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A Postmodern Preface / 65 A Postmodern Preface  Porque la Salsa no existe [there is no such thing as Salsa] —Dámaso Pérez Prado Yo sólo conozco una Salsa que venden en botella, llamada catsup. Yo toco música cubana [I only know a Salsa sold in a bottle called ketchup. What I play is Cuban music.] —Tito Puente Soy cubana, tú lo sabes. Aquí la Salsa . . . Soy yo! [I am Cuban, as you know. I am Salsa music!] —Olga Navarro, “Nuestra música cubana” Puerto Rico es Salsa [Puerto Rico is Salsa]. —Concierto Expo 92, Seville, Spain Salsa es una suma armónica de toda la cultura latina reunida en Nueva York [Salsa is the harmonic sum of all Latin culture that meets in New York]. —Willie Colón “La música Salsa es un folclor urbano a nivel internacional [Salsa music is urban folklore at the international level]. —Rubén Blades “Puerto Rico es Salsa,” an evening concert at Expo 92 in Seville, Spain, was the culmination of a day of festivities honoring the National Day of Puerto Rico on June 23, 1992. Yet behind the curtains of a successful stage performance by Alex de Castro, Tony Vega, Andy Montañez, and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, the national affirmation of salsa as Puerto Rico’s music had become a controversy well before the show began. Issues of national identity, popular culture, race, and class were subtexts to this public debate that began once the government revealed that a salsa concert would represent Puerto Rico in Spain’s Expo 92. For many upper-class Puerto Ricans, salsa was not an appropriate and lofty enough symbol of the island’s musical traditions. Either the Puerto Rican Symphony Orchestra or a lyrical trio would have been much more acceptable. Other sectors contested that salsa was not Puerto Rican but Cuban music. Still others felt that jíbaro music had been denied its opportunity as a traditional symbol of Puerto Rico’s autochthonous folklore. Altogether and albeit their conflicting views, these opinions reveal the contested nature of salsa and the difficulties of defining a music that is syncretic and interethnically Caribbean. They also dramatize the central role of popular music as a site for the formation and definition of national identity , a process that assumes serious consequences for the Puerto Rican people because of the island’s complex, lagging colonial conditions within an assumed postcolonial world. This complex and contradictory political location is informed by Puerto Rico’s “uneven insertion . . . into the modern industrial configuration,” what Juan Flores and María Milagros López have termed “the post-colonial colony.”1 Yet the symbolic values of popular music as a locus of national identity are not exclusively expressed by Puerto Ricans; they are also shared by Cubans, from whose African musical tradition salsa emerged, and other urban Caribbean audiences, such as Venezuelans and Colombians, who have embraced salsa as an artistic articulation of urban life and a reaffirmation of class conflict and racial identity in Latin America. Within the continental United States, salsa music adds to this complexity as a Pan-Latino expression of cultural hybridity and resistance. Thus, 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, eludes a fixed definition. It shifts meanings among individual receptors, and it also 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 Rico 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, a “harmonic sum” as Willie Colón describes it. Simultaneously, the history of salsa music in the United States has revealed the mechanisms by which the Anglo mainstream appropriates and coopts the cultural productions of less dominant groups. This mainstreaming reproduces, at a larger social level, strategies of appropriation analogous to those deployed by white writers around the role of the black figure as a locus of liberation. Salsa music has been received as an oppositional, liberatory music by progressive Anglo performers like David...

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