-
Afterword
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword Throughout this book, I have identified and analyzed discursive traditions in the terrains of Puerto Rican music, literature, and culture that have served to legitimize and naturalize the asymmetries of power between men and women and have led to what Anglo feminist critics of mass media have termed the “symbolic annihilation” of women.1 The feminization of AfroCaribbean music, a process traced to the late nineteenth century in Puerto Rico, continues to circulate in U.S.-dominant representations about salsa music; an English translation of a Cuban song and journalistic representations about Anglo desire for Latin rhythms and dancing reveal the intercultural underpinnings of this process. Eroticization also informs the almost omnipresent motifs and voyeuristic metaphors in various Caribbean cultural texts about the mulatta and her rhythm, illustrating that this discourse is not only the exclusive result of either patriarchy or colonial encounters but is also historically linked to the racialized histories of the Hispanic Caribbean islands. I am aware, however, that discourse analysis poses the risk of conflating everything into discourse, thus eliding the dialogic tensions between producers and consumers of music and the historical specificity of the musical forms and traditions discussed here. Thus, to denounce patriarchy or to engage in content analysis about the representations of women in Latin(o) popular music is not enough at a time when we now define popular culture as sites where diverse social sectors negotiate meanings and where power struggles are enacted. As this book has demonstrated, the patriarchal ideology behind an image like the dancing mulatta shifts, depending on the politics of the singing subject. As I have shown in Part Three, when women singers, as subaltern subjects in a male-dominated industry, appropriate this imagery, its oppressive value is transformed into a rhetorical weapon for resisting those masculinist ideologies. Afterword / 239 Released in 1994, the song “Calypsos,” written and arranged by Wild Mango, the multicultural women’s group from the Bay Area of San Franciso , reveals how the icon of the dancing mulatta can also suggest a homoerotic reading or, at the very least, the reaffirmation of women’s sensuality unmediated by a male perspective.2 This is the result of women’s growing participation in the music industry as producers, composers, and arrangers. It is also, of course, defined by the sexual politics of the group members. What has been otherwise a problematic icon in male-authored texts is mediated here by an introductory text in French in which the figure of the moon suggests a homoerotic gaze and desire, thus implying to listeners that the gaze on the mulatta could be that of other women desiring women. Most interestingly, the oppositional value of this cut also resides in the very intersection or crossroads of a multicultural production such as Made in Mango, a recording characterized by the combination of various rhythms associated with Latin America, Arab cultures, and of course, the Trinidadian calypso. In the 1990s, I would argue, the continuing dominant trend toward salsa romántica seems to exemplify another instance of feminization as I have discussed it in this book. This time, however, feminization is evident in the industry -induced hegemony and canonical status of bolero-informed songs about individual heterosexual relationships. Most of the new salsa interpreters in the 1980s and 1990s, both men and women, invariably sing to and about love, in contrast to the more heterogeneous thematic repertoire of salsa figures from the 1970s. While Olga Tañón’s 1994 release, Siente el amor, includes only love songs, Celia Cruz’s Irrepetible, released the same year, includes songs about (hetero)sexual relations, mostly in defense of women, such as “Que le den candela” and “La guagua.” In the latter, she defends women’s rights to travel in city buses without being touched by men, while in the highly political “Cuando Cuba se acabe de liberar,” she visualizes a utopian return to Cuba after the fall of Fidel Castro.3 Willie Colón’s 1993 release, Hecho en Puerto Rico, presents love songs such as “Idilio,” an interesting fusion of salsa romántica with the lyrical language and versification of décimas jíbaras. This song plays on the market for love ballads while simultaneously reaffirming national identity for Puerto Ricans . A song such as “Buscando trabajo” addresses the economic difficulties and unemployment that Latinos face in the age of globalization and dwindling job security for workers, and “Atrapado” narrates the life of a drug dealer in a song that denounces U...