Content area
Abstract
This study, based mainly on fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela, as well as Puerto Rico, analyzes the role of salsa music in promoting ideals of identity among Latinos, exploring the dynamic balance between the music's appeal to national pride and its appeal to a sense of belonging to a larger pan-Latino community. Broadly defined, salsa is Latin dance music created by Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Cuban, and Dominican musicians during the 1960s in New York City. This “new way of making music,” based on a reconfiguration of Cuban and other Spanish Caribbean genres, has spread to all Latin America, starting with the recordings of the FANIA record company in the 1960s and 1970s. Analysis of salsa's sound, combined with ethnographic data on its performance and reception, are used to explore the following hypothesis: that by capitalizing on musical elements and concepts that are shared throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, salsa has become a common musical denominator among Latinos; at the same time its flexibility to include distinctive local genres, to reflect musically the variety that exists among Latino people, has permitted people of different nationalities to regard salsa as their own. Salsa's success in maintaining this dynamic and delicate balance between national and pan-Latino identity, as well as the genre's distinctive forms and esthetics, are explained in terms of musical structures and lyrics—factors which can be distinguished from commercial marketing, or the mere necessity to have such a music. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between salsa and urban migration, the promotion of African cultural heritage, and the importance of a multi-lateral perspective in distinction to a diffusionist model of salsa's development.
