-
6. Cultural (Mis)Translations and Crossover Nightmares
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r s i x Cultural (Mis)Translations and Crossover Nightmares In her lucid analysis of “Women Dancing Back,” Leslie Gotfrit refers us to dance as an activity that contests the split between “body and mind” that has ensued from the binary logic of Western culture. Unlike the mind, the body is “crucial to any oppositional politics,” and dance allows for the possibility of “a re-integration of mind and body.”1 However, the general human and collective value of dancing, of course, is not exclusive to salsa music nor to Latin culture. I have stressed the importance of Latin dancing as cultural resistance and, following Víctor Hernández Cruz’s poems, cultural acknowledgment; these functions are activated, for Latinas/os, within the complex colonial conditions under which they produce and consume culture. Yet it seems that this “state of disembodiment,” this radical fissure between body and mind that Gotfrit analyzes, informs Anglo constructs of salsa music. Perceptions by Anglos of Latin musical culture in the United States reveal an eroticized reading, a sort of tropicalization, that is not limited to the field of music but significantly recognizes the “human” aspect of Latina/o dancing vis-à-vis the presupposed technologizing and dehumanizing practices of contemporary Anglo popular music and of the Western world. A November 4, 1991, Newsweek article titled “Crossover Dreamers” concludes with such a view: “That is the sanctuary Latin music offers U.S. audiences—it is still played by human hands and danced by couples who can look into each other’s eyes when they do it. Whether you like salsa or not, artists like Guerra have preserved more than just the mambo tradition . They’ve held onto a way of making music that the world is fast losing and would be much worse without.”2 Fraught with historical confusion (Juan Luis Guerra performs more merengues and bachatas than salsa or even mambo) and conflating musical t h e p l u r a l s i t e s o f s a l s a / 104 t h e p l u r a l s i t e s o f s a l s a / 104 forms, nonetheless these observations identify a nostalgic, pretechnology stage of music that assumedly redeems salsa from the depersonalized musical practices of industrialized societies. This primitivist othering relies on strategies of depicting Latinas/os as figures that embody emotions, sentiment (“heart”), and magic (the article describes Juan Luis Guerra’s erotic song “Burbujas de amor” as “magical realism”), thus continuing the discursive tradition of Anglo-constructed stereotypes and tropicalized representations of the regions and cultures south of the border. Cultural (Mis)Translations This discursive construct is not an isolated incident but emerges laden with historical instances of rewritings on the part of dominant institutions. U.S. adaptations of Latin American music erase, literally speaking, the political and cultural values of music and songs, replacing them with messages and themes that fulfill the needs of an Other, a culturally located listener or audience. A clear instance of this process is the English mistranslation and “adaptation” of one of Cuba’s most famous exemplars of Afro-Cuban music, “Mama Inés,” popularized as a son that expresses the collective subjectivity of black Cubans since the times of slavery. Issued as an “American adaptation” of “the greatest of all Cuban Rumbas,” the 1931 English translation by L. Wolfe Gilbert clearly illustrates the conflation— rightly denounced by Leonardo Acosta—of diverse forms of Cuban music into “rumbas” (which later becomes the mambo and the cha-cha-cha), although the term was also used in Cuban teatro bufo to refer generally to all Afro-Cuban music.3 It also stands as an instance of the systematic erasure of culturally and racially different voices: Aquí estamos to’ los negros [Here we are all blacks] Que venimos a rogar [who come to ask] Que nos concedan permiso [that you permit us] para cantar y bailar [to sing and dance] Yo ‘taba en casa de madrina [I was at godmother’s house] Que ella me mandó a buscar [Cause she asked me to come] Que de doblar de la esquina [Right around the corner] Que ella vive en el manglar [She lives on the swamps] Ay mama Inés, Ay mama Inés, [Oh, Mama Ines, Oh, Mama Ines] todos los negros tomamos café [we blacks drink coffee] [Repeat] Nos vamos para el solar [We go to the land] donde...