Urban, Immigrant, Pan-Latin Identity and Sociopolitical Issues in Salsa Music

What is Salsa?

The Cuban band leader and composer, Dámaso Pérez Prado, known as the King of Mambo, once stated that there was no such thing as Salsa. Famed Cuban percussionist, Tito Puete, who perhaps ironically starred with the quintessential group of early Salsa musicians, Fania All Stars, not only agreed with Pérez Prado, stating that the only salsa he knew was sold in a bottle called ketchup, he further added: “Yo toco música cubana” [What I play is Cuban music.]” [1]

Although closely associated to Cuban son, in fact, claimed by many to be one and the same, Salsa is also claimed by Puerto Ricans as their own. In fact they presented a concert in Expo 92 in Seville, Spain titled “Puerto Rico es Salsa [Puerto Rico is Salsa].”[2] Personally, I agree with accomplished Nuyorican musician, Willie Colón, in that, historically speaking, Salsa as we know it today emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s. Colón considers Salsa to be “una suma armónica de toda la cultura latina reunida en Nueva York [a harmonic sum of all Latin culture that meets in New York].”[3] It is undeniable, however, that regardless of its heritage and birthplace Salsa has long been a global/transnational phenomenon.

In her book, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, Frances R. Aparicio states that because of its semantic polyvalence contingent on the cultural context in which it is listened to, produced, and performed, this particular music, fluid in its social values and cultural meanings, [Salsa] eludes a fixed definition” (66). Furthermore, she argues that it is precisely the plurality of ideologies, discourses, locations, and concepts of Salsa which enhance its value as “as metaphor for national identity, difference, hybridity, and oppositionality” (68). Aparicio also claims that Salsa exists simultaneously in two conflicting realities: as a central aspect of Puerto Rican society, and as a marginalized cultural Other in the United States. Thus, she suggest that need “for a postmodern approach to understanding current forms of Afro-Caribbean music, that is, an analysis that considers Salsa in its ideological plurality: as national discourse, as international mass culture, and a continuing double-edged value as culturally appropriated musical form in the United States” (61).

Although I acknowledge these issues, in order to limit the scope of exploring a phenomenon as broad as Salsa, this essay is not concerned with finding the authentic national origins of Salsa; tracing its history and key players; or dissecting the appropriation or colonialist othering of Salsa in the first-world mainstream discourse. Instead I have chosen to work within the following definition of Salsa (spelled with a capital letter, precisely to differentiate it from the sauce): “a syncretic cultural expression” of the urban working-class, “central to Latina/o urban communities in the United States and across Latin America” (Aparicio 68). I will mostly concern myself with exploring Salsa as Rubén Blades defines it: “un folclor urbano a nivel internacional [urban folklore at the international level]” (as cited in Aparicio 65).

As a feminist cultural scholar, I am interested in the gender, race, and class issues present in the historical development and present circumstances of the genre. As a Latina immigrant in the U.S.,I am also concerned with the role Salsa plays in the U.S. “as a Pan-Latino expression of cultural hybridity and resistance” (Aparicio 66), and as a source of connection with immigrants’ cultural heritage. For example, Aparicio cites in her book a Puerto Rican immigrant in Michigan who states: “the music reminds me of Puerto Rico.” The author adds: “These phrases ,most revealing of the multisensorial associations that the act of listening provokes … stand as a compelling testimony to the role of Salsa music as a bridge between a trans- or dislocated present and a past home … the sense of familiarity that these formulas evoke for colonized peoples, such as Puerto Ricans and Latinas/os in the United States” (91)

Aparicio reflects on the past and present sociocultural and political context of Salsa in the U.S. and abroad when she states that it:

“becomes a metaphor for race, class, and gender conflicts within the diverse Puerto Rican communities (the island and the diasporas), as well as across Latin America, the United States, and the international scene. While Salsa has been identified as the music of the urban, working-class black and mulatto sectors in Puerto and historically rejected as such by the upper classes on the island, in the United States it has functioned as a cohesive force among latinos in general, syncretizing, in fact, an array of Latin American musical styles into its repertoire.” (66)

Salsa as Pan-Latin Urban Folklore

According to Aparicio, the fact that Salsa originated in the 1970s in New York, is “evidence that it was a social result of the gradual industrialization and migratory movements from rural areas to urban centers that have characterized many Latin American countries through the second half of the twentieth century … Historically, then, Salsa is the music of the immigrant and the urban working class” (81). As César Miguel Rondón has documented, Salsa also functioned as the music of the urban poor all over the Caribbean, including islands such as Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also the mainland countries that surround it, such as Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela (as cited in Aparicio 81).

Thus, Salsa lyrics, from the 1970s to the present, have often included political commentary and dealt with urban social issues, including street violence, as attested by many famous songs immortalized by Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, and Rubén Blades, such as Calle Luna Calle Sol, Pedro Navaja, Buscando América, Decisiones, and Plástico . Aparicio states that “while much commercialized Salsa repertoire has been influenced by the romantic ballad since the 1980s, the most important salseros – El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Willie Colón , Rubén Blades, Celia Cruz, Ismael Rivera, Ismael Miranda, Cheo Feliciano, Ray Barretto, Héctor Lavoe – have consistently responded to historical events and social issues that affect Latina/o communities” (82). She argues that these artists speak to “the collective realities of Latina/os in the United States and Latin America,” despite their ideological differences. “Their songs,” as she states “ether address race, gender, and class conflicts or reaffirm cultural practices usually marginalized, such as santería and other African-based traditions.” (82)

Salsa and Caribbean Cultural Identity

In Listening to Salsa, Aparicio highlights a number of Salsa music elements identified with Latino cultural heritage and values. For example, she cites Angel Quintero Rivera’s allusions that the jamming-improvisational style sessions or sections typical of Salsa performances known as descargas “may be constructed as an instance of freedom … virtuosity, and creativity.”[4] She also points out that “the perception that many cultural outsiders have of this type of music – that it is primitive, loud, chaotic, and subversive – constitute historical repetitions of the same vestigial fears expressed b the Spanish colonial government about the performance on drums by African slaves in Cuba” (83-4).

Another example, is the section of Salsa songs in which the singer improvises within a call-and-response structure with the chorus, known as soneo. Aparicio equates its loose improvisational format with freedom and spontaneity. She also points out that the call-and-response structure “is a trait that represents continuity with older forms of Afro-Caribbean musical folklore and with West African music.” Perhaps, more importantly, the chorus section “allows Salsa music to articulate a collective voice … and to establish a dialogic texture.” Finally, she points out that the singer improvises on the theme of the song by creating “new utterances” and also rearticulating “phrases from others songs or various traditions.” Thus, “the singer opens up a sonorous space of freedom, improvisation, and innovation, clinging simultaneously to musical tradition and reaffirming collective memory” (84).

Finally, Aparicio points out to the “polyrhythmic basis of Afro-Caribbean music embodied in the clave – a rhythmic pattern of 3-2 or 2-3 set against a 4-beat measure and performed by the clave sticks” as an “equally oppositional and dialogic element in Salsa” (89). She concludes then that the call-and-response structure, the intertextuality of improvised lyrics, they polyrhythmic nature, and the performance of Salsa, “constitute the material embodiment of a plural, nonindividualist (read anticapitalist), yet free site of artistic expression, a multivocal locus, musically speaking” (91).

I would like to add that such an collectivist, pluralistic, and spontaneous nature is not only characteristic of Salsa music, but of many other aspects and expressions of Latin cultures and communities. Perhaps because of this, Salsa has managed to construct for itself a niche of Pan-Latin identity that cuts across national, class, gender, and race boundaries in Latin-America and the Latin diaspora like no other musical form or cultural expression. As such, it was unavoidable for Salsa to become an anchor to the homeland and symbol of Latin identity for Latino/as who have migrated to the U.S. and other first world countries. This shared nostalgic connection to music as cultural heritage is perhaps best identified by the internationally famous song Mi Tierra, from Gloria Stefan’s first all Spanish CD, of the same title, in which she states she “hears the drums” of the beloved homeland she left behinds and misses painfully.

Race and Class Issues

As we have seen has been the case for many other Latin music genres, the Afro-Puerto Rican plena and bomba, which largely influenced the development of Salsa, were “by the turn of the century … historically and discursively marginalized, erased, and dismissed as música de negros (music of Blacks),” in a process that negated “the racial hybridity of the Puerto Rican people as well as the basic processes from which its transcultural manifestations emerge” ( Aparicio 27). Nowadays, however, Salsa has been accepted by the Puerto Rican, and other Latin-American, upper class and dominant sectors as a valid musical style representative of national/ethnic culture. Aparicio argues that this is due largely ot the globalization and international popularity of Salsa. She states that it was only embraced locally after it had acquired “visibility – audibility, we may say – among European audiences.” “This reception, a posteriori,” she points out, “signals a colonialist structure of cultural circulation: the music is produced locally yet remains in the margins; then it is exported and mainstreamed by foreign audiences, to return with the endorsement of others. Like the transatlantic circulation of the tango and the analogous development, Salsa music has been mainstreamed in Puerto Rico because of its newly found international westernized legitimacy.” (73-4)

Aparicio also points out that the process that has popularized and validated Salsa at home and abroad, has also often tried to “whiten” it. For example, she explains how it has been sometimes recontextualized as concert music, “to be only listened to, unidirectionally consumed as another commodity.” However, she argues that the danceability of Salsa as a social festive encounter has prevailed. As “Salsa concertgoes will notice,” she states “whenever a Latina/o audience is present, there I dancing in the aisles and in any available open space within the confines of the theater or auditorium” (97). Nonetheless, in the constant tension between what is considered classical and what is considered popular music, Salsa has yet to earn a respected position for its own musical value. As Aparicio affirms:

“music educators have generally focused and trained students to read music, insisting that such training is the only valid method for becoming a musician, but improvisational skills also require training and practice. This ‘differential’ expertise, rarely valued and in fact repressed in conservatories and music programs, requires a different kind of training based on practice ,ear, pitch, acuity in rhythm, and most important, a true sense of dialogue with other members of the group. A collective sound emerges from the dialectic balance of improvisatory freedom and formulaic entrenchment.” (84-5)

Mass Media and Authenticity

Many argue that Salsa emerged as a commercialized and diluted version of authentic Caribbean musical forms. Aparicio argues that “the tensions between hegemony and resistance in Salsa music stem basically from its modes of production and dissemination. For better or for worse and unlike its folkloric antecedents transmitted orally, Salsa, like all contemporary popular music, is as part of mass culture” (92).She continues,“Salsa … brings to the foreground issues of cultural authenticity … rejected by … scholars … For years, the metropolis has critiqued the nationalism emerging from the colonized countries, yet it simultaneously appropriates these very nationalist-informed expressions” (114). The entire issue, however, is based on a failed logic that opposes authenticity/national folklore to commercialism/mass culture.

As Aparicio states, “to reify Salsa music as merely a victim or object of hegemony is virtually to preempt its powers for creativity, cultural resistance and reaffirmation, and possibly social change. And to sort Salsa music as either ‘commercial’ or ‘sociopolitical’ is, again, another reifying practice that takes into account only the moment of initial production or the isolated text and that fails to consider listening practices and the larger sociopolitical context within which ha musical performance is embedded” (93). Salsa musicians, Aparicio affirms, have “reappropriated the tools of the master – technology – to reaffirm the musical and cultural presence of the marginalized.” “Indeed, to speak about technology and about media only as hegemony,” she continues, “… is to miss the strategic appropriations of that media by marginalized sectors, a process that historically has led to innovation and experimentation and to new traditions” (34).

Conclusion

Salsa, as the heir to previously repressed Afro-Caribbean musical genres, and the cultural torch of contemporary urban Latino/as in their home countries or abroad, presents and represents political issues, cultural values, and social realities. In its multiple forms and contexts, it becomes, as Aparicio so eloquently explores in her book, “the cultural locus through which gender politics, sexuality, and cultural identity are continuously defined and redefined, contested, negotiated, and ultimately, even internalized” (238).

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[1] Both Tito Puente and Dámaso Pérez Prado citations from Aparicio, p. 65.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Angel Quintero Rivera , Music, Social Class, and the National Question in Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rico, Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, 1987).

Dominican Bachata: Another Cinderella

Deborah Pacini Hernandez’s book, Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music, is the third book I have read this semester with the rags to riches narrative of a marginalized music genre that becomes socially accepted if not emblematic of national identity. The author conducted her research in the 80s and early 90s. Up through the ‘80s bachata had been “thoroughly rejected and stigmatized by mainstream Dominican society” (p. xxii). During her first years in the Dominican republic, she found that “Dominicans were reluctant to accept bachata as a legitimate music form and that listening to bachata was considered incompatible with their desired self-presentation” (p. xiv). She states that when she asked some of her friends about bachata, they told her it was “a guitar-based Dominican form of music listened to and made by uneducated campesinos (country people) and the urban poor”(p. xiii).

In other cases explored thus far in this blog of the music of the oppressed being absorbed or appropriated by the dominant group, the issue has centered largely around race and the denial of African cultural roots. However, in the case of bachata, it was much more of a class and social issue of the urban vs rural/newly-urban or the lower vs the middle/upper class.

For example, Pacini Hernandez states that “dictionaries of Latin American Spanish define the term bachata as juerga, jolgorio, or parranda, all of which denote fun, merriment, a good time, or a spree … get-togethers that include music, drink, and food”(p. 7). This is not the only case in which the same term is utilized to refer to a party than to a type of music in Latin America – which makes me think of how truly inseparable the concept of “celebration” is from music and dancing in Latin America. I wonder, for example, whether the term rumba for example was also first used to refer to a party and then to the music genre or viceversa. In any case, Pacini Hernandez reaffirms the lower status conception of bachata by pointing out that in Dominican Republic “the word bachata also had certain class associations; upper-class parties would never be called bachatas” (p. 8).

Pacini Hernandez also ventures that the actual development of bachata was due to the new realities of migration to the city. “In the 60s,” she explains, “massive rural to urban migrations sent thousands of peasants into urban areas. Unable to find employment, people of rural origins were condemned to working for subsistence in the informal sector ad to residence in shantytowns, where traditions patterns of making music were transformed by the urban experience” (p. 32). Like many other music genres often associated with lower class in Latin America, such as tipico in Panama, bachata found its particular niches: like popular working-class bars and private parties. Pacini Hernandez’ argues, for example, that while bachata encountered “stiff competition from foreign music on the radio, the field was wide open in terms of live performances ... For example, the fiestas patronales (patron saints’ festivals) of towns of villages all over the country” (p. 80).

However, by the ‘90s and in part because of the release of Juan Luis Guerra’s, a well-respected and sophisticated musician, album Bachata Rosa and its worldwide success, bachata had become a popular and well accepted genre across Dominican society (p. xxii). Pacini Hernandez states that as “well-educated, middle class musicians like Juan Luis Guerra” started producing “sophisticated versions” of bachata, with different instrumentation and arrangements, they were differentiated from the “low-status, street-level, originals by being called tecno-bachata” (p. 15). If she labels Juan Luis Guerra tecno-bachata, I can’t imagine what she would think of today’s much more fast paced, urban-flavored, and synthesized bachata.

Pacini Hernandez’s book was published in 1995. Since then bachata’s popularity has transcended the Dominican borders and become a world wide phenomenon, with crossovers in other countries such as Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. In the NY based Latino music industry it has also become closely related to current music rage, reggaeton. In order to reflect contemporary popular lore, I will take the liberty of quoting from Wikipedia’s current entry on bachata (music):

Aventura, based in New York City, is today the best known bachata group. Their 2002 single "Obsesión" dominated airwaves in Latin America countries, the US Hispanic market, and Caribbean Spanish speaking Islands. Other popular modern artists include Toby Loe, Monchy y Alexandra, Andy Andy, Antony Santos, Zacarias Ferrerira, Luis Vargas, and Xtreme. (retrieved May 10, 2010)

Many aspects of bachata seem to have remained the same since its origins decades ago. For example, Pacini Herandez describes the sinuous bachata dance as consisting “of an alternating “one-two-three-kick” pattern, in which the “kick” is a toe step or a small hop” (p. 7), which is exactly how it is danced today. Again, Wikipedia’s entry on bachata (dance) describes (very accurately, in my experience) the contemporary step thus:

Counts 1 through 3 and 5 through 7, when taken, generate a natural hip motion. Counts 4 and 8, consists of a “pop” movement. The "pop" depending on a person’s style is executed lifting or tapping a foot or using stylish footwork while popping the hip to the side opposite of the natural Cuban hip motion. Bachata music has a slight accent in rhythm at every fourth count, indicating when the “pop” should happen. Note: The “pop” will always be done in the opposite direction of the last step, while the next step will be taken on the same direction of the pop. The dance direction will interchange at every 4th count.

However, other aspects of the genre have undergone significant changes in the past decades. For example, Pacini Hernandez states that “when the first bachata songs were recorded in the early 1960s, they were still unequivocally part of the broad, Pan-Hispanic tradition of romantic song … usually modeled after the quintessentially romantic bolero, they tended to be highly emotional expressions of lost and unrequited love” (p. 158). She argues that by the 1980s the most common themes had shifted to lust, sex, deception, bars and drinking (p. 159). The lyrics suggested “that women were unreliable because they had no sense of self-control and therefore could not resist sexual desire.” She points out that “the idea of women’s sexuality as a potentially dangerous natural force that can only be controlled by containment was part of the culturally baggage inherited from the country’s Spanish/Mediterranean colonizers.” Her argument for the rise of non-romantic lyrics is that it was caused by the changes in family structure and gender roles that came about with immigration to the cities and women joining the work force. On page 66, she states: “Women’s sexuality had been kept under control in the confines of patriarchal rural home and community settings but was unleashed when they discovered freedom of movement in the city.” She adds that “In bachata, men could also compensate for their inability to control women by bragging and other sorts of posturing that reaffirmed their masculine authority” (p. 167). Finally, she grants that “while we must consider the verbal denigration of women as a form of violence, physical violence towards women was seldom if ever mentioned in song texts. When physical violence was mentioned, it was directed at other men” (p. 168).

The truth is I came to known bachata for the first time in the 00’s and the style of bachata that has become internationally popular is characterized, once again, by romantic lyrics. Reggaeton is the only urban contemporary genre I would consider to be more popular with contemporary Latino teenagers than bachata – which in my opinion have started to displace salsa and merengue which had been the uncontested favorite Caribbean rhythms for generations. Until very recently, reggaeton largely featured violent lyrics, aggressive or diminishing towards women, sexually charged, and often inciting to physical violence and guns. Bachata, was in fact, differentiated from reggaeton, not only because they are obviously different rhythms, but because of its romantic lyrics and formal (though close) embrace for dancing. In the past year or two, however, a new form or reggaeton, literally termed “romantic styled,” which also tends to downplay the hip hop influence that become dominant in reggaeton, while featuring fusion with other Latin danceable genres, such as cumbia or, of course, bachata.

Pacini Hernandez argues that “bachata clearly belongs with a category that Charles Keil has called ‘people’s music.’” Keil coined that term in his article “People’s music comparatively: Style and stereotypes, class and hegemony” published in Dialectical Anthropology in 1985, “to define a space between ‘folk’ (with its strong connotations of ‘rural,’ ‘illiterate’) and ‘popular’ (with its denotation today of ‘mass mediated’); … he also used the term ‘working-class music’” (p. 23). As we have seen in previous entries, most if not all of what we consider to be Latin music belongs to this genre, and emerged out of the fusion of Native America, African, and European music, which became popularized and co-opted by the local and international music industries in the ‘60s.

Although considered ethnic and picturesque, if not mistaken by folkloric music, by outsiders, many of the contemporary Latin music genres are also urban music genres. As Pacini Hernandez points out: “In Latin America, the simultaneous processes of migration, urbanization, and industrialization intensified in the 1960s, spawning a new generation of ‘people’s musics,’ which … emerged at a time when the recording and broadcast industries were promoting hegemonic middle-class-oriented popular musics – some of which, such as orquesta merengue in the Dominican Republic and later salsa throughout Latin America, had started out as ‘people’s musics’ themselves” (p. 232). This statement, however places an unnecessary dichotomy, in my opinion, between the music of el pueblo (the people) and marketable or commercial music. By Pacini Hernandez’s definition, in the 21^st Century bachata has now joined the ranks of salsa and merengue and ceased to be “people’s music.” In fact, on page 38, she states: “ the term music of marginality ceases to be appropriate when a musical style created by musicians and fans who are economically and socially marginalized begins to be produced by the dominant elite and marketed to non-marginalized audiences”.

Is the popularization and commercialization of working-class music a form of cultural appropriation, then? What would that say of those of my generation who have grown up with salsa, merengue, cumbia, and bachata, not to mention reggaeton, as essential elements of our cultural Latin identity? I don’t feel the original creators of the genres been deprived of their music in any of this cases (although, yes, they have changed considerably while adapting to the mass market, but also just like all music genres form do through time), in fact I have found they are often proud of the fame the music their consider their own has achieved. Of course, both aspects of the issue are to be considered in a full picture, but ultimately the expansion of the popularity of bachata, and other such genres, from marginalized to fashionable, has increased a market that benefits Latin musicians, while at the same time fertilizing and supporting a national and sometimes pan-Latin identity for generations to come.

Samba as the symbol of Brazil: An example of cultural restitution or adopted inter-ethnic identity?

In The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National identity in Brazil, Hermano Vianna explore the process through which Samba became “Brazil’s ‘national rhythm, its prime symbol of cultural nationalism” (xiii). As is the case with many other Latin music genres, Brazilians and samba scholars are preoccupied with the concept of authenticity: what is and isn’t samba, where and when did it originate, what is authentic samba instrumentation or dancing, etc. Vianna presents authenticity, national identity, cultural symbols, in this case, as they relate to Brazilian samba, as social constructions (xiii).

But how did these social and culturally based shared concepts come to be constructed? To answer this question, Vianna does not concern himself with trying to find, for example, the holy grail of the first recorded samba. Instead, he focuses on “samba’s transformation into a ‘national rhythm,’ when it was suddenly ‘discovered’ by the nation as a whole and adopted as a defining element of brasilidade or Brazilian identity” (10).

The conspicuous mention of “the nation as a whole” discovering samba, suggest the genre, or its musical predecessors, were previously part of the cultural heritage of only a portion of the nation’s population. It also suggests that Brazil is a heterogeneous society and Brazilians can act “as a whole” or they can act separately in sub-groups with individual ethnic identities. All of this qualities apply equally to the peoples of all other Latin-American countries. Furthermore, as we have seen in the case of Dominican merengue, the adoption of one sub-group’s music as “a defining element” of an entire nation’s identity is also a process that has taken place often throughout Latin America in the past.

In the case of samba, as in many other cases, the particular music/dance form in question often features African, rural, and/or lower class elements and was looked down upon by the upper/white/urban class before being taken up as the national rhythm. In Feijoada e Soul Foudd, Peter Fry asks a question of Brazilian samba that I would like to generalize to all of Latin America: Why have Latin Americans taken up national symbols and built popular culture around cultural items originally generated by dominated groups?. Fry suggests that “the conversion of ethnic symbols into national symbols masks a situation of racial domination” (as cited in Vianna 13). Thus, Latin preoccupation with and practice of syncretism (in this case with music, but why not also with religion, language, or any other cultural aspect?) is presented as a consequence of past and present oppression, perhaps as a way to avoid conflict or to restitute cultural value, and definitely as reflecting a need for a cohesive identidad mestiza or ethnically mixed identity.