Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures

Listening to Salsa is a sustained, musicological, interdisciplinary and intercultural study of the history and development of salsa as well as of other related popular musical genres such as the bolero, the plena, the bomba, and the danza. Aiming for a more democratic (read: less heteronormative, misogynist, and racist) popular musical canon, Listening to Salsa is both an “act of love toward the Latina/o culture and people” and a critical “act of war” that rescues from oblivion a truly amazing number of key Latina composers and performers and their oftentimes radical rewritings of the patriarchal imaginary which informs salsa and other popular musical genres (p. xi). Shifting between literary texts that either inform popular musical compositions or are inspired by them (most importantly Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega and Carmen Lugo Filippi’s short stories and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s novels La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos and La guaracha del macho Camacho); musicological analyses of the polyrhythmic and dialogic structure of salsa; feminist critical readings of salsa and bolero lyrics; interviews with salsa fans and sociological interpretations thereof; Aparicio’s Listening to Salsa is a major history of salsa music both in the US and in Puerto Rico and will prove to be an invaluable resource for those of us who teach courses in Latin/o American and US popular culture.

Beginning with a discussion of Rosario Ferré’s controversial 1975 short story “When Women Love Men” (collected in Papeles de Pandora/The Youngest Doll) in which two women, Isabel Luberza (the white lady) and Isabel la Negra (the black whore), who normally inhabit opposite social and racial poles, are situated side by side, Aparicio shows how the Puerto Rican national imaginary depends on their separation and on the suppression of the black/mulatta woman in favor of a whitened ideal of mestizaje. This dichotomy is also embodied by the history of two major musical genres (the danza as the white lady and the plena as the black/mulatta whore) and underpins much of the discourse of musicology in Puerto Rico since the nineteenth century. Through critical readings of the writings of key essayists such as Manuel Alonso, Antonio S. Pedreira, Amaury Veray, Tomás Blanco, and Salvador Brau, Aparicio shows how the image of the feminized, docile Puerto Rican emerges. Her rescue of major female figures, in this case that of Lola Rodríguez de Tió and her radical “masculine” rewriting of the national hymn “La Borinqueña,” serves Aparicio to undermine these foundational texts.

In Part Two “The Plural Sites of Salsa,” Aparicio adopts Willie Colón’s dictum that salsa is the harmonic sum of all the different Latino cultures in New York City and refuses to ascribe its origins to Cuban music exclusively—particularly the Cuban son—as many critics do. Instead, among contributing factors, she lists Rafael Cortijo’s innovations in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap and the increased immigration of Puerto Ricans to NYC—hence the adaptation of the Cuban son to barrio life—, Cuban La Lupe’s feminist lyrics and revolutionary performance style, and finally as an unacknowledged result of the Cuban revolution. Given that the embargo on all things Cuban after 1959 created a vacuum and confusion among Latino musicians, she argues that they found themselves having to mix musical forms (including rock n’ roll) which ultimately gave rise to salsa. Salsa’s growing acceptance among all social levels in Puerto Rico and elsewhere (Aparicio discuses how shocked the upper classes were when they found out that the government had decided to display Puerto Rico in Seville’s Expo ‘92 as “Puerto Rico es salsa” because once again, as in the case of the plena, they viewed the music as lower class and Africanized) is garnered through increasing internationalization and visibility. As her discussion of Orquesta de la Luz shows, salsa is played to great acclaim even by a Japanese band...