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9. Singing the Gender Wars
- Wesleyan University Press
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c h a p t e r n i n e Singing the Gender Wars Yo la mato o pide perdón [Either I kill her or she apologizes]. —Daniel Santos, “Yo la mato” The increased mobility and integration of Latin American and Puerto Rican women into the work force and their growing access to the public spheres has had a destabilizing impact on the power of patriarchy in Latin America. New gender values and subjectivities among women have indeed resulted from their massive incorporation into the labor force. It is these new attitudes that conflict and clash with the traditional values that continue to instill “an ideology of inequality.”1 In fact, contemporary sociological studies in Puerto Rico have shown that the longer a woman works outside the home, the more likely that her attitudes will change.2 Concomitantly , as women’s gender expectations change and become more profound and long-lasting, the attitudes and practices of traditional males and of patriarchal society become more resentful and reactionary. Such resentment can be traced through the historical development of Latin music. The bolero, for instance, gained much popularity during the 1930s, precisely at the moment when industrialization and urbanization in Latin America drew large numbers of women to work outside the home. In response to such changes, the discurso boleril, with its euphemistic and elegantly veiled expressions of courtly love and ill hearts, accused women of men’s problems: “Usted es la culpable.”3 Yet this type of accusation simultaneously revealed male dependency on women’s love and presence, that ubiquituous “no puedo vivir sin ti” [I can’t live without you] that permeates this musicolyrical tradition. Thus, through a centripetal language of refinement, harmony, idealization, and nostalgia, the bolero continues to articulate those conflicts between men and women that have followed social and economic changes since the turn of the century. d i s s o n a n t m e l o d i e s / 154 Following the tradition of the guaracha in Afro-Caribbean music, with its popular diction, masculine and phallocentric perspectives, and a burlesque , parodic tone articulated from marginalized positions, salsa music emerged in New York City’s Latin barrios during the 1960s and 1970s. It then shifted toward a more aggressive, warlike articulation of (hetero)sexual relations in Latin(o) American societies than the bolero had sung about. As a syncretic sociomusical practice, salsa exhibits a heterogeneous array of conceptions of the feminine. While centrally integrating the amorous discourse of the bolero and its obsession with the absent or lost woman, salsa presents more heterogeneous subject positions regarding women. For instance , it draws from the merengue’s puns about woman as object to be consumed and cannibalized, as well as its idealized images of mothers, young women, and daughters and its passionate confessions of love. Also prominent in salsa’s lyrics is the dualistic construct of the promiscuous, sexually superendowed black woman or mulatta, on the one hand, and the pure, sexually unattainable virgin/mother figure, on the other. These configurations are not exclusive to salsa, for they abound in the literature of Hispanic countries as well as in the folklore and literature of other Western cultures.4 As Sander Gilman has pointed out, the building of stereotypes “perpetuate[s] a needed sense of difference between the ‘Self ’ and the ‘object,’ which becomes the ‘Other.’ Because there is no real line between the Self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self.”5 This basic need, Gilman argues, leads to the construction of what Stephen Pepper has called “root metaphors,” that is, “a set of categories which result from our attempt to understand other areas in terms of one commonsense fact.”6 By establishing analogical values between real life experiences and the world of myths, stereotypes establish associations that may entail either “negative images” or “positive idealizations.”7 It is at these two poles, indeed, that women are positioned and represented within Hispanic culture. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s, salsa music was characterized by quite disturbing articulations of violence against women and of (hetero)sexual conflict consistently framed as metaphors of war and physical struggle. In part, this is not suprising, given the poetics and politics of a musical movement born in the war zones of Anglo society and...