Made in NuYoRico traces the cultural development of salsa across a fifty-year period, beginning with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964. It is thoughtful and detailed, with author Marisol Negrón using a wide range of sources – interviews with fans, renowned musicians, and music industry personnel as well as detailed analyses of songs, albums, films, legal documents, and newspaper clippings – to position salsa within ‘a complicated process whereby multiple concurrent claims circulate simultaneously in the artistic, social, economic, and legal spheres’ (p. 26). A perceived Nuyorican ‘authenticity’ emerges, which, by ‘disrupt[ing] prevailing attitudes about race, class, and diasporic belonging’ (p. 175), Negrón argues, challenges notions of ‘Americanness’ as well as ‘Puerto Ricanness’. Made in NuYoRico follows that progression, demonstrating not only how salsa ‘reclaimed the public sphere in New York from which Puerto Ricans were repeatedly expelled literally (through urban renewal)’, but also why this led to ‘the Nuyorican imaginary [becoming a] site for the performance of musical, cultural, political, legal, and economic authority’ (p. 26).
Made in NuYoRico is divided into two parts: ‘Anatomy of a Salsa Boom, 1964-1979’ followed by ‘After the Boom is Gone, 1980-2000s’. Chapter 1 introduces the film Our Latin Thing (Nuestra cosa), a musical documentary of the Fania All Stars’ 1971 concert at New York’s Cheetah Lounge, which ‘captures a rawness, creativity, and a sense of possibility that drew precisely on a Nuyorican performative excess across the stages, nightclubs, and streets of Latin New York that could not be anticipated or fully appropriated by Fania Records’ (p. 29). Directed by Leon Gast, Our Latin Thing combined taped performances from Cheetah Lounge with scenes from across the Lower East Side of New York City to firmly connect salsa to Latin New York and convert it into a ‘viable cultural signifier’ of Nuyorican ‘collectivity, performance, and colonial resistance’ (p. 8).
Chapter 2 introduces salsa through masculine ‘subjecthood’, the ‘boastfulness, aggression, and competition embraced by los malotes de la salsa (salsa’s bad boys or gangsters) in their songs [which] mirrored their performative bravado on- and off-stage’ (p. 70). These salsa ‘bad boys’ represented an excessiveness and ‘social incivility’ that further challenged ‘established musical practices and social norms’ (p. 24), their album covers, liner notes, and publicity documents presenting them as ‘gangsters’ ‘who hustled for gigs and murdered competitors with a musical ferocity that left fans dancing themselves to death’ (p. 70). Using Willie Colón and Héctor LaVoe as case studies, Negrón demonstrates how these notions of hypermasculinity actually ‘symbolically collaps[ed] boundaries between outlaw and revolutionary’ (p. 87), presenting imagery that ‘transcend[ed] the limits of the colonizing eye’ (hooks 1995, cited in Negrón, ibid.) and enabled salsa again to ‘tur[n] representations of Puerto Rican abjection on their head’ (p. 110).
Chapter 3 introduces ‘the feminine’ as ‘both necessary and threatening to the performance of subjecthood’ in salsa (p. 25). Using the song lyrics of Colón and LaVoe, Negrón traces ‘the geography of Fania’s markets’ through salsa’s representation of women (p. 117). Generally depicted as ‘objects of affection’ or ‘recipients of scorn’, women emerged in salsa as the ‘screens’ for male homosocial relations (p.114); as commodities ‘to be circulated, consumed, and discarded’ (p. 135). Women who refuted such representation (with La Lupe offered as an example) were quickly cast aside. In Negrón’s words: ‘Just as the repudiation of effeminate manhood and the accumulation of women’s bodies are necessary for the performance of virile masculinity, so too is the disposal of women who exceed the limits of patriarchal intimacy’ (p. 134).
Part 2 explores the wider impact of this Nuyorican imaginary, with Chapter 4 introducing a Puerto Rican-wide branding campaign that included a curated salsa exhibit for the 1992 Universal Expo in Seville. Although this exhibit was meant to showcase Puerto Rico’s ‘presumed cultural exceptionalism, cosmopolitan character, and economic aspirations’ (p. 25), it emphasised ‘Black, urban, and diasporic meanings [that] exceeded the commercial and political logic’ of the exhibit, in turn activating new notions of Puerto Ricanness that promoted Nuyorican aesthetics and Black diasporic practices (p. 176–7).
The final two chapters explore the impact of salsa’s evolving and expanding Nuyorican sensibilities. Chapter 5 centres on the song ‘El Cantante’ (The Singer), which shares the tribulations and hardships facing a salsa singer, using LaVoe’s own complicated life experiences as reference. Written by Rubén Blades and recorded by LaVoe in 1978, the song became the centre of a number of lawsuits, each side advancing a separate argument afforded by the ambiguity of Nuyorican imaginaries. Chapter 6 dives further into those complexities by unpacking the legal tensions that pitted LaVoe – the performer and inspiration for the song – against Blades – recognised as the song’s sole author. As Negrón has concluded, ‘El Cantante’ ‘creates a space of Rican/Struction: a space within which Blades recognises the song and the experience it narrates not only as his but as LaVoe’s’, with both Blades and LaVoe able to ‘lay claim to the experience it narrates … precisely because of the ways salsa’s Nuyorican imaginary accommodates the song’s dynamic meanings’ (p. 243).
Made in NuYoRico is an absolute tour de force of detailed, comprehensive research. It fills current gaps in popular music scholarship by introducing salsa not only as a complex musical phenomenon, but as a catalyst for critical discourse on racialisation and inclusivity, subjectivity and colonial power, and representation and displacement. By unravelling salsa’s intricate web of musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrón offers what is sure to become a key text in popular music and Caribbean and Latinx studies.
