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3 Who's Who In Mambo? FROM 1948 TO 1966, the Palladium Ballroom was known among Latin music audiences as the mecca of Latin dance music in New York City. In the early 1950s it became specifically recognized in the American mainstream media as the home of the mambo, which featured amateur and professional mambo dancers as well as the Three Kings of the Mambo in New York City, Machito, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodriguez. Its importance to the popularization of Latin dance music in the United States is undeniable, but the Palladium and the music of its principal protagonists have constituted a dominant place in both the American imaginary of Latin culture and the historical canon of Latin popular music. As a result, the entire landscape of Latin music, dance, and culture in New York City during the 1950s has been largely ignored or overlooked . For example, various dance halls, cabarets, and social clubs that were located in East Harlem or "EI Barrio" and the South Bronx were the sites of a local and vibrant music culture whose importance to resident Cubans and Puerto Ricans equaled or even surpassed that of the Palladium. Arsenio was especially important to this milieu for his Cuban music repertory and unique son montuno style. Many residents of EI Barrio and the South Bronx even preferred Arsenio's music over the mambo big bands that were popular at the Palladium and whose music was being disseminated internationally by the American popular music industry. Cuban Melba Alvarado, a longtime member of the Club Cubano InterAmericana , a social club in the South Bronx, stated: "We always danced a lot of bolero, danzon, and son. These are three tipicas [traditional Cuban genres]. We didn't care too much for mambo. Mambo was played a lot, orchestras played mambo, but it wasn't something that we did with much gratification" (Alvarado interview 2000). Arsenio himself had become very critical of the mambo, maintaining throughout the 1950s that the final section of his arrangements and in general his son montuno style constituted the "original" and "authentic" model of the mambo. In an interview given to Cuban magazine Bohemia in 1952, Arsenio articulated his views with respect to Damaso Perez Prado's style of mambo: "What Perez Prado did was to mix the mambo with American music, copied from Stan Kenton. And he did us irreparable harm with it. I'll never Copyrighted Material Who's Who in Mambo? 65 forgive him for that, or myself for creating that damned mambo" (Cubillas 1952). Arsenio's claim of originating the mambo and characterization of Perez Prado's mambo style as mixed (read: "diluted" and "Americanized ") with jazz music speak not to an empirical distinction between an authentic and inauthentic mambo style. Nor do I suggest that the Puerto Rican and Cuban music and dance scene in El Barrio and the South Bronx, in which Arsenio's conjunto formed a central component throughout the 1950s, developed in isolation from those music and dance styles that were most popular in the Palladium and that were being circulated transnationally. In fact, Arsenio's conjunto performed regularly at the Palladium and continued to record with RCA Victor through 1952 and again in 1955 and 1956. He also made temporary changes to his group's instrumentation, attempting to align his conjunto's sound with that of the mambo big band. Finally, Machito, Tito Puente, and other mambo big band leaders actually added the son montuno genre to their repertories. In the end, his statements as well as those of Melba Alvarado and others I have interviewed suggest that some Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians and dancers were ambivalent toward international trends in Latin popular music and dance, namely, the mambo. This ambivalence could be seen as having emerged from the precarious position that many firstgeneration Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, including Arsenio, bore in relation to the hegemonic North and Latin American entertainment industries, whose commodification of mambo music and dance conflicted with their identities and, in Arsenio's case, destabilized his professional career. This chapter problematizes the conventional historical narrative of the mambo that has treated its development in teleological terms-"born in Cuba but made in the U.S.A.," as Gustavo Perez Firmat put it (Perez Firmat 1994, p. SOl-rather than as a transnational phenomenon with complex interrelationships with local contemporary styles, cultures, and identities. For this purpose Arsenio is especially significant because his musical career transversed the national boundaries and historical...

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