The Soul of the Barrio:
30 Years of Salsa
Salsa was born in the 1960s and early
1970s, and embodied the moment's affirmative and sanguine spirit. It depicted
creative Latinos confronting their social situation and literally dancing
their way through adversity.
BY PETER MANUEL
It is now 30 years since bandleader Johnny Pacheco founded Fania Records as a
fledgling Latin record company,
contracting the up-and coming New York dance bands and distributing his
records to area stores from the trunk of his car. By 1970, with the input of
entrepreneur Jerry Masucci, Fania had
turned the New York Latin beat into the soundtrack for the Latino pride
movement that spread rom Spanish Harlem throughout the urban Caribbean Basin.
Salsa-Fania's name for its product-went
on to become the popular music of choice for some ten million
Latinos. Its trajectory can serve as an index
for much of what has happened in Spanish
Caribbean culture over the last three decades. Salsa was never confined to the
hermetic world of dance clubs and record
studios. Rather, its style and its role in Latino culture have always been
conditioned by changing- demographic and
socioeconomic patterns, the workings of the music
industry, interaction with rival music styles,
and changing political orders.
The new social consciousness called for a new musical movement, which could at
once embrace Puerto Rican tradition and
capture the spirit of the barrio in all its alienated energy and heightened
sense of self-awareness. Fania Records. with a combination of entrepreneurial
skill, aggressive marketing, and
energetic talent scouting, rode the crest of the sociomusical moment,
explicitly linking the fresh, new sound of the
New York Latin bands to the buoyant spirit of the
barrio. Curiously, perhaps, the chosen musical
vehicle was neither stylistically new nor
distinctively Puerto Rican; rather, it was
essentially Cuban-style dance music-a modern version
of the son, which had dominated Cuban
music since the 1920s. In the early decades of the
century, the son had emerged as a
medium-tempo urban folk idiom featuring vocals backed by
sextets or septets of guitar, the guitar-like
tres, trumpet, bass, and light percussion. In the 1940s,
the son was further Afro-Cubanized by
the use of congas and faster tempos, and the
incorporation of more horns and sophisticated,
jazz-influenced harmonies and arrangements. It
was the brassy, sophisticated, mature son of the 1950s that
became the stylistic backbone of what
came to be called "salsa."
However superficially paradoxical, the
choice of Cuban dance music was in many respects quite
natural and logical. This music had flourished for decades not only in
Puerto Rico, but in New York City itself
-the crucible of some of the most vital developments in Latin music, including
the big band mambo of the fifties. To some,
labeling this music '.salsa" seemed artificial,especially in the case of
"salsa stars" like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, whose musical styles had
evolved 25 years before the term was coined. To
Cubans who knew that many of Johnny Pacheco's hits were simply note-for-note
renditions of Cuban records of the 1950s, the use of the
rubric "salsa" seemed like an attempt to
obscure the music's Cuban origins by capitalizing on the
Cold-War quarantine of the island's bands and
recordings.
But if Cuban music constituted the core of salsa style, New-yoricans had
resignified the music in a way that
largely justified the adoption of a new name, however commercial in origin. As
the music become reborn as a symbol of New-yorican, and by extension,
pan-Latino ethnic identity, its Cuban
stylistic origins like those of the rumba played by street drummers throughout
the city, became essentially irrelevant. While Cuba was remote and isolated,
salsa. in the words of a popular
Spanish-language radio program, was el alma del barrio soul of the
barrio.
Apart front the reliance on Cuban rhythms
and forms, salsa has been far from stylistically
homogeneous. Bandleaders like Pacheco and Pete "El Conde" Rodriguez have
perpetuated a tipico traditional style of old Cuban bands like the Sonora
Matancera, using a conjunto with only
two trumpets; their music, although not original, still retains its freshness
and vitality. Most mainstream bands have
cultivated a more modernized sound, adding more horns and more jazz influence.
Representing the salsa vanguard have been, among others, arranger-pianist
Eddie Palmieri, former teen prodigy
Willie Colón (contracted by Fania at the age of 15), and Ruben Blades...
Blades and his occasional collaborator Colón
have devoted much of their time and energy
to non-musical pursuits. Blades spent his youth
in Panama, studied law until 1974, and them turned to music. He soon
distinguished himself as a sifted singer and composer, and even
embarked upon a modestly successful acting
career. In 1984 he returned to legal studies, earning an M.A. from Harvard,
and returned to Panama in 1993 to lead his leftist-greenish Papa
Engoro party in an ultimately unsuccessful bid
for the presidency. Colón is currently running for
a Bronx Congressional seat on a platform of
reformist community activism; as he puts it,
sometimes writing a song is not enough." It may seem remarkable that
given their ongoing involvement in other
fields, the occasional recordings of these two musicians are invariably
commercially successful as well as critically
acclaimed. But perhaps it is precisely their breadth of interests and talents
that has lent their music its wider conceptual and aesthetic vision.
Salsa may have originated in New York. but was an inter-national genre from
the start. While Puerto Ricans
constituted the core, even in New York both performers and audiences were of
diverse backgrounds. Aside from older Cubans
like Machito and Mario Bauza, one could
mention the Dominican Johnny Pacheco, the Panamanian Blades, the Argentine
pianist Jorge Dalto, and, for that
matter, Jewish American arrangers Larry Harlow and Marty Sheller-. Most
importantly, salsa, in connection with the
heightened sense of pan-Latino identity, soon spread
throughout the Spanish-speaking urban Caribbean
Basin. Aside from Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic and Cuba, salsa established strong roots in Venezuela and
Colombia, with enclaves of fans and
performers in Mexico City, Lima, and elsewhere.
The case of Venezuela is representative. By 1970, salsa, whether performed by
local or foreign groups,, had become the
favored music of Caracas' popular classes, who related as much to its
infectious rhythms as to its barrio-oriented
lyrics. The local, predominantly white bourgeoisie
tended to disparage salsa as musica de monos-monkey
music-just as in Puerto Rico, affluent,Yankophilic rock fans (rockeros)
deprecated salsa lovers by the similarly racist term cocolos
coconut-heads. But by the mid-1970s, salsa had
won over Caracas' middle classes as well, and
Venezuela, buoyed by the rise of its own
superstar, Oscar de Leon, had become the best single
market for the music. Neighboring Colombia has
since emerged as a new international hub,
generating, its own star acts, Grupo Niche and
Joe Arroyo.
Salsa is quintessentially dance music,
designed to be performed live at clubs, weddings, and
open-air concerts where Latinos of all ages,
races, and ethnicities mingle and enjoy their own
artistic creativity as dancers-very often, virtuoso dancers. Accordingly, most
salsa songs have dealt with the timeless
topics of sensuality, romance, and praise of the music itself. (In its role as
dance music, it should be noted, salsa has
tended to reinforce, rather than critique, the gender
relations of the barrio. Women are rare both as
performers and industry personnel, and in
dancing, of course, it is the man who leads.
The lyrics are occasionally mildly machista, though
they display little of the crude and blatant
sexism found in reggae, calypso, and hardcore rap.)
Despite this primary function as dance
music, in salsa's most vital period-the late 1960s ' and
early 1970s-a significant minority of its
lyrics contained powerful social commentary. The songs
of Ruben Blades, for example, are particularly distinctive in the ways
they confront, rather than obscure
social reality. For his recording of the anti-imperialist "Tiburon" ("Shark")
and his denunciation of U.S. hostility to Cuba, he earned both progressive
credentials and death threats from Miami Cubans, who banned his music from local airwaves. The most
characteristic of Blades' songs are
vignettes portraying the vicissitudes of barrio life via epigrammatic
character studies, typically at once
humorous, critical and empathetic. His "Juan Pachanga" portrays a
narcissistic dandy whose indulgences in wine,
women and song fail to mask his inner loneliness
and alienation. "Te Estan Buscando" depicts the
plight of a naif who has run afoul of barrio loan
sharks. In "Pedro Navaja," a sort of
existential snapshot of barrio life, a petty gangster and a
hooker shoot each other, for reasons which are
unexplained and irrelevant. "Pablo Pueblo"
depicts the joyless tedium of a worker's life:
A man returns in
silence front his exhausting work
His gait is slow, his shadow trails behind
The same barrio awaits him, with the light at the comer, the trash in front,
and the mucic emanating from the bar...
He enters the room
and stares at his wife and children,
wondering "How long does this go on?...
He takes his broken dreams, and patching them with hope,
making a pillow out of his hunger, he lies down, with an inner misery.
In a lighter vein, Blades' "Numero Seis" describes the experience, familiar to
all Spanish Harlem residents. of waiting
for the number six subway train. Steering clear of both political
sloganeering and the sentimental soap opera, Blades' songs at once entertain
and enlighten, validating barrio life in
their attempt to make salsa, as Blades puts it, "a folklore of the city."
Willie Colón has specialized in depictions of the darker side of barrio life,
portraying its lurking malevolence with
an am-bivalent mixture of fascination and social-realist indictment that
foreshadows gangster rap. While "Juanito Alimaña" non-judgmentally depicts a
swaggering thug, Colón's 1973 "Calle
Luna Calle Sol" warns:
Listen mister, if
you value your life,
stay out of trouble or you'll lose it...
In the barrio of guapos, no one lives at peace,
watch what you say or you won't be worth a kilo
Walk straight ahead and don't look sideways.
By situating salsa squarely in the Hobbesian
side of barrio life, such songs illustrate how
the genre was indeed much more than recycled Cuban dance music.Songs
about barrio life and urban survival intimately grounded salsa in the local
and immediate, while its calls for pan-regional Latino unity made it
dynamically international.
Salsa was in this sense far removed from Cuban son out quaint and colorful
Havana, or from the innumerable
nostalgic Puerto Rican boleros and jibaro (peasant) songs romanticizing the
idyllic and forever lost campesino life.
The songs of Colón and Blades rather than providing escapist
sentimental fantasies bowed creative Latinos confronting their social
sit on and literally dancing their way
through adversity. Much of salsa's vitality, indeed, derives precisely from
its spirit of exuberant affirmation-via
style and language-in the face of socioeconomic marginalization.
This exuberance connected the music with a
sense of inter-national Latino consciousness. While salsa in general
implicitly affirmed and embraced Latino ethnicity by the use of the
Spanish language a Caribbean rhythms, many salsa songs from this period were
explicit in their celebration of Latino
pride and unity. Conjunto Libre's "Imagenes Latinas" is typical:
Indians, Hispanics,
and blacks, we've been mixed into
a blend with the blood of all races, to create a new future...
From Quisqueya to La Plata, from the Pampas to Havana,
we are blood, voice, and part of this American land
Whether in the land of snow, or beneath a palm tree Latinos everywhere
struggle for their
freedom...
This is my Latin image, my new song
To tell you, my brother, to seek and find unity.
Salsa's first decade, from the mid-1960s to
the mid-1970s, was in many ways the most vital era
of the genre. Songs about barrio life and urban
survival intimately grounded salsa in the local
and immediate, while its calls for pan-regional Latino unity made it
dynamically international. Meanwhile, the music's affirmation of barrio
identity reflected not only an acute awareness of
adversity, but a fundamental optimism about the
future, both on the local and global levels. In
the United States, the signs of progress were manifold. The Young Lords
had gained some prominence and
influence, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, the economy was
expanding, colleges were adopting multicultural
curricula, and progressive domestic policies
were enacted by a series of White House liberals (including, by today's
standards, Richard Nixon!).
Internationally, the Latin American Left, despite ferocious repression,
thrived underground, animated by the
Cuban model and, indirectly, by the Soviet and Chinese blocs which, by their
very existence, suggested the possibility of alternatives to U.S. hegemony.
Salsa songs like Ray Barretto's
"Indestructible" conveyed the fundamental optimism of the era:
Take your destiny
in your hands,
Surge ahead, my brother, with the help of new blood If your soul feels weary,
Think that anything is possible Because the new blood is an indestructible
force.
In the 1980s, however, changing
conditions led to a etrenchment of salsa's exuberant spirit,
stylistic vitality, and commercial growth. With
the advent of Reaganomics and its massive
transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich,
the purchasing power of minorities declined,
and salsa record sales slumped accordingly.
Latinos recognized that the progressive and militant
sixties and seventies represented not the dawn
of a new era, but an historical chapter now
eclipsed by a triumphant and jingoistic
resurgence of the Right. On more immediate
levels, salsa was paradoxically marginalized on the airwaves by the belated
interest that the major record companies
were finally taking in the Latin market. Rather than promoting what they
perceived as an ethnically divisive and socially unsavory salsa, the majors
pressured radio stations to air
common-denominator romantic baladas. Julio Iglesias seemed to rule over
Ruben Blades in the very homeland of salsa.
Meanwhile, Latino pride notwithstanding, it was
natural that many second- and third-generation
Latinos were forgetting their Spanish,assimilating to hip-hop culture, and
coming to see salsa as old-fashioned.
Merengue invaded salsa In its own heartlands of New York and Puerto Rico.
Salseros watched with dismay as
their favorite clubs switched to merengue.
Another sort of challenge to salsa was posed by what musicians refer to as the
"merengue invasion"-a phenomenon which
cannot be understood without some discussion of the Dominican
Republic and its own music history. Within the
Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the Dominican
Republic had suffered a somewhat isolated and
inhibited cultural de-velopment. For their part,
Cuba and Puerto Rico had been closely
intertwined as the twin colonies of Spain until 1898, and since the early
twentieth century Puerto Ricans had adopted much of Cuban popular music
especially the son and bolero, as their own. Cultural ties were
somewhat weaker with the Dominican Republic, which had been independent since
the early 1800s. Throughout the
nineteenth century, the evolution of a Creole national culture remained
hampered by poverty,
political chaos, and an ongoing denial of the country' s African heritage.
Relative sociopolitical stability came
only with the U.S. occupation from 1916 to 192 , which laid the foundations
for the despotic 31-year dictatorship of
Rafael Trujillo.
One of the very few positive aspects of
Trujiillo's regime was its fostering of a national musical
culture centered around the merengue. The
merengue of the Cibao valley was a lively fast-tempo dance, sometimes played
by rustic accordion-based perico ripiao (ripped parrot)
quartets and sometimes by large
saxophone-dominated ensembles influenced by swing-era big bands. Under the
dictator's patronage and control, merengue became the national dance.
Yankee commercial music, along with U.S.
business, was largely kept out of the country, and with Dominicans discouraged
from emigrating or even traveling locally, Dominican music flourished in it's
own isolated way.
Following the CIA-sponsored assassination of Trujillo in 1961, the country's
leader for 25 of the next 33 years, the
U.S.-sponsored Joaquin Balaguer, opened the country to foreign-primarily
U.S.-investment. As multinationals like Gulf &
Western bought vast tracts of land, hundreds of
thousands of uprooted peasants flooded into
shanty towns, especially in Santo Domingo, whose
population doubled between 1961 and 1970. Along
with the foreign businesses came foreign record companies and their music
rock, schmaltzy baladas, and salsa-putting local merengue on
the defensive.
Merengue's relation to salsa is somewhat complex. Salsa, as we have seen, is
an international genre, and in the
Dominican Republic, as elsewhere. it functioned as a symbol of Latino cultural
resistance to gringo Coca-Colonization. At the
same time. however, Dominicans perceived salsa
as something foreign Cuban and Puerto Rican-in
relation to the merengue. Most Dominicans
blithely enjoyed all of the various competing
musics, but for merengue musicians and cultural
nationalists, a musical war was going on for
the hearts and ears of the Dominican people. To
make a long story short, by the late 1980s, a
modernized and revitalized merengue, guided by bandleader Johnny Ventura and
others, successfully marginalized its competitors. Moreover,
merengue went on to invade salsa in its own
heartlands of New York and Puerto Rico.
Throughout the 1980s, hardcore Salseros watched with dismay as their
favorite clubs and radio programs switched to merengue, with its romantic
lyrics, elementary choreography, simpler harmonies and rhythms, and the
gimmicky antics of its performers.
To a large extent, merengue has been personally carried abroad by the flood of
Dominicans pouring out of the country,
especially to New York City, where they now number about half a
million. In New York and elsewhere, the
Dominican bands undercut the salsa groups, and many
young Latinos, intimidated by the choreographic
pyrotechnics of veteran salsa dancers, feel more
at home with the simple two-step merengue.
Meanwhile, as happened with other Caribbean
musics, the merengue world's center of gravity
has shifted to New York, with its music industry
infrastructure and concentrated population, leading bandleader Wilfrido
Vargas to refer to the city as a province of the Dominican Republic." Merengue
has become an international music in its
own right, and to further complicate the geo-musical map, Dominican bands in
Puerto Rico and New York are now having
to compete with Puerto Rican merengue bands. Meanwhile,
Dominican music as a whole has acquired greater
sophistication and professionalism. This trend
is especially evident in the music of Juan Luis
Guerra, whose output encompasses sentimental, if
tasteful love ballads, sociopolitical
commentary, and searingly danceable merengue and salsa.
As of the mid-1990s, the salsa-merengue war appears to have cooled off, and
Salseros seem to feel that the situation
has stabilized. A portion of the salsa audience may have been irretrievably
lost to merengue, but many Dominicans have also
replenished the ranks,of salsa fans. Nevertheless, Dominican immigration has
reconfigured Latin musical culture. For one thing, New York Latinos can no
longer be thought of as primarily Puerto Rican, and
Dominicans naturally take umbrage at the
persistent habit of salsa singers and emcees to try to turn concerts into
celebrations of Puerto Rican identity. For another, although salsa is now more
international than ever, it will not be able to
rule as the chosen vehicle of Latino unity, but will
have to share the stage with merengue and other
musics.
Among these "other musics," mention must be
made of a newcomer to the scene, namely Latin
rap. The emergence of Spanish-language rap has
been an inevitable development, with young
urban Latinos in New York and elsewhere mixing
with their African American neighbors and
creating their own hip-hop fashions. As reggae,
rap, and salsa radio programs crisscross the
Caribbean, and satellite dishes bring MTV to
the entire region, Latin rap has emerged as one
more dynamic hybrid in the margins and
interstices of the music world. Like salsa, it is an
international genre, with branches from Los
Angeles to Puerto Rico, and performers from all
over the hemisphere. In an age where the
borders of cultures are the sources for so much artistic
creativity, the Latin rap of performers like Vico C and Gerardo is
self-consciously eclectic, reveling in the mixture of Spanish and English
street talk, and the fusion of reggae, hip-hop, and Latin rhythms.
Since the mid-1970s, the music industry
has tended to direct salsa away from its barrio
orientation, to make it into a more bland, depoliticized pop- ketchup rather
than salsa.
Amidst the past decade's proliferating hybridity, salsa still enjoys its
stable niches on the radio and in the
club network-. The big record companies have even invested in salsa, deciding
that it has some commercial potential
after all. At the same time, the genre seems to be in a sort of
holding pattern. Struggling to retain their
audiences, most salsa performers remain stuck in the
unremunerative, exploitative club scene, with
little hope of breaking into the crossover "world
beat" markets. Most significant has been the
emergence of a tame, commercial, salsa-lite style
which has marginalized the moi-e innovative and
dynamic sub-styles. By the late 1970s, salsa, whether in New York or Caracas,
had largely abandoned its portrayals of barrio life and themes
of Latino solidarity in favor of sentimental
love lyrics.
Of course, salsa is not the first art form
to have to confront the dual and often incompatible
functions of being both educational and escapist entertainment. Some
people may always prefer fantasy to social realism, and many Latinos who dress
Lip to (lo dancing in plushsalsa clubs don't want to hear songs about barrio
murders-that's what they've trying to get away
from. For its part, since the mid-1970s the music industry has tended to
direct salsa away from its barrio
orientation. to make it into a more bland, depoliticized pop-ketchup rather
than salsa.
Since that period, most of what has been promoted on radio and records is the
stick, sentimental salsa romantica of
crooners like Mark Anthony, rather than the more aggressive, roletarian,
Afro-Caribbean salsa caliente. The change is also reflected in the fact that
most of today's bandleaders are not
trained musicians and seasoned club performers like Willie Colón, but cuddly,
exclusively white singers distinguished by their pretty-boy looks and supposed
sex appeal. Most of them, like Jerry
Rivera. are studio-bred creations of the commercial music industry; in their
occasional live performances, they cling timidly to the recorded versions
of their songs, hoping to compensate for their
musical limitations by extravagant smoke, lighting, and stage effects.
Unfortunately, as this type of salsa grows ever more trivial, it
continues to lose the interest of barrio
youth-precisely the people whose creative input could
revitalize it.
While the music industry and artistic
creation have their own internal logic, salsa's course seems
to reflect broader developments in the
sociopolitical order at large. Salsa was born in the sixties
and early seventies-a period of protest and mobilization linked to
rising expectations and the generalized
feeling that fundamental social change was possible. Domestically, the economy
was growing, blacks and Latinos were discovering the exhilaration of mass
mobilization, and the Right was on the defensive. In the Caribbean, newly
independent West Indian countries were optimistically confronting imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution was
flourishing. Salsa embodied the moment's
affirmative and sanguine spirit in its unabashedly proletarian flavor and
hymns to Latino solidarity.
But those days are decades past, and we are
now in the older, wiser, and more cynical 1990s. Internationally, the Latin
American Left is decimated, the Cuban Revolution is on the defensive,
and throughout the hemisphere, the American
flag flies unchallenged. Domestically, the
progressive gains of the sixties and seventies
have been largely unmade by a triumphant Reaganism, and scarcely dented by a
nominally Democratic president. In the New World Order,
to sing songs of revolution would be like
spitting in the wind, and popular music throughout the
hemisphere seems to have retreated into
sensuality, sentimentality, and lumpen nihilism.
Accordingly, roots reggae's messianic fervor
has given way to dance-hall's glib crudity, the
Nueva Cancion
movement has fizzled, nihilistic gangster rap
rules the ghettos, and mainstream salsa has withdrawn into a commercially safe
formula of soap-opera lyrics and diluted rhythms. It remains to be seen
whether a resurgent pan-Latin American culture can again presume to challenge
Pax Americana in song and action.
C.L.R. James wrote, "What do they know of cricket,,
who only cricket know?"
