{"id":65169,"date":"2026-03-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=65169"},"modified":"2026-03-18T19:51:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T00:51:38","slug":"salsa-for-salsas-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/salsa-for-salsas-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"Salsa For Salsa\u2019s Sake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

Si te quieres divertir<\/p>\n\n\n\n

con encanto y con primor (pero \u00bfqu\u00e9 es esto?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Solo tienes que vivir (\u00bfy este fr\u00edo?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Un verano en Nueva York (Un ratito na<\/em>‘<\/em> m\u00e1’<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[If you wanna have fun<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With charm and delight (But what\u2019s this?<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You just have to live (And this cold?<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A summer in New York (Just for a bit<\/em>)]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Bad Bunny, \u201cNUEVAYol\u201d DeB\u00cd TiRAR M\u00e1S FOToS<\/em> (2025)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Let me begin at the end\u2014with what I have valued most in this book: its potential to ignite a conversation about salsa, not merely as a musical and discursive genre but as both a commodity and a site of poetic singularity. From the outset, it is just as significant to affirm: Without the experience and community of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, the very qualities that render salsa intelligible, possible, and arrestingly beautiful would remain unrecognizable. In the second half of the book, Negr\u00f3n undertakes a thorough examination of the legal disputes and lawsuits that shaped Fania Records, the most consequential orchestra and enterprise in the emergence of salsa. Her \u201ccultural history\u201d of Fania, traced \u201cthrough the streets of \u2018Latin\u2019 New York,\u201d presents the basic context in which salsa constructed its \u201cNuyorican meanings\u201d and how these circulated among New York, Puerto Rico, Latin America, and broader international contexts. Chapter 4 focuses on former Governor Rafael Hern\u00e1ndez Col\u00f3n\u2019s use of salsa\u2019s cosmopolitan appeal in the Puerto Rico pavilion at the 1992 Universal Expo in Seville, showing how the slogan \u201cPuerto Rico es salsa\u201d mobilized a \u201cNuyorican imaginary\u201d to project national exceptionalism from a colonial position that remains unspoken for the governor himself, along with economic ambition\u2014while ultimately, as she argues, reinforcing transatlantic structures of whiteness and inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final chapters examine Rub\u00e9n Blades\u2019s and H\u00e9ctor Lavoe\u2019s divergent modes of authorship, focusing on \u201cEl Cantante\u201d\u2014written by Blades, first recorded by Lavoe, and later performed by Blades himself. Negr\u00f3n shows how the song\u2019s portrayal of the singer\u2019s private suffering and the mask of performative joy crystallized Lavoe\u2019s tragic persona, becoming a lens through which to consider diaspora, fame, and loss. The thoroughness of this section leaves little room to doubt how the record industry\u2014and particularly the owners and principal administrators of Fania\u2014carefully orchestrated, or rather, offloaded onto their musicians and composers a systematic theft and expropriation of value and capital, made possible through their marketing strategies and identity-driven rhetoric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marisol Negr\u00f3n presents Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa\u2019s Nuyorican Meanings<\/em> as a reconstruction (or Rican\/Struction, to use Ray Barretto\u2019s metaphor) of salsa\u2019s 50-year cultural history, anchored in the 1964 founding of Fania Records. Negr\u00f3n examines album covers, liner notes, magazines, newspapers, press releases, and legal documents \u201cto examine salsa\u2019s significance across a variety of musical and nonmusical contexts.\u201d Crucially, she conducted numerous interviews and incorporates sources now accessible online, such as interviews and profiles published across various media, including the now-defunct Descarga Journal<\/em>, digital programs like El show de Rub\u00e9n Blades<\/em>, and videos produced by Salser\u00edsimo Per\u00fa. This book is the most comprehensive updating of the institutional, governmental, media, commercial, and legal materials that shaped the context in which the Fania All Stars enterprise emerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through those interviews, archival contents, close readings of song lyrics, and media artifacts\u2014offering musically insightful commentary on arrangements and performances\u2014she argues that salsa\u2019s Nuyorican aesthetics disrupted \u201cnormative mobilizations of Americanness and<\/em> Puerto Ricanness,\u201d forged alternative public spaces for working-class Puerto Ricans, and became entangled in commercial, legal, racial, gendered, and political currents. Negr\u00f3n maintains that Fania mobilized a \u201cNuyorican imaginary\u201d to captivate a global audience, asserting salsa\u2019s pivotal place in articulating Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book unfolds in two parts. Part I, \u201cAnatomy of a Salsa Boom (1964\u20131979),\u201d begins with \u201cOur Latin Thing<\/em>: Salsa\u2019s Nuyorican Histories,\u201d locating salsa\u2019s emergence in New York\u2019s Puerto Rican neighborhoods and Fania Records\u2019s role in shaping a Nuyorican imaginary through a reading of the legendary musical documentary Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa)<\/em> (1972). \u201cLos Malotes de la Salsa: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood,\u201d examines how male musicians Willie Col\u00f3n and H\u00e9ctor Lavoe \u201cdrew on popular representations of virile masculinity on the periphery of the US economy to perform subjecthood,\u201d and \u201cSalsa\u2019s Dirty Secret: Liberated Women, Hairy Hippies, and the End of the World\u201d explores how \u201cwomen become the boundary that separates abjection and subjecthood,\u201d among other topics. Part II, \u201cAfter the Boom Is Gone (1980\u20132000s),\u201d turns outward: \u201cPuerto Rico\u2019s (Un)Freedom: The Soundscape of Nation Branding\u201d analyzes salsa\u2019s use by the colonial government in Puerto Rico\u2019s 1992 Seville Expo campaign; \u201cEntre la Letra y la Nota: Becoming \u2018El Cantante de los Cantantes\u2019\u201d traces the history and relationship of the song \u201cEl Cantante,\u201d from Lavoe to Blades; and \u201c(Copy)Rights and Wrongs: \u2018El Cantante\u2019 and the Legislation of Creative Labor\u201d examines legal disputes over authorship, labor, and cultural capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These paragraphs lay bare Negr\u00f3n\u2019s hermeneutic and political drive: to reveal the forces shaping salsa while grounding it in the struggles and desires of the Puerto Rican diaspora:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Made in NuYoRico<\/em> shows not only how salsa reclaimed the public sphere in New York from which Puerto Ricans were repeatedly expelled literally (through urban renewal) and symbolically but how the music\u2019s Nuyorican imaginary became the site for the performance of musical, cultural, political, legal, and economic authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Made in NuYoRico<\/em> illuminates how Nuyorican subjectivities embedded within salsa impacted the music\u2019s trajectory in both New York and Puerto Rico, sounding a colonial contestation that produced alternative meanings of Puerto Ricanness in each space.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For anyone who believes (because for the majority it is a matter of believing) that a musical genre\u2014or even a discursive or literary one\u2014is some kind of realist device designed to enable the tracing, identification, subscription, or reinscription (moral fall) of a class, gender, racial, or identitarian subjectivity, this book is required reading (although nowhere does it explore the paradoxical and uncertain condition of all subjectivity<\/em>\u2014a subject is subjected, is the product of an interpellation, and enacts an identification).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But who are these readers? Do these studies reach beyond the perimeter and professional lexicon of scholars and academics ensconced in the discursive silos of their area studies and curated \u201carchives\u201d? This book reflects more on the institutional \u201cframeworks\u201d and practices that Puerto Rican migration in New York endured or sparked\u2014even examining the very institutions that claim to read or regulate Puerto Rican culture in the US and Puerto Rico\u2014than on the poetry, discourse, and musicality that converged in salsa and moved through that imaginal space. Today, as the US government openly attacks immigrants, minorities, and especially universities, we can no longer ignore the decades-long entanglement and institutional acquiescence of area studies, identity-centered disciplines, and cultural studies in confronting\u2014or failing to confront\u2014this ongoing devastation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book exemplifies the conflation of politics with identity, and identity analysis with the moralizing stance adopted by \u201cleftist, radical, liberal or woke\u201d intellectuals and politicians, marked by self-absorbed totalizations. This conflation is a gesture defeated and hounded by today\u2019s relentless corporatization of experience\u2014which it has also embraced and perpetuated\u2014and exhausted by the policing and management of a glossary of wounds and damages that many disciplines exploit for institutional power, publicity, and visibility. What is at stake is not merely the recognition or \u201cmaking visible\u201d of these racializations, abuses, gendered violence, and above all the extraction of value from everything, but the possibility to disarticulate and desist from the naturalized modes of intervention these regimes of meaning impose\u2014and to open ourselves toward other practices and ways of existence, beyond the surveillance of inter- and multidisciplinary confines. This is another way of doing politics, not merely the acquisition of institutional power. The enemies of democracy have already seen the stitches holding this together and attack through them with their own templates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n
\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Public Thinker: Frances Negr\u00f3n-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Wendy V. Mu\u00f1iz <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

In the spirit of listening closely to the radical difference of anyone at all, rather than performing a ready-made identification, it is important to interrogate the moral soundscape of this critical discourse. At times, it is astonishing: so much effort to \u201cdiscover\u201d that a sonero<\/em>, sonera<\/em>, or musician raised in a machista<\/em>, homophobic, and racist culture and family inevitably ends up inhabiting such a subjectivity or subscribing to its poetics. Really? Made in NuYorico<\/em> unfolds in a woven lingo of critique\u2014\u201cmapping,\u201d \u201cperformance abjection and a hypermasculinity amid homosociality,\u201d \u201creify[ing] the coloniality of power,\u201d \u201cdecolonial praxis,\u201d \u201cnormative belonging,\u201d \u201cheteropatriarchal recuperations of the dance floor,\u201d etc.\u2014a litany of charged phrases that echo more like a liturgy of certainties than an invitation to think otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This discourse neither can nor wants to see itself reflected in its own concepts (reify, overdetermination, commodity, synecdoche, archive[Derrida]), which too often function as mere adjectives or labels rather than as open\u2011ended zones of reflection fraught with uncertainty and paradox. Even the scant, unexamined appearance of notions drawn from psychoanalysis could be understood as the affirmative work of every negation, as Freud reminds us: to deny that something is being done (that this is not a history of salsa, not an origin story for lo salsero<\/em>) is precisely a way of unconsciously affirming it. The \u201carchive\u201d here is a wall of authorities and notions that never face questions, nor receive challenges or critical interrogation from Negr\u00f3n.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her reading of the operatic song \u201cBandolera\u201d in H\u00e9ctor Lavoe\u2019s voice is both compelling and bold, as she dares to confront what many critics have avoided: the raw gender violence embedded in much salsa music. However, her reading of \u201cQu\u00e9 l\u00edo\u201d rests on a misunderstanding and overwrites what is clearly the sonero<\/em>\u2019s inhabiting of Puntilla\u2019s voice to narrate the trouble his friend (pana<\/em>) encountered in his relationship with Mariana. Negr\u00f3n believes it is \u201cpresumably\u201d an act of mockery and distancing from Puntilla\u2019s feminine becoming. Her comments on Col\u00f3n and Lavoe\u2019s album Asalto Navide\u00f1o<\/em> (1970, 1973) highlight the temporal and rhythmic multiplicity that made this album essential in Puerto Rican homes regardless of their location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that in this book, every process of meaning-making is always determined by the subject\u2019s location<\/em> and\/or its moral or heteronormative proclivities. There is also no consideration of the image as a form of work with language, or as shaped by its materiality or medium beyond naturalistic or social representation, or as a practice of shaping and exploring language, or as something shaped by its materiality and medium\u2014beyond veristic or simple social representation. What materials constitute an image, and how does it come to touch us? Are all images simply spaces containing information that invariably denote or describe? Here, the image always functions as a plausible, sociologizing description, and its historicity is only perceptible or visible when filtered through anthropological, legal, realist, and informational interpretive protocols. The \u201cNuyorican meanings\u201d consistently appear as institutional responses or counter-responses (press, state, law), and thus this study perpetuates the tradition of denying the written, poetic, and historical dimensions of the composers largely ignored by dominant salsa scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is identity\u2014any identity\u2014the quintessential theme of salsa? What themes or recurring images define salsa\u2019s generic and discursive practices?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The book acknowledges the Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican musical richness that shapes salsa and notes how \u201cthe persistence of desire in the cultural politics of pleasure is particularly salient for poor and working-class communities.\u201d But it does not address how these connect to the paradoxical poetics of jouissance, goce<\/em>\u2014the immediacy and intimacy at the heart of Caribbean musicality, sustaining its sabor<\/em> and lo sabroso<\/em>. The genre\u2019s undisputed poet\u2014without whose songbook salsa\u2019s edifice would collapse\u2014Catalino \u201cTite\u201d Curet Alonso, is reduced here to a mere \u201ccelebrated songwriter.\u201d Although Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have examined authorship and meaning, Negr\u00f3n instead turns to Kant and Hegel to analyze the copyright disputes and claims of authorship among Rub\u00e9n Blades, H\u00e9ctor Lavoe, and Fania over Lavoe\u2019s signature song, \u201cEl Cantante.\u201d Blades\u2019s own \u201clegal strategy\u201d is even complicit in relegating \u201cLaVoe to the status of legal nonsubject.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book exemplifies the institutional dynamics of the so-called \u201cturns\u201d and area studies in university discourse\u2014transcultural, affective, decolonial, identity, racial, ontological, hybridity, archipelagic, Latinx, and cultural studies, among others. They currently serve as academic merchandise, merch<\/em>: seasonal labels that promise novelty yet instrumentalize what is thinkable within coordinates set by the corporate university\u2014peer reviews, conferences, publishers, and tenure-track processes. This discursive formation imprints their \u201cproducts\u201d with striking predictability and foreseeable \u201cfindings.\u201d Their circulation responds less to existential stakes or openness to the unthought than to the mantras of visibility, belonging, and market-driven consumption within academic knowledge and networks. Each \u201cturn\u201d or area study becomes a brand, slogan, and symbolic capital that \u201cupdates\u201d discourses without disrupting its own certainties, seeking validation from authorities who standardize the field by making it visible<\/em>. What is proclaimed as a challenge to the \u201cnormative\u201d often proves a calibrated reiteration designed to be cited, funded, and applied. It oils the gears of the institutional machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This neither denies the depth of specific research nor assumes these fields are monolithic. Yet it is unsurprising that such studies end up addressing the very power they claim to interrogate\u2014already shaped and interpellated by that power\u2014and tailor their lexicon to institutional legitimacy protocols. Under many disciplinary emphases, the doxa of these turns dissolves the dissonant force of what they read, subordinating it to categories ensuring academic intelligibility and circulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, everything hinges on framing\u2014a hegemonic act that stuffs and disciplines emptiness, complexity, death, nada<\/em>. Any object or subject thus framed becomes part of a ventriloquism act: Experiences, historicity, and subjectivities are narrated\u2014or replaced outright\u2014by the prerequisites of disciplinarity, then staged before archives and institutional gatekeepers of \u201crelevance\u201d and \u201cvisibility.\u201d Interdisciplinarity, even when posed as openness or renewal of academic knowledge, acts as a framing device: it orders knowledge within preestablished coordinates that translate the unspoken, the unsettling, into the sayable, the palatable, according to languages legitimized by the disciplines endorsing it. Its critical capacity is limited because it presupposes prior agreements about what counts as problem, method, or evidence, closing off what still lacks name or obstructs function. These approaches conform to\u2014or openly seek to control\u2014institutions dedicated to shaping feelings, desires, and moral sensibilities through discursive, social, cultural, and political practices. They \u201cillustrate\u201d (train) to align with prevailing institutional norms, ideologies, and power structures, while also navigating (or \u201cnegotiating\u201d) the potential to disrupt those alignments. Ultimately, all these efforts end up as rubrics, templates, syllabi, CVs, and PowerPoint presentations: pedagogical pulp, the stuff of syllabi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

\u201cMe voy, me voy, me fui: I am outta here\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negr\u00f3n\u2019s refusal\u2014or rather reluctance\u2014to engage with the poetic fantasy of Lavoe in \u201cPara\u00edso de dulzura\u201d reveals a mode of reading that openly turns its back on the text itself, a tendency long present in hegemonic critical salsa scholarship:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Plena\u2019s use of improvisation, its narratives of everyday life, and its identification with LaVoe\u2019s hometown of Ponce likely encourage him to credit the music with \u201cla sabrosura rica y sandunguera\u201d of Puerto Rico. While LaVoe immediately answers the question about where he is coming from, what remains unasked and unanswered is \u201c\u00bfAd\u00f3nde estoy?\u201d\u2014\u201cWhere am I?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That unasked, unanswered question belongs to Negr\u00f3n, not Lavoe\u2014a question about a song that doesn\u2019t exist, or one she wishes she had heard. \u201cPara\u00edso de dulzura\u201d is not about identity (not centered on fixed modes of being [ser<\/em>], the \u201cidem\u201d), but about journeying, being in motion, immersed in the flow or shifting imaginal terrain of sabor<\/em>, here flowing from a halcyon Puerto Rico. It is the song of a poetic subject or sonero<\/em> in transit, in constant offering:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u00bfQu\u00e9 de ad\u00f3nde vengo? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00bfQu\u00e9 pa d\u00f3nde voy? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00bfQu\u00e9 de ad\u00f3nde vengo? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00bfQu\u00e9 pa d\u00f3nde voy? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vengo de la tierra de la dulzura. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00bfQu\u00e9 pa d\u00f3nde voy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voy a repartir ricura. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

La sabrosura rica y sandunguera que Puerto Rico puede dar, Lolelolai, Lolelolai, lolelola. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do I come from? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where am I going? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do I come from? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where am I going?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I come from the land of sweetness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where am I going? I\u2019m going to spread richness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rich and lively sabrosura that Puerto Rico can give, Lolelolai, Lolelolai, lolelola.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014H\u00e9ctor Lavoe, \u201cPara\u00edso de la dulzura\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\n\n
\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Until We Meet on the Dance Floor Again: A Playlist<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n Jafari S. Allen <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

For Negr\u00f3n, the \u201chere\u201d of a salsera<\/em>, poetic, or even visual utterance is always something that can be pinpointed on a map, and this location is pure self-determination: the site of any alternative or non-normative way of being Puerto Rican. Is identity\u2014any identity\u2014the quintessential theme of salsa? What themes or recurring images define salsa\u2019s generic and discursive practices? Could someone please verify the list of the best-selling or most listened-to salsa songs during Fania\u2019s heyday? The true theme of salsa is salsa itself: sabor <\/em>as condition, lo sabroso<\/em> as experience (ex-periri<\/em>), an inescapable work with the negative, a journey through danger and the ignition of misfortune\u2014a calamity endured by a subject and a community that is, and will always be, a multiplicity. When will we finally listen to a song for what it is, rather than for what it should have been?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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