©2005 by Alexandra de la Riva

Salsa music is a mix of different rhythms. It is a contemporary, urban, complex development of diverse forms of music, especially early twentieth-century styles from Cuba. Salsa music affects everyone differently. My fascination began when I was five years old in Minneapolis, and I attended a Venezuelan party. The half turns, the twists, and the dips of salsa dancing mesmerized me. It was like magic filled with rhythms and beats that you just could not escape, and it demanded a physical response. But salsa is more than just elements derived from such beats as rumba, mambo, cha-cha, and other Latin styles and forms. These rhythms represent much more. Just what does salsa music symbolize for Latino/as living in the United States? And why is it so important? I believe that salsa is above all a symbol of resistance to the loss of national identity. When a group of youngsters gathers to listen to, sing, and dance salsa, they are celebrating and recreating the values, beliefs, and practices of their cultural heritage. First, I will explore the history of salsa music, and then examine the impact of salsa music on Latino/as living in the United States. Through an interview and a set of photographs, I will provide insights into the importance of salsa music here in the U.S.

The word salsa literally means sauce. Loosely translated, it means “spice.” Culturally, salsa often refers to a Latin essence, much as the word “soul” has been used by black Americans.1 The term may refer to the musical styles of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the entire Spanish Caribbean; it has been extended to the music of any Latin country.2

Musical styles from various Latin countries influenced salsa music; however, many of salsa’s musical forms have roots in Cuba. The three major musical influences from Cuba are the son, the clave, and the bomba. The son originated in Cuba in the 1920s as a Caribbean form that used an array of African-derived characteristics. The s on was typically performed by voices, a nine-stringed guitar called a tres, a bass instrument called the marimbula, as well as maracas and bongos. Soon afterward the trumpet was added to form the style known as septeto.3 The clave is the single beat that anchors the different rhythms played by percussion instruments, giving the music its drive and orienting dancers. As such, the clave serves as the fundamental organizing arrangement and improvisational form for salsa music. Clave has a strong first part and an answering second part. The bomba was the dance of plantation sugarcane workers and was named after a wooden drum covered with goatskin. Finally, the bomba is a blending of both non-Hispanic and Spanish elements, the latter being evident in the rhythmic instruments.4

Although many argue that salsa originated in Cuba, Puerto Rico also played an enormous role in the history of salsa music. The Puerto Rican plena is a tropical sound accompanied by percussion, and it has many African elements. It is composed of an alternating, call-and-response scheme between the soloist and the chorus. Another Puerto Rican form is the danza. The danza is a particular dance style that evolved from the English and European country dance and became transculturated in the Caribbean. In addition to Puerto Rico, North America also influenced salsa music through jazz and soul.

As time progressed and immigration to the United States increased, salsa became a blend of many genres; hybrid that it is, it is embraced by dominicanas, venezolanos, Panamanians, colombianas, cubanas, and puertorriqueños as unique to their own individual countries. Not only is salsa celebrated throughout Latin America, but many second- and third generation immigrants in the United States claim it as their own, especially Puerto Ricans in New York.

Puerto Rican migrants have a special claim on salsa. Many arrived in New York City in the twentieth century, right after World War II. They left Puerto Rico to escape depressed economic conditions that left many unskilled and semi-skilled workers without jobs. Many of these migrants came from rural areas in Puerto Rico and took jobs in the U.S. as factory workers.5 Thus, Puerto Rican emigration influenced not only the urbanization of rural migrants but also their “ghettoization” into segregated inner cities.

Cuban immigrants, too, worked in factories in New York City—although their numbers decreased after the Cuban Revolution as a result of the hostile relationship that developed between Cuba and the U.S. as Cuban revolutionaries nationalized U.S.-owned companies, part of a larger project of providing all Cubans with a decent standard of living.6 Cubans, nevertheless, continued to influence music throughout the U.S., especially in Miami. Here and in the New Yorkbarrios,salsa emerged as a bridge between native and adopted homeland—a bridge that could take them away as well as toward one or the other “home.”

During the 1950s, salsa started to achieve worldwide popularity, attracting performers and audiences from all over the world, not just Latin America. New York City became the host to young performers who borrowed, innovated, and repackaged their music as salsa. Pioneers such as Willie Colon, Rubén Blades, Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto, and Eddie Palmieri led this movement. Their music made salsa the driving rhythm behind Latin pride in many parts of the world. During the 1960s and 1970s, this dominant force spread around the world. In the 1990s, a younger generation gave salsa a different style and form; salsaromantica, a smoother style of salsa, became very popular.

Bandleaders such as Eddie Santiago, Tito Nieves, and Marc Anthony were among those to formalize salsaromantica.7  In the past fifteen years or so, salsa’s popularity has increased as a result of the enduring “Latin Craze.” From Ricky Martin to Jennifer Lopez and even in the Hollywood studios that recently made a sequel to Dirty Dancing (titled Dirty Dancing Havana Nights ), salsa continues to thrive. Its musical hybridity includes many rhythms and styles encompassing many nationalities. But what does salsa mean for Latino/as living in the United States? Through a set of photographs and an interview with a Cuban living in the United Sates, we see that salsa symbolizes a culture transformed through immigration.

By attending a club in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I began to investigate salsa’s impact on Latino/as in the United States. The bar and cafe is called The Times and has salsa night every Thursday, featuring a live band called Salsa Del Soul. I arrived at The Times around ten o’clock, and the club was full. The atmosphere was filled with Latin dance sounds and laughter. The live band consisted of a female singer from Cuba, a male singer from the Dominican Republic, a percussionist, a trumpeter, a guitarist, and a conga player. People from all over the Americas filled the dance floor. Evidently, salsa is dancing music. This blending of nationalities suggests that salsa music integrates songs, instruments, and dances from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. My goal at this club was to capture the atmosphere through a series of photographs.8

These pictures reconstruct the environment at The Times and include shots of the singers and dancers. The photographs sparked a question: Why is salsa dancing so popular among immigrants? The pictures show that salsa dancing represents a social encounter. The music represents the urban-industrial working class. Given this, most salsa gigs are limited to the weekends, since the Latina/o community does not always have the luxury of engaging in entertainment activities during the week. Many people will say that salsa is street music. Some participants come from humble beginnings, from parents who came to the United Sates as immigrants, braving a whole new world.9 In the United Sates, Latino/as are a minority for whom discrimination is a daily occurrence. Spaces of music and dance allow Latinas/os to represent, reproduce, and live their own culture.

Salsa is also an expression of the motherland for immigrants, and the music becomes a space of transculturation. Spaces of music belong to them and can be configured and reconfigured to tell their own individual national stories.10 For immigrants, dancing symbolizes the recuperation of a national space that was lost during migration. Within the social frame of cultural displacement and migration, dancing represents a time and a space for reaffirming culture through reenactments of those elements lost to the dominant culture. The use of Spanish lyrics and the familiar sounds such as the bongos, tumbadora, and maracas take the audience back to their countries of origin and to the sounds of past social celebrations and daily life.11 Furthermore, the movements of salsa dancing imply a going out of oneself, the creation of an alternative space, a state of mind that may function as therapeutic.12 In an interview, Fernando Diaz, a Cuban salsa dancer at The Times, explained what salsa music represents for him:

It represents my country’s culture, Cuba, where salsa originated. When I hear salsa, there is a nationalist sense of pride. It also reflects my people’s dreams and sorrows. When I am dancing salsa, it is a space I can claim (as) my own. It is a place where I can forget about everything, and forget myinhibitions. Most of all it is aboutthe Passion.

Diaz describes salsa’s importance to many Latino/as in the United Sates. For many, salsa is not about the music itself, but the soul within the music, the spirit that moves Latino/as to dance and sing and go on in spite of all obstacles.14

Salsa originated among working-class Latinas and Latinos who fused music from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and other Latin American countries with African American jazz, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and European dance music. Salsa style emerged in U.S.barrios, places filled with cultural traditions where the music, the dance, the movement, and the living cultural production truly became known as salsa. Salsa named and identified the music as quintessential nuevayork Latino/a music. Salsa provided working-class Latinas and Latinos and, ultimately all Latinos/as with a voice, a dance, an identity that was inclusive of all U.S. Latina/os, as well as those living in Caribbean nations, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Venezuela. Salsa’s spicy beats and sexy moves rapidly achieved worldwide popularity. Yet for many Latino/a immigrants living in the United Sates, it is much more. For them, salsa music and dancing is above all a symbol of resistance to a loss of national identity. For many of these working Latinos and Latinas, going dancing on the weekend is not just about entertainment. It is about liberating their bodies, claiming public space for themselves, and overcoming the harsh realities of work and the social injustices of everyday life. The dancing and music together allow them to recuperate and celebrate their bodies and their Latin identity through salsa.15

1. Felix M. Padilla, “Salsa: Puerto Rican and Latino Music,” Journal of Popular Culture 24, no. 1 (Summer 1990), 87.
2. Jorge Duany, “Popular Music in Puerto Rico: Toward an Anthropology of Salsa” in Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City, ed. Vernon Boggs (New York: Excelsior Music Publishing Company, 1992), 77.
3. Padilla, “Salsa: Puerto Rican and Latino Music,” 90.
4. Duany, “Popular Music in Puerto Rico,” 77.
5. Duany, “Popular Music in Puerto Rico,” 79.
6. Ibid., 79-80
7. Jose Mastosantos, “Between the trumpet and the bongo: A Puerto Rican hybrid,” Massachusetts Review 37, no. 3 (1996), 428.
8. Alexandra de la Riva, Collection of Photographs from The Times, Minneapolis, MN, October 2004.
9. Padilla, “Salsa: Puerto Rican and Latino Music,” 97.
10. Marisol Miranda, “Con Sabor a Puerto Rico,” in Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America, ed. Frances Aparicio and Cándida Jáquez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 51.
11. Frances Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1998), 100.
12. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 103.
13. Fernando Diaz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 13 October 2004.
14. Padilla, “Salsa: Puerto Rican and Latino Music,” 97-98.
15. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 102.

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