revised and expanded renditions of that material here.
Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan University Press has been as wonderful and supportive an editor as one could possibly wish for; I am grateful for her encouragement and feedback. Thanks also to George Lipsitz for his enthusiastic response to the project and his support as series editor. I am also grateful to Thomas Radko at Wesleyan University Press and to Chris Crochetière and Barbara Norton at B. Williams and Associates for their input and support during the publication stage. Pablo Delano assisted with the preparation of some of the photographic illustrations in this volume. I am indebted to Fabio Larrahondo and Jaime González of the newspaper El Occidente in Cali for archival photographs. William Cooley prepared most of the musical notations that appear here, and Steven Russell designed the maps; my thanks to both for their terrific collaboration. All translations from written sources and interviews are my own, as are tables and charts.
Finally, with great pleasure I thank my entire family for their unconditional love through my many years of researching salsa music. Not only did they give me freedom and encouragement to explore this path and travel to Colombia, but they also provided moral support, calls, letters and care packages whenever the going got tough. I am also indebted to the Arias-Satizábal family for their love and support through this project. An especial vote of gratitude and love goes to my husband and research collaborator, Medardo Arias Satizábal. He provided important contacts during the final stages of fieldwork and follow-up and offered several observations and perspectives of his own. His magnificent support and understanding during these months of writing have been without equal. Gracias, amor lindo.
Introduction
This book is about a Latin American city and its people. More specifically, it is about how those people found themselves—like residents of many Latin American cities—dealing with rapid urbanization and change in the twentieth century, and the ways in which they responded to these transitions in popular cultural practice. The city in question is Cali, the bustling center of southwest Colombia and now the second largest city in the country after the capital, Bogotá. As any Colombian will tell you, popular culture in Cali is based on the localization of salsa music, a widespread Spanish Caribbean dance style developed in the 1960s by Puerto Ricans in New York City, based upon the Afro-Cuban and (to a lesser extent) Puerto Rican roots known in Colombia as música antillana (an-tee-YA-nah). Since the late 1960s, salsa’s centrality in local culture has been particularly visible in the week-long bout of collective merrymaking known as the Feria de la Caña de Azucar, or Sugarcane Carnival, held between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Highlighted by live performances by international and local salsa bands, salsa dances, bullfights, neighborhood festivities, and huge gatherings by local salsa record collectors, the Feria is Cali’s largest event of the year. Unlike salsa’s adoption in other Latin American cities, however, such as Panama City, Caracas, or Guayaquil, the embrace of salsa in Cali has been so strong that by the late 1970s, Caleños (inhabitants of Cali) began asserting that their city was the “world capital of salsa.” This is a bold claim, given salsa’s primary performance and production nexus in New York City and Puerto Rico. I am less interested in proving or disqualifying Cali as the world salsa capital, however, than in exploring how this claim arose in the first place.
Among various factors that he cites as reasons for salsa’s adoption in Cali, Alejandro Ulloa points to Cali’s rapid urbanization, accompanied by heavy migration into the city from other regions (1992: 195).1 While he observes that urbanization and internal migration created a heterogeneous population in Cali’s working classes, he does not draw out the implications of this diversity. On the one hand, it served to create a climate wherein social and cultural difference was positively received. On the other, it also established a new cultural reality in which no single group predominated over any other—hence, no single regional musical tradition was capable of representing this complex new urban environment. Salsa and música antillana, hence, were adopted as representative styles of the increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan context of the city.2 Notably, the image of fun and tropical revelry tied to these styles stands in stark contrast to the abrupt upheavals that characterized Cali’s rapid urbanization after the 1950s and the specter of violence and civil war that engulfed the nation during this period.
Cali’s self-image as the world capital of salsa challenges core-and-periphery models of cultural diffusion. Most salsa fans, including those in Cali, have never ceased to recognize salsa’s roots in Cuba, nor the role of New York and Puerto Rico in continuing to lead the world salsa scene. The move by Caleños to claim center stage on the world salsa scene is, on the surface, a clear instance of the periphery demanding to become the core. On a deeper level, however, the “world salsa capital” claim points less to Cali’s centrality in world salsa than to the central position of salsa in local popular life. Salsa became a resource for forging a sense of location and identity on the world map during a period when Cali was virtually invisible in national political and cultural arenas. The practices shaping salsa’s localization and resignification in Cali hence enabled Caleños to bypass national channels of cultural identity (without eschewing them entirely) and allowed Caleños to voice their own participation in transnational cultural and economic flows beyond regional and national confines. A central concern of this study is the way in which salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican predecessors served as a vehicle for Caleños to formulate an alternative cosmopolitan identity as they became increasingly tied to world markets, while being excluded from national and elite spheres of cosmopolitan culture.
The contradiction that lies in Cali’s claim to be the world salsa capital while still recognizing Cuba, New York, and Puerto Rico as the artistic wellspring for this music leads us in two directions. In the first instance, it points us to the transnational network of transport and communications through which salsa was circulated throughout the Caribbean and into several Central and South American sites. By the time Cali’s media began proclaiming the “world salsa capital” banner in the late 1970s, salsa’s transnational diffusion was so broad that tastes and reception could not be governed directly from New York or Puerto Rico—if they ever were to begin with. Salsa now embraces a wider geographic and cultural context than its Cuban and Puerto Rican predecessors did. The localization and resignification of salsa in Cali offers important cultural perspectives for recent scholarship on globalization and our understanding of local-global cultural links at several levels: barrio, city, region, nation, transnational circuits, and larger global networks. The transnational circulation of música antillana and salsa and their localization in Cali forms one important trajectory of this book.
In the second instance, the contradiction behind Cali’s “world salsa capital” bid leads us to the issue of modernity in Latin America. While cultural contradictions have been the subject of postmodern studies since the late 1980s, Latin Americanists have recently observed that such incongruities are not signs of postmodernism but rather are characteristic of Latin America’s particular engagement with modernity. In a region that was excluded from the Industrial Revolution and largely underdeveloped before 1950, rapid urbanization and technological development during the twentieth century have produced several rifts and contradictory tendencies (García Canclini 1989; Rowe and Schelling 1991). Cali’s recent history provides a clear illustration of the disjunctures accompanying Latin American modernity. During the twentieth century, Caleños were abruptly inserted into an escalating series of world economic markets (coffee, sugar, and cocaine, respectively), which contributed directly to waves of urban expansion and created spaces for new, hitherto unimagined cultural links to occur. Cali’s self-image as the world salsa capital flows directly from this complex process, which forms the second trajectory of my study.
As its title suggests, this book is concerned with the nexus of music and memory as a particular affective site for understanding Latin American modernity. Particularly, I am interested in the bridges created between mass-media forms of music (e.g., records, radio, and film), cultural practice, and popular memory, and how these serve as affective links in the formation of subjective experience and popular identity in Cali. When I arrived in Cali
