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Preface
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
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Preface This book originally emerged out of my desire to give personal and cultural meaning to academic work, that is, out of a profound need to reclaim the knowledge about Puerto Rican culture that had been denied to me through a colonial education. But to limit the impact of this interdisciplinary study to the ways in which it has allowed for my personal decolonization would not do justice to the larger issues it has provoked. By now it has become commonplace for prologues to become personal confessions, a site, as postructuralists would say, for “locating the writing subject.” As much as this project has enhanced my own life, here I neither claim the role of organic intellectual (my upper-class upbringing limited my identification with salsa music), nor do I feel compelled to “tell my story.” Rather, a more productive framework for these preliminary words would include tracing the process of the research project; reviewing the dilemmas, goals, and tensions experienced by those of us who juggle popular culture in and out of the prudish and disembodied spaces of academic production; and reflecting on the tenuous location that popular culture still holds in academe despite its commodification as cutting-edge scholarship. This interdisciplinary incursion is, first of all, an act of love toward the Latina/o culture and people. I have seen, among those Latinas and Latinos whom I have known and loved, the destruction and pain that cultural displacement , exclusion, and internalized colonialism can create. At the same time, I have also witnessed firsthand the strength that we hold in our power of affiliation, cultural resistance, and reaffirmation. My efforts at analyzing our social contributions to popular music sincerely reflect the respect , admiration, and responsibility that I feel toward these collective expressions , a cultural legacy that was denied to me by my class upbringing and that this research project attempts to recover for myself, my daughters, and for future students of Latino and Latina cultures. Simultaneously, this project is a declaration of war. As a puertorriqueña Preface / xi who still resists being labeled a “feminist” scholar, I cannot but critique, from within, the traditional masculine discourse that continues to imbue our everyday lives as Latinas/os with blatant objectifications and insidious mutings of women. Thus, I must address those social contradictions posited by salsa and the larger Afro-Caribbean musical tradition from which it emerges. Certainly, salsa—by the very racial and class positionings of its composers and interpreters—has historically represented, because of its marginality, a delimited freedom with which to carve a space for social change and for cultural resistance. However, as a musical industry dominated by men, salsa music continues to disseminate lyrics laden with problematic , misogynist, and patriarchal representations of women. Thus, like other sites of popular music, it too articulates the heterogeneous values and cultural negotiations of gender that Latinos and Latinas experience. While Afro-Caribbean women, such as La Lupe, India, Celia Cruz, Deddie Romero, Olga Tañón, Albita, and other emerging feminist singers have sung with or against these discursive traditions, the politics of distribution and marketing, coupled with masculinist historiography, have systematically rendered mute their voices, relegating them to the margins of mainstream attention. A revealing example of this marginalization is the September 1994 issue of Latin Beat, dedicated to salseras and, more generally, to Latina musicians . “The Women’s Issue,” as it is titled, textually embodies the problematic location of women within the industry and their ensuing contradictory representations. While many of the articles, authored by men, attempt to contest women’s invisibility and document the musical contributions of Latinas such as La India, Gloria Estefan, Selena, Deddie Romero and of female groups like La Noreste and Wild Mango,1 the “special” nature of this issue reveals the systematic invisibility of women in Latin Beat’s regular issues —and in the music industry in general—while emphasizing their extraordinary , marked presence as women within the male-dominated world of popular music.2 In an otherwise honest and productive attempt to render Latinas visible, “The Women’s Issue” nonetheless frames women’s professional success as derivative. That is, it emphasizes the woman’s genetic predispositions to music making (as in the case of Deddie Romero, who comes from a family of musicians); it explains the woman’s success as a result of her male mentoring and management, as the brief discussion of La India suggests. Eroticizing associations, analogous to the objectifying discourse of merengue and salsa songs, continue to inform...