It grew in the Barrios of New York during the late 1960’s and the 1970s from Puerto Rican musicians who rearranged and recombined Cuban and Puerto Rican musical genres.
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Similarly I am interested in showing how salsa made such a difference.īut, what is salsa? Salsa is dancing music that borrows its forms, both musical and lyrical, from the extensive Afro-Caribbean popular music vernacular, more specifically from the Cuban son, rumba, and guaracha. Stuart Hall expresses his interest as well in “… Cultural strategies that can make a difference… and shift the dispositions of power.” (Hall 1996:468). “The role of the ‘popular’ in popular culture is to fix the authenticity of popular forms, rooting them in the experiences of popular communities from which they draw their strength, allowing us to see them as expressive of a particular subordinate social life that resists its being constantly made over as low and outside” (Hall 1996:469).īecause salsa springs from a brutally marginalized sector of society and because it gained immense popularity and acceptance in several sectors of society, not only the lower classes, I contend that it is a great example of the “resistance to constantly being made over as low and outside.” Salsa questioned this concept of low and outside by being embraced almost in every household in urban Latin America. My analysis of salsa as liberation is informed by Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall who looks at how popular culture responds to problems of power relations.
#SALSA MUSIC FREE#
For Puerto Ricans in particular, but also Latinos generally, salsa represented a kind of liberation from the cultural and political dilemmas of this time, a liberation that was experienced on several distinct levels:ġ) First, Like other genres of music salsa represented a refuge for latinos after work and on weekends, at home and in dance halls, it offered liberation of the body and mind through the experience of music and dance,Ģ) Second, Salsa challenged the oppressive hierarchies of cultural and musical values, it was music from the people to the people, andģ) Third, Salsa offered new conditions of possibilities to Puerto Ricans to free themselves from their dependence on, and identification with the United States, a cultural freedom that also resonated with musicians and audiences in cities all over Latin America. Salsa’s unprecedented international popularity resulted from the confluence of several distinct social conditions and historical events: the Puerto Rican dilemma of colonial status, the civil rights and black pride movements in the U.S., the Cuban revolution with its tremendous impact and aftershocks, urban migration, and the need for a Latino alternative to the hegemony of Anglo rock. In the span of a single decade, the 1970s, people in urban centers all over Latin America came to embrace salsa music as their preferred musical style and expression. The film also documented the emergence of something that Puerto Ricans had been searching for throughout the 1960s: a new sound, similar to the harmonic and rhythmic patterns of the Cuban son, but which the beginning of a new style. It showed us all the wretchedness and isolation people had refused to believe could exist in the ‘capital of the world’(Calvo Ospina 1995:79).
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There was the famous Barrio and its ancient, filthy tenements, with human flesh crammed onto every inch of the buildings, their patched clothing hanging out to dry in the windows. ‘Our Latin Thing’ was the first documentary on salsa as an expression of Latin American urban social identity. The film “Our Latin Thing” Nuestra Cosa Latina,(1971) filmed at the Cheetah club near the Bronx in New York for the first time showed Latin Americans outside the United States the realities of life in New York, the Big Apple. Why are you crying? I’ve no idea., and couldn’t care less.” (NARRATOR’S VOICE from the film ‘Our Latin Thing” 1971). The trumpets pierce our ears with indescribable pleasure, we want to embrace the whole world.
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Our hair stands on end, hot and cold shivers run up and down our spines. Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Caribbean ethnomusicology séminar (july 2003 - Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe).Ĭan you hear the clave, whats going on? Cheo Feliciano gives the signal and Ricardo (Rey) sets his ten magic fingers twinkling on the keys, letting loose those volleys of sound that strike into the deepest part of our beings.