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12. Así Somos: Rewriting Patriarchy
- Wesleyan University Press
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c h a p t e r t w e l v e Así Somos Rewriting Patriarchy Patterns of listening to El Gran Combo’s song “Así son” show different ways of producing meaning, not only between men and women but also between the Latinas from the University of Michigan and those from Detroit . These differences in listening practices, as individual engagements in cultural semiotics, do not by any means reveal essential differences between how men and women listen to popular music. In fact, there are a number of strategies for reading and producing meaning that overlap all three interpretive communities. The significant difference between men and women in their qualitative responses to the musicality of such songs, to music as an industry, and to its processes of production signal the “structured secondariness” in which women are located in the cultural space of salsa music, that is, the existence of “a whole alternative network of responses and activities through which [women] negotiate their relation to the sub-cultures [in this case salsa] or even make positive moves away from the sub-cultural option.”1 That is, while working class Latinas may speak about salsa music as a central part of their everyday lives, they do so through tactics of appropriation, rewriting, and countervaluation. Indeed, they recontextualize the music and transform its social value to best fit their own needs and desires.2 They did not share the Puerto Rican male fans’ detailed knowledge of the music’s social impact nor of each musical group’s development nor of the particular song’s historicity. (I suspect that had I interviewed the wife of one of the Puerto Rican students in Ann Arbor, she might have proved an exception to this. Also, I have not included in these samples the numbers of individual women who are musicians themselves and whose knowledge and participation in producing salsa would offset these results). I am not trying to suggest here that Latinas are not active participants in sociocultural praxes nor that they do not belong in or to Rewriting Patriarchy / 219 salsa. Rather, I am suggesting that their political, gender-based location as women does indeed exclude them from developing a musical competence in the fullest sense of the word. In contrast to Willie Colón’s relatively monologic voice in “Cuando fuiste mujer,” El Gran Combo’s “Así son” combines a patriarchal ideology, voiced through the persona of the singing, abandoned male, with a polyvalent , open refrain, “así son,” which opens the text to a myriad of readings, valorations, and rewritings. Indeed, the open-ended nature of the refrain, in conjunction with the rest of the text, which is quite specific about heterosexual relations, allows listeners to negotiate between the textual hegemony of the stanzas and the freedom accorded by its potentially polyvalent refrain. Interestingly, one Puerto Rican man identified the social situation framed within “Así son” as directly mimetic of social reality in Puerto Rico. His comments suggest that this song could well serve as a mirror of individual experience for men, as a text by, for, and about men’s repressed affective domain. The song reminded this interviewee of his father’s restaurant : “[H]e had a jukebox, and I remember when he would serve alcohol in the restaurant men would come to drink after having fights with their girlfriends, play this same type of song, feel sorry for themselves in a corner , and then leave. . . . I know specifically my cousin, who would go to the restaurant, he would get drunk and complain, ‘Women, look how they are, look how they pay you back.” This same cousin is now happily married today and is a loving father and husband, so his views possibly changed.” This observation semantically links this particular salsa song, Vega’s and Filippi’s short story, and the tremendous popularity of the song in Puerto Rico throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. The above image is not merely an image but a real historical and personal event that marks gender identity in terms of the space (the restaurant with the jukebox), the discourse (diatribes against women), and the affective and emotional states experienced (anger, loss, and depression) as a result of (hetero)sexual conflicts . That the interviewee even identified a particular individual, his cousin, as a participant in that socially gendered practice, suggests the commonality of that masculine ritual. However, in contrast to Vega and Filippi ’s story, where four men suffer in each other’s company, the...