own. I also spoke with many people from the upper middle class, including both fans and detractors of salsa, which gave me an idea of the complex social and economic discourses cross-cutting popular musical tastes within Cali and in Colombia generally. My core network of friends, however, comprised musicians, aficionados, and record collectors. Ranging in age from our early twenties to our late thirties, most of us were unmarried and only partially employed (most salsa musicians in Cali do not have steady work). So, unhampered by family and work obligations, we spent much time hanging out and listening to music.
For most of my stay in Cali, I shared a flat with Sabina Borja, a Caleña woman my age. Our place soon acquired a reputation as a meeting place and hangout, as friends would drop by at all hours to chat, drink beer or rum, and sample the latest acquisitions of my record collection. For a brief time, the Latin jazz group I played with would meet for rehearsals at our place, and these, too, became a pretext for friends to drop by and hang out, our music serving as a backdrop for the impromptu socializing. Thankfully, the neighbors tolerated our bohemian gatherings and never once complained about the noise, although the music and animated conversation often reached intrusively loud levels. Had I lived in a more affluent neighborhood, this would not have been possible, since these barrios, like their North American and European counterparts, are characterized by a respectful observance of social distance, which includes keeping one’s music at a discreet and unobtrusive level (cf. Pacini Hernández 1995: xxi). Having grown up in a reserved Toronto neighborhood, I witnessed these transformations of our living space with bemusement and wonder (is this really my house?), letting people take charge of putting on the music, prepare drinks, cook, and roam about the flat as they wished. What these gatherings afforded me was a firsthand experience of informal social life in Cali and the role that salsa plays in this context. Over time, as Sabina and I became friends with our neighbors, some of them would come up and join our parties, and this, too, gave me a sense of how everyday life in working- and middle-class Cali both frames and is framed against a lively panorama of musical sound.
During my time in Colombia, I had some of the most intense and exhilarating experiences of my life. I did not grow up with salsa or Cuban music; I became interested in these sounds only in my mid-twenties, when I began studying Latin popular music in Toronto as an aspect of ethnic identity and cross-cultural integration (Waxer 1991). Over the years, however, I have become intensely interested in and involved with the study of salsa and Cuban music, finding this music to somehow embody the diverse and dynamic circumstances of my own life. As a young Canadian woman of mixed Chinese and Jewish ethnic heritage, I have had intense personal experiences of the ways in which diverse cultural flows can shape individual subjectivity. In salsa’s rich and variegated diffusion through the Americas, I have found a metaphorical expression for my own complex background. I believe it was no mistake that I ended up in Cali, a city where, like myself, people have not been among the original creators of a musical style but have nonetheless found meaning in its rhythms, embracing it as their own.
Just as salsa music cannot be performed by one person alone, neither can its study be completed by one sole scholar. It is with sincere gratitude that I thank the many, many individuals who collaborated on various stages of this project. The first tip of the hat goes to my mentor and former doctoral advisor at the University of Illinois, Thomas Turino, who has guided and given feedback on this project since its initial conception as a doctoral thesis. My thanks also to Bruno Nettl, Charles Capwell, Alejandro Lugo, and Norman Whitten, who served on my doctoral defense committees and whose helpful comments on earlier drafts of this material served greatly for its transformation into a book. Special mention also goes to Lawrence Grossberg, whose teachings have strongly influenced my own thinking on popular culture. I would
