characteristics differentiate salsa from its Cuban predecessors (see Waxer 2002). Even a casual listening to 1960s and 1970s salsa dura (e.g., Eddie Palmieri) and Cuban son bands from the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Arsenio Rodríguez) provides strong evidence for distinguishing between the two. While the rhythms and forms are the same, the stylistic treatment is quite different. Salsa uses more percussion and larger horn sections than do its Cuban antecedents.4 The arrangements are more aggressive, and the social and cultural milieu to which the lyrics refer is not Cuban. Although some might argue that such differences hardly suffice to categorize salsa and its Cuban roots as different styles, we should keep in mind that similar kinds of distinctions separate such closely related sounds as rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, and hip-hop—styles usually recognized as distinct without the vociferous debate that the salsa-Cuban music split engenders.
The New York community in which salsa developed was strongly Puerto Rican, and during the 1960s and 1970s salsa became a potent emblem of working-class Puerto Rican cultural identity both for islanders and for those living in the United States (Duany 1984; Padilla 1990). The use of the ten-stringed Puerto Rican cuatro, an icon of cultural identity, by Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars during the early 1970s underscored salsa’s Puerto Rican affiliations and marked a further difference between salsa and its Cuban roots.5 The music’s own interracial heritage was mirrored by the strong interethnic participation that marked the New York scene, with Jewish and African American musicians performing in several bands. The Jewish pianist Larry Harlow even became an important bandleader and producer in the New York scene.
During this same period, salsa music also spread to other parts of Latin America, especially Venezuela, Panama, and Colombia—countries with close geographic and economic ties to the Caribbean.6 Significantly, salsa’s lyrics reflected the experiences of the Latino and Latin American black and mixed-race working class, and—in distinction to its Cuban antecedents—the songs mirrored the violence and discontent of the inner city. Salsa and its predecessors were initially reviled by the Latin American and Caribbean upper classes for being the music of the dark-skinned working classes—often in grossly racist terms such as música de monos (music of apes). When salsa’s exuberant beat and social message caught on with Latin American leftist intellectuals from the middle and upper-middle classes in the early 1970s, however, salsa music began to shed its lower-class associations to establish a devoted following not only across national boundaries, but also across social ones. Ironically, it was salsa romántica (romantic salsa), a smoother, less aggressive style developed in the late 1980s, that truly succeeded in breaking class barriers in Latin America. Avoiding the political messages of early salsa dura that had alienated conservative middle- and upper-class audiences, salsa romántica captured a larger market; thus, it was when commercial salsa stopped promoting messages about Latino unity that salsa actually became more widespread in Latin America. By the end of the 1980s salsa was firmly entrenched as a transnational musical genre, with followers throughout the Americas and in Europe, Africa, and Japan.
Currently, there are five principal “schools” or transnational styles of salsa performance: New York, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Cuban, with the development of timba or “Cuban salsa” in the early 1990s.7 Some observers might add Miami to this list, although the common pool of arrangers and studio musicians used in New York, Miami, and even Puerto Rico has made much contemporary salsa produced in these places sound very similar (Washburne 1999). Cross-cutting these transnational schools is another stylistic matrix that correlates to salsa’s historical development. Negus (1999: 138–39) characterizes these as: (1) the “old school” (salsa dura), which follows the classic 1960s–70s sound; (2) salsa romántica, a continuation of 1980s salsa erótica (sensual salsa); (3) “soulful salsa,” incorporating Top Forty pop, rhythm ’n’ blues, and soul harmonies and arrangements (e.g., Luis Enrique and Victor Manuel); and (4) “dance club salsa,” which fuses salsa romántica with elements of hop-hop, R & B, and Cuban timba (e.g., Marc Antony and La India). In each of the five transnational schools of salsa, there are bands that follow one or another of these four stylistic matrices, hence combining a regionally or nationally defined way of playing salsa with these broader categories.
Salsa research to date has focused primarily on salsa’s Cuban roots and its development in New York and Puerto Rico (Blum 1978; Roberts 1979; Rondón 1980; Arias Satizábal 1981; Singer 1982, 1983; Duany 1984; Alén 1984; Padilla 1989, 1990; Gerard 1989; Arteaga 1990; Boggs 1992; Santana 1992; Manuel 1991, 1994, 1995; Quintero Rivera 1998; Washburne 1999). Colombian writers, mainly journalists and sociologists, have also produced a notable body of work on salsa and música antillana, mostly detailing the impact of Cuban and Puerto Rican artists in Colombia (e.g., Valverde 1981; Arias Satizábal 1981; Arteaga 1990; Jaramillo 1992; Betancur Alvarez 1993). A definitive history of Colombian salsa remains to be written, although journalists in Cali and Bogotá have contributed important commentaries about Colombian artists and fans to local newspapers and magazines.8 While my own work in this book and other publications attempts to redress the gap, I do not focus on Colombian salsa from a complete national perspective, and I omit discussion of artists and developments in other parts of the country.
Alejandro Ulloa’s detailed sociological study La salsa en Cali (1992) stands as the only extant book-length exploration of salsa’s impact in urban Colombia written by an insider of Cali’s salsa scene. Indeed, the work can be seen as a product of the self-image as the world salsa capital that was being widely circulated in Cali by the late 1980s. Although Ulloa’s frequent shifts between sociological analysis and nostalgic rhapsodizing make the book difficult to follow for readers unfamiliar with his inside references, the work is invaluable and has served as a basic reference for my own research in Cali. Ulloa conducted his study on salsa in Cali during the mid-1980s, when Cali was emerging on the international scene as an important salsa center. My research, coming at the close of this epoch, serves as an extension of the themes planted in Ulloa’s research, updating his discussion of musical venues, local bands, and radio stations. I also address issues that he does not deal with, such as the stylistic components of Colombian salsa, the artistic and commercial processes that shape the lives of contemporary Caleño musicians, and salsa’s impact in the region around Cali. Sections of Valverde and Quintero’s recent work on Cali’s all-woman bands, Abran paso (1995), also deal with local salsa history and serve as an additional reference for my work.
This book represents an attempt to go beyond the New York-Cuba-Puerto Rico focus of current salsa scholarship, particularly that published in English, by focusing on a South American case. My study follows recent scholarship on Latin American and Caribbean music (e.g., Guilbault 1993; Pacini Hernández 1995; Glasser 1995; Averill 1997; Austerlitz 1997) that systematically examines the links between popular music, race, class, the music industry, transnational flows, and local and national identity. Ulloa 1992, for example, despite recognizing social differences of class, race, and gender in Cali, does not always clarify where or how or even why these lines are drawn, nor does he analyze the fluidity of these categories with regard to key developments in Cali’s scene. I attempt to highlight such processes by exploring how salsa’s local adoption intersects with shifting lines of class, racial and ethnic identity, gender, and age. I am also influenced by recent research in Latin American and Latino/Latina studies about dancing and listening bodies as sites for the internalization and enactment of social difference (e.g., Savigliano 1995; Fraser Delgado and Muñoz 1997). In the following sections, I outline the key theoretical concerns that shape my study.
Recordings and Popular Memory
The centrality of recorded music for Caleños challenges the privileging, in most scholarly work, of live performance as more “real” or “authentic” than its mediated versions.9 Indeed, for many decades “playing music” in Cali literally meant putting on a record, as a source of music for other social and expressive activities. The term disco (literally, a record disc) still exists as a local synonym for “song,” even when it is a live rendition of a song—as in “Vamos a tocar ese disco” (Let’s perform that song). Despite the
