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10 Allons à la Fête—On Danse Salsa New Routes for Salsa in France Saúl Escalona (Translated by Sydney Hutchinson) D rawing from Patria Román-Velázquez’s (1998) work about the development of a salsa circuit and the construction of Latino identities in London, in this chapter I analyze the salsa movement in Paris.1 RománVel ázquez, using the notion of route, examines salsa in London by describing where it came from—and thus how it spread. She asserts that salsa, as an amalgam of rhythms and practices, is articulated differently in different cultures . If this is true in the Caribbean, which includes Cuba, Colombia, Panama , Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and in places emigrants from these countries live and perpetuate their cultural practices, then salsa’s articulation will present different characteristics in European countries, whose social and cultural characteristics are different from those of the countries of salsa’s roots. One of these characteristics is its geographic sense, meaning the transfer of the music from the Americas to Europe. Salsa transports culture, a culture that digs its roots deeply into the Latin American continent, and salsa is a reminder of one of the most painful and, at the same time, most fruitful times for the lands “discovered” and colonized by the Spanish. Integrating itself into Europe, particularly France, and establishing relations between Latin America and Europe, salsa evokes a different conception of existence, at times the nostalgia of the excluded or oppressed, alongside its collective nature and spirit of festivity, as Octavio Paz has indicated2 in his essays. In the early 1970s,3 a Latin American colony in Paris was composed principally of middle-class political refugees from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile. They held peñas, nighttime musical parties with Andean 174 Saúl Escalona music played on instruments like charango and quena. In 1978 the discotheque La Chapelle des Lombards4 opened, offering tropical music, particularly salsa, to a French audience of academics, professionals, artists, students, and those who were acquainted with the Caribbean region through travel or who found the rhythm innovative. A decade later, a new Latin American migration fit itself into this salsa route, a heterogenous migration of social classes who came to France in search of a better life. As a consequence of their different class and national origins, they propelled a musical practice in which the charango and quena were replaced by congas and bongos. Other Latin Americans in Paris and other European cities joined this tropical atmosphere, and Colombians and Venezuelans, among others, came to love salsa and learned to dance it. Although in their countries of origin salsa was regarded as a music of “delinquents” (malandros) or blacks or even the barrios,5 nostalgia for home brought acceptance of and even affection for the cultural values of other social classes. In addition, salsa in distant Europe was a way to meet others as well as an expression of identity . One sometimes heard, “You are Venezuelan (or Colombian), and you don’t know how to dance salsa?” This first stage culminated with a large increase in the size of the Latin American community, and salsa musicians contributed to the music’s diffusion in the French musical landscape. A New Path My research has shown the birth of a new, commercial path in the late 1990s, in which Latin Americans are displaced from the musical world and its economic benefits, and salsa is seen as only a dance. New services flourish: food, disc jockeys, “professors” of salsa, and tourist travel to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. There also emerges a tendency to refer to Cuba for everything related to Latin music.6 During this period establishments opened to take advantage of the phenomenon and played music while customers were eating, drinking, or talking, just as in any place in Latin America. The historic ballrooms of the French capital adapted their programming to incorporate dance classes, shows, spectacles, and the like. The turn toward this music did not occur for cultural reasons but for financial ones, and it entails the complete and definitive erasure of Latin American organizers from the scene, since the new promoters, all European , had greater economic resources and knew better the regulatory legislation for mounting events or concerts. In this context, salsa is associated with and marketed as foreignness with a Caribbean climate, to make it a music without which one cannot live; as some followers assert, “I look for salsa because it takes...

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