The Soul of the Barrio: 30 Years of Salsa
Manuel, Peter
It is now 30 years since bandleader Johnny Pacheco founded Fania Records as a fledgling Latin record company, contracting the up-andcoming New York dance bands and distributing his records to...
...Much of salsa's vitality, indeed, derives precisely from its spirit of exuberant affirmation-via style and language-in the face of socioeconomic marginalization...
...In the 1980s, however, changing conditions led to a retrenchment of salsa's exuberant spirit, stylistic vitality, and commercial growth...
...Soda, juice and coffee were also available, but not alcohol or drugs...
...Fania Records, with a combination of entrepreneurial skill, aggressive marketing, and energetic talent scouting, rode the crest of the Peter Manuel, an ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of India and the Caribbean, teaches at John Jay College (CUNY...
...For one thing, New York Latinos can no longer be thought of as primarily Puerto Rican, and Dominicans naturally take umbrage at the persistent habit of salsa singers and emcees to try to turn concerts into celebrations of Puerto Rican identity...
...While the music industry and artistic creation have their own internal logic, salsa's course seems to reflect broader developments in the sociopolitical order at large...
...Most Dominicans blithely enjoyed all of the various competing musics, but for merengue musicians and cultural nationalists, a musical war was going on for the hearts and ears of the Dominican people...
...As he practiced the instrument that had given him so much pleasure in his youth, Maldonado felt a growing sense of pride and identity...
...She conducted research for this article while she was an Aaron Diamond post- doctoral fellow at the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health...
...With the advent of Reaganomics and its massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, the purchasing power of minorities declined, and salsa record sales slumped accordingly...
...For his recording of the anti-imperialist "Tibur6n" ("Shark") and his denunciation of U.S...
...Meanwhile, the music's affirmation of barrio identity reflected not only an acute awareness of adversity, but a fundamental optimism about the future, both on the local and global levels...
...He enters the room and stares at his wife and children, wondering "How long does this go on...
...Relative sociopolitical stability came only with the U.S...
...As VOL XXVIII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1994 23REPORT ON CULTURE C.L.R...
...Cultural ties were somewhat weaker with the Dominican Republic, which had been independent since the early 1800s...
...It may seem remarkable that given their ongoing involvement in other fields, the occasional recordings of these two musicians are invariably commercially successful as well as critically acclaimed...
...In the Caribbean, newly independent West Indian countries were optimistically confronting imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution was flourishing...
...Domestically, the progressive gains of the sixties and seventies have been largely unmade by a triumphant Reaganism, and scarcely dented by a nominally Democratic president...
...Salsa is quintessentially dance music, designed to be performed live at clubs, weddings, and open-air concerts where Latinos of all ages, races, and ethnicities mingle and enjoy their own artistic creativity as dancers-very often, virtuoso dancers...
...Latinos were inspired by the civil-rights and black-power movements, and by the very economic progress they had recently made, which at once empowered them and heightened their sense of ongoing discrimination...
...Too often recovering addicts find that after a lifetime of drug- oriented social relations, they have lost simple social skills like dancing and conversation...
...But by the mid-1970s, salsa had won over Caracas' middle classes as well, and Venezuela, buoyed by the rise of its own superstar, Oscar d'Le6n, had become the biggest single market for the music...
...Since the mid-1970s, the music industry has tended to direct salsa away from its barrio orientation, to make it into a more bland, depoliticized popketchup rather than salsa...
...For about 20 years, Maldonado was a heroin addict...
...Te Est6n Buscando" depicts the plight of a naif who has run afoul of barrio loan sharks...
...hostility to Cuba, he earned both progressive credentials and death threats from Miami Cubans, who banned his music from local airwaves...
...Colon is currently running for a Bronx Congressional seat on a platform of reformist community activism...
...rather, it was essentially Cuban-style dance music-a modern version of the son, which had dominated Cuban music since the 1920s...
...Maldonado grew up in the Puerto Rican part of Williamsburg in the 1960s-a decade of drugs, street gangs and social activism...
...Blades and his occasional collaborator Colon have devoted much of their time and energy to non-musical pursuits...
...Music also gave Maldonado a way to celebrate and socialize without drugs or alcohol...
...Drugs were what was happening in the sixties," he recalls, "and there was a lot of peer pres- sure...
...Nevertheless, Dominican immigration has reconfigured Latin musical culture...
...A portion of the salsa audience may have been irretrievably lost to merengue, but many Dominicans have also replenished the ranks of salsa fans...
...Aside from older Cubans like Machito and Mario Bauza, one could mention the Dominican Johnny Pacheco, the Panamanian Blades, the Argentine pianist Jorge Dalto, and, for that matter, JewishAmerican arrangers Larry Harlow and Marty Sheller...
...But if Cuban music constituted the core of salsa style, Newyoricans had resignified the music in a way that largely justified the adoption of a new name, however commercial in origin...
...Since that period, most of what has been promoted on radio and records is the slick, sentimental salsa romdntica of crooners like Mark Anthony, rather than the more aggressive, proletarian, Afro-Caribbean salsa caliente...
...For its part, since the mid-1970s the music industry has tended to direct salsa away from its barrio orientation, to make it into a more bland, depoliticized popketchup rather than salsa...
...in their occasional live performances, they cling timidly to the recorded versions of their songs, hoping to compensate for their musical limitations by extravagant smoke, lighting, and stage effects...
...24 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON CULTURE Salsa Tracks, a compilation of salsa hits on the Yuma label...
...By the late 1970s, salsa, whether in New York or Caracas, had largely abandoned its portrayals of barrio life and themes of Latino solidari- ty in favor of sentimental love lyrics...
...Songs about barrio life and urban survival intimately grounded salsa in the local and immediate, while its calls for pan-regional Latino unity made it dynamically international...
...That is how we got the idea for Musica Against Drugs...
...One of the very few positive aspects of Trujillo's regime was its fostering of a national musical culture centered around the merengue...
...Two years into recovery Maldonado discovered he had AIDS, a disease which had already reached epi- demic proportions in the recovery community...
...In "Pedro Navaja," a sort of existential snapshot of barrio life, a petty gangster and a hooker shoot each other, for reasons which are unexplained and irrelevant...
...Later he emerged as a leader of the student movement at Brooklyn's Eastern District high school...
...The case of Venezuela is representative...
...The emergence of Spanish-language rap has been an inevitable development, with young urban Latinos in New York and elsewhere mixing with their African American neighbors and creating their own hip-hop fashions...
...Rather, its style and its role in Latino culture have always been conditioned by changing demographic and socioeconomic patterns, the workings of the music industry, interaction with rival music styles, and changing political orders...
...His earliest memories involved music...
...In 1986, buoyed by his return to music at Boy's Harbor, a social agency in Harlem, Maldonado quit drugs for good...
...In another part of the building, there was a video exhibit of Williamsburg residents speaking about their lives...
...While salsa in general implicitly affirmed and embraced Latino ethnicity by the use of the Spanish language and Caribbean rhythms, many salsa songs from this period were explicit in their celebration of Latino pride and unity...
...However superficially paradoxical, the choice of Cuban dance music was in many respects quite natural and logical...
...A "greatest hits" album from 1982 on the Profono label...
...On more immediate levels, salsa was paradoxically marginalized on the airwaves by the belated interest that the major record companies were finally taking in the Latin market...
...They revived "a sense of pride and identity in Puerto Rican culture," he recalls, "especially among those born in New York City...
...By the time he was a teenager, the music had become political, and addressed Vietnam, the bar- rio and social revolution...
...The group is now creating a community dining hall for people with AIDS, replete with a nutritionist and a van to provide food to those confined at home...
...This is my Latin image, my new song To tell you, my brother, to seek and find unity...
...In the United States, the signs of progress were manifold...
...It was the Young Lords that shaped Maldonado's under- standing of the relationship between culture, self-esteem and social activism...
...In 1968 Maldonado was elected president of the Aspira club, an organization designed to encourage excellence and leadership among talented Latino youth...
...Others gorged on the plentiful array of entries, which included rice and peas, roast chicken, red beans and salad...
...There is a lot of pain and suffering in drug addiction," he says, "that society doesn't pay any atten- tion to...
...Latinos recognized that the progressive and militant sixties and seventies represented not the dawn of a new era, but an historical chapter now eclipsed by a triumphant and jingoistic resurgence of the Right...
...It is now 30 years since bandleader Johnny Pacheco founded Fania Records as a fledgling Latin record company, contracting the up-andcoming New York dance bands and distributing his records to area stores from the trunk of his car...
...Accordingly, most salsa songs have dealt with the timeless topics of sensuality, romance, and praise of the music itself...
...Musica volunteers and paid peer educators began canvassing heavy drug-trafficking areas, giv- ing users information on AIDS and referrals to detox programs and other healthcare facilities...
...In the early decades of the century, the son had emerged as a medium-tempo urban folk idiom featuring vocals backed by sextets or septets of guitar, the guitar-like tres, trumpet, bass, and light percussion...
...Confronting the deadliest consequences of urban poverty and demoralization, Musica celebrates life, builds solidarity, and gives some hope and even joy to those with HIV or already suffering from AIDS...
...Women are rare both as performers and industry personnel, and in dancing, of course, it is the man who leads...
...The lyrics are occasionally mildly machista, though they display little of the crude and blatant sexism found in reggae, calypso, and hardcore rap...
...Internationally, the Latin American Left, despite ferocious repression, thrived underground, animated by the Cuban model and, indirectly, by the Soviet and Chinese blocs which, by their very existence, suggested the possibility of alternatives to U.S...
...Merengue has become an international music in its own right, and to further complicate the geo-musical map, Dominican bands in Puerto Rico and New York are now having to compete with Puerto Rican merengue bands...
...Domestically, the economy was growing, blacks and Latinos were discovering the exhilaration of mass mobilization, and the Right was on the defensive...
...Musica Against Drugs threw this party to inaugurate the installation of the new art exhibit in their building...
...You have to offer people something to aim for...
...To make a long story short, by the late 1980s, a modernized and revitalized merengue, guided by bandleader Johnny Ventura and others, successfully marginalized its competitors...
...For their part, Cuba and Puerto Rico had been closely intertwined as the twin colonies of Spain until 1898, and since the early twentieth century Puerto Ricans had adopted much of Cuban popular music, especially the son and bolero, as their own...
...Maldonado may have been a leader in the community, but he was already addicted to heroin...
...Merengue invaded Julio Iglesias seemed salsa in its own to rule over Rub6n Blades in the very heartlands of New homeland of salsa...
...Pablo Pueblo" depicts the joyless tedium of a worker's life: A man returns in silence from his exhausting work His gait is slow, his shadow trails behind The same barrio awaits him, with the light at the corner, the trash in front, and the music emanating from the bar...
...But perhaps it is precisely their breadth of interests and talents that has lent their music its wider conceptual and aesthetic vision...
...The merengue of the Cibao valley was a lively fast-tempo dance, sometimes played by rustic accordion-based perico ripiao (ripped parrot) quartets and sometimes by large saxophone-dominated ensembles influenced by swing-era big bands...
...hegemony...
...Salsa was in this sense far removed from Cuban songs about quaint and colorful Havana, or from the innu- merable nostalgic Puerto Rican boleros and jibaro (peasant) songs romanticizing the idyllic and forever lost campesino life...
...Yankee commercial music, along with U.S...
...We needed a place people in recovery could go and not be subjected to it...
...To Cubans who knew that many of Johnny Pacheco's hits were simply note-for-note renditions of Cuban records of the 1950s, the use of the rubric "salsa" seemed like an attempt to obscure the music's Cuban origins by capitalizing on the Cold-War quarantine of the island's bands and recordings...
...Willie Colon has specialized in depictions of the darker side of barrio life, portraying its lurking malevolence with an ambivalent mixture of fascination and social-realist indictment that foreshadows gangster rap...
...This trend is especially evident in the music of Juan Luis Guerra, whose output encompasses sentimental, if tasteful love ballads, sociopolitical commentary, and searingly danceable merengue and salsa...
...Songs about barrio life and urban survival intimately grounded salsa in the local and immediate, while its calls for pan-regional Latino unity made it dynamically international...
...By 1970, with the input of entrepreneur Jerry Masucci, Fania had turned the New York Latin beat into the soundtrack for the Latino pride movement that spread from Spanish Harlem throughout the urban Caribbean Basin...
...He had lost the discipline...
...Moreover, merengue went on to invade salsa in its own heartlands of New York and Puerto Rico...
...For the first time, Latinos on a mass scale came to reject the Anglocentric assimilationism which had led so many to feel ashamed of their language and culture...
...Curiously, perhaps, the chosen musical vehicle was neither stylistically new nor distinctively Puerto Rican...
...During that time, he gave up both music and social activism...
...But those days are decades past, and we are now in the older, wiser, and more cynical 1990s...
...Maldonado and several friends decided to broaden Musica Against Drugs, using music to bring people together and educate them about AIDS...
...Throughout the nineteenth century, the evolution of a creole national culture remained hampered by poverty, political chaos, and an ongoing denial of the country's African heritage...
...In a lighter vein, Blades' "Ntimero Seis" describes the experience, familiar to all Spanish Harlem residents, of waiting for the number six subway train...
...Unfortunately, as this type of salsa grows ever more trivial, it continues to lose the interest of barrio youth-precisely the people whose creative input could revitalize it...
...Conjunto Libre's "Imagenes Latinas" is typical: Indians, Hispanics, and blacks, we've been mixed into a blend with the blood of all races, to create a new future...
...The local, predominantly white bourgeoisie tended to disparage salsa as masica de monos-monkey music-just as in Puerto Rico, affluent, Yankophilic rock fans (rockeros) deprecated salsa lovers by the similarly racist term cdcolos-coconut-heads...
...alsa may have originated in New York, but it was an international genre from the start...
...Using our culture as a tool facilitates organizing for us...
...Internationally, the Latin American Left is decimated, the Cuban Revolution is on the defensive, and throughout the hemisphere, the American flag flies unchallenged...
...Aside from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, salsa established strong roots in Venezuela and Colombia, with enclaves of fans and performers in Mexico City, Lima, and elsewhere...
...His recent books include Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India and Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey...
...Combine that with poverty and feelings of inadequacy, getting high was an escape...
...In the New World Order, to sing songs of revolution would be like spitting in the wind, and popular music throughout the hemisphere seems to have retreated into sensuality, sentimentality, and lumpen nihilism...
...Salsa songs like Ray Barretto's "Indestructible" conveyed the fundamental optimism of the era: Take your destiny in your hands, Surge ahead, my brother, with the help of new blood If your soul feels weary, Think that anything is possible Because the new blood is an indestructible force...
...In A Blades-Colon collaboration from 1977 on the Fania label...
...In an age where the borders of cultures are the sources for so much artistic creativity, the Latin rap of performers like Vico C and Gerardo is self-consciously eclectic, reveling in the mixture of Spanish and English street talk, and the fusion of reggae, hip-hop, and Latin rhythms...
...James wrote, "What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know...
...Its trajectory can serve as an index for much of what has happened in Spanish Caribbean culture over the last three decades...
...As the music become reborn as a symbol of Newyorican, and by extension, pan-Latino ethnic identity, its Cuban stylistic origins, like those of the rumba played by street drummers throughout the city, became essentially irrelevant...
...Colonization and assimilation in the United States had left many Puerto Ricans feeling alienated and lacking in self-esteem...
...By situating salsa squarely in the Hobbesian side of barrio life, such songs illustrate how the genre was indeed much more than recycled Cuban dance music...
...At the same time, however, Dominicans perceived salsa as something foreign-Cuban and Puerto Rican-in relation to the merengue...
...The model of the civil-rights movement, the new interest in "roots," and, indirectly, the still-smoldering Puerto Rican independence movement made the barrio a cauldron of militant assertiveness and artistic creativity...
...The big record companies have even invested in salsa, deciding that it has some commercial potential after all...
...occupation from 1916 to 1924, which laid the foundations for the despotic 31-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo...
...Some people may always prefer fantasy to social realism, and many Latinos who dress up to go dancing in plush salsa clubs don't want to hear songs about barrio murders-that's what they're trying to get away from...
...For another, although salsa is now more international than ever, it will not be able to rule as the chosen vehicle of Latino unity, but will have to share the stage with merengue and other musics...
...Blades spent his youth in Panama, studied law until 1974, and then turned to music...
...The songs of Rub6n Blades, for example, are particularly distinctive in the ways they confront, rather than obscure social reality...
...as he puts it, "sometimes writing a song is not enough...
...Merengue's relation to salsa is somewhat complex...
...Some viewers signed up for the free art, poetry, dance, theater, photogra- phy and music workshops...
...Bandleaders like Pacheco and Pete "El Conde" Rodriguez have perpetuated a tipico-traditionalstyle of old Cuban bands Jike the Sonora Matancera, using a conjunto with only two trumpets...
...Throughout the 1980s, hardcore salseros watched with dismay as their favorite clubs and radio programs switched to merengue, with its romantic lyrics, elementary choreography, simpler harmonies and rhythms, and the gimmicky antics of its performers...
...Steering clear of both political sloganeering and the sentimental soap opera, Blades' songs at once entertain and enlighten, validating barrio life in their attempt to make salsa, as Blades puts it, "a folklore of the city...
...The songs of Colon and Blades, rather than providing escapist sentimental fantasies, showed creative Latinos confronting their social situation and literally dancing their way through adversity...
...sociomusical moment, explicitly linking the fresh, new sound of the New York Latin bands to the buoyant spirit of the barrio...
...In New York and elsewhere, the Dominican bands undercut the salsa groups, and many young Latinos, intimidated by the choreographic pyrotechnics of veteran salsa dancers, feel more at home with the simple two-step merengue...
...A bearded poet took the microphone to recite pas- sionate verse about poverty and drug abuse...
...Despite this primary function as dance music, in salsa's most vital period-the late 1960s and early 1970s-a significant minority of its lyrics contained powerful social commentary...
...He soon distinguished himself as a gifted singer and composer, and even embarked upon a modestly successful acting career...
...Later, he learned to play the trumpet as well...
...We started a workshop called Get Your Chops Together," recalls Maldonado...
...Salseros watched with dismay as their favorite clubs switched to merengue...
...Most of them, like Jerry Rivera, are studio-bred creations of the commercial music industry...
...Further, says Maldonado, "the Latin clubs are often about BY CATHY SCHNEIDER drinking a lot of alcohol...
...From Quisqueya to La Plata, from the Pampas to Havana, we are blood, voice, and part of this American land Whether in the land of snow, or beneath a palm tree Latinos everywhere struggle for their freedom...
...A photography exhibit included pictures from East Harlem, accompanied by the transcribed observations of a woman from the barrio, Next to it were sketches by several ex-drug addicts, each showing neighborhood efforts to fight drug abuse and AIDS...
...Meanwhile, Latino pride notwithstanding, it was natural that many second- and third-generation Latinos were forgetting their Spanish, assimilating to hip-hop culture, and coming to see salsa as old-fashioned...
...Since he can remember, he played congas in the street and in the park...
...While "Juanito Alimafia" non-judgmentally depicts a swaggering thug, Colon's 1973 "Calle Luna Calle Sol" warns: Listen mister, if you value your life, stay out of trouble or you'll lose it...
...Apart from the reliance on Cuban rhythms and forms, salsa has been far from stylistically homogeneous...
...In the barrio of guapos, no one lives at peace, watch what you say or you won't be worth a kilo Walk straight ahead and don't look sideways...
...It was at Boy's Harbor that he met and studied congas with Frankie Malave, who he calls "the greatest Puerto Rican congero...
...In 1984 he returned to legal studies, earning an M.A...
...Most importantly, salsa, in connection with the heightened sense of pan-Latino identity, soon spread throughout the Spanish-speaking urban Caribbean Basin...
...He entered detox over 20 times, but each time he ended up back on heroin...
...Last year Musica Against Drugs was awarded close to a million dollars in federal, state, city and private grants...
...cians refer to as the "merengue invasion"-a phenomenon which cannot be understood without some discussion of the Dominican Republic and its own music history...
...Among these "other musics," mention must be made of a newcomer to the scene, namely Latin rap...
...Rather than promoting what they perceived as an ethnically divisive and socially unsavory salsa, the majors pressured radio stations to air common-denominator romantic baladas...
...Neighboring Colombia has since emerged as a new international hub, generating its own star acts, Grupo Niche and Joe Arroyo...
...Along with the foreign businesses came foreign record companies and their music-rock, schmaltzy baladas, and salsa-putting local merengue on the defensive...
...Eventually, these musicians began to form recovery bands...
...While Cuba was remote and isolated, salsa, in the words of a popular Spanish-language radio program, was el alma del barrio-the soul of the barrio...
...Salsa, as we have seen, is an international genre, and in the Dominican Republic, as elsewhere, it functioned as a symbol of Latino cultural resistance to gringo Coca-Colonization...
...Two children swung their hips to a rhumba, drawing the attention of several adults, who began to clap in rhythm...
...their music, although not original, still retains its freshness and vitality...
...Salsa was never confined to the hermetic world of dance clubs and record studios...
...been the emergence of a tame, commercial, salsa-lite style which has marginalized the more innovative and dynamic sub-styles...
...The Young Lords, a political organization that emerged out of Puerto Rican gangs in Chica- go, had a particularly profound impact on young Cathy Schneider is an assistant professor at the School of Inter- national Service at American University...
...the 1940s, the son was further Afro-Cubanized by the use of congas and faster tempos, and the incorporation of more horns and sophisticated, jazz-influenced harmonies and arrangements...
...from Harvard, and returned to Panama in 1993 to lead his leftish-greenish Papd Egor6 party in an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the presidency...
...Men and women, old and young, grabbed other members of a grow- ing crowd and whirled them to a sultry salsa beat...
...Salsa was born in the sixties and early seventies-a period of protest and mobilization linked to rising expectations and the generalized feeling that fundemental social change was possible...
...Salsa, like rock, was a product of the turbulent 1960s...
...The decade's spirit of questioning and mobilization took hold among minorities, including New York City's nearly two million Latinos-primarily Puerto Ricans, or "Newyoricans...
...Within the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the Dominican Republic had suffered a somewhat isolated and inhibited cultural development...
...Of course, salsa is not the first art form to have to confront the dual and often incompatible functions of being both educational and escapist entertainment...
...The size of Latino communities in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side ("Loisaida") had reached a critical mass, and they were ripe for cultural and sociopolitical self-awakening...
...To feel good about who you are," notes Maldonado, "you must know your roots...
...Another sort of challenge to salsa was posed by what musiYork and Puerto Rico...
...Perhaps the most significant development of the era was a new sense of pride in being Latino...
...Like salsa, it is an international genre, with branches from Los Angeles to Puerto Rico, and performers from all over the hemisphere...
...Most significant has NACI8A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28REPORT ON CULTURE Juan Luis Guerra's 1990 album on the Karen label...
...Musi- ca was born of the conviction, Maldonado notes, "that we could build self-esteem through culture and identity...
...Accordingly, roots reggae's messianic fervor has given way to dance-hall's glib crudity, the nueva canci6n movement has fizzled, nihilistic gangster rap rules the ghettos, and mainstream salsa has withdrawn into a commercially safe formula of soap-opera lyrics and diluted rhythms...
...The party was "clean and sober...
...In its role as dance music, it should be noted, salsa has tended to reinforce, rather than critique, the gender relations of the barrio...
...While Puerto Ricans constituted the core, even in New York both performers and audiences were of diverse backgrounds...
...He takes his broken dreams, and patching them with hope, making a pillow out of his hunger, he lies down, with an inner misery...
...Addicts were quitting drugs only to find they now had to face even deadlier prospects...
...Salsa's first decade, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, was in many ways the most vital era of the genre...
...The Young Lords had gained some prominence and influence, the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, the economy was expanding, colleges were adopting multicultural curricula, and progressive domestic policies were enacted by a series of White House liberals (including, by today's standards, Richard Nixon...
...It remains to be seen whether a resurgent pan-Latin American culture can again presume to challenge Pax Americana in song and action...
...At the same time, the genre seems to be in a sort of holding pattern...
...His "Juan Pachanga" portrays a narcissistic dandy whose indulgences in wine, women and song fail to mask his inner loneliness and alienation...
...As of the mid-1990s, the salsa-merengue war appears to have cooled off, and salseros seem to feel that the situation has stabilized...
...Several exhausted dancers entered the building-headquarters of a group called Musica Against Drugs-to cool off, and to contemplate the exhibition of Latino art...
...Several professional musicians in recovery including Ralph Irizarry, the timbale player for Ruben Blades, Ray Cruz and Tomas Santiago of Cruz Control, and Maldonado began to get together and play during "12-step" anniversaries...
...The most characteristic of Blades' songs are vignettes portraying the vicissitudes of barrio life via epigrammatic character studies, typically at once humorous, critical and empathetic...
...Representing the salsa vanguard have been, among others, arranger-pianist Eddie Palmieri, former teen prodigy Willie Colon (contracted by Fania at the age of 15), and Rub6n Blades, perhaps the most talented of the lot...
...As multinationals like Gulf & Western bought vast tracts of land, hundreds of thousands of uprooted peasants flooded into shantytowns, especially in Santo Domingo, whose population doubled between 1961 and 1970...
...As reggae, rap, and salsa radio programs crisscross the Caribbean, and satellite dishes bring MTV to the entire region, Latin rap has emerged as one more dynamic hybrid in the margins and interstices of the music world...
...This exuberance connected the music with a sense of international Latino consciousness...
...Meanwhile, Dominican music as a whole has acquired greater sophistication and professionalism...
...To some, labelling this music "salsa" seemed artificial, especially in the case of "salsa stars" like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, whose musical styles had evolved 25 years before the term was coined...
...Struggling to retain their audiences, most salsa performers remain stuck in the unremunerative, expoitative club scene, with little hope of breaking into the crossover "world beat" markets...
...Desperate, he attempted suicide...
...Following the CIA-sponsored assassination of Trujillo in 1961, the country's leader for 25 of the next 33 years, the U.S.-sponsored Joaquin Balaguer, opened the country to foreign-primarily U.S.-investment...
...Most mainstream bands have cultivated a more modernized sound, adding more horns and more jazz influence...
...To a large extent, merengue has been personally carried abroad by the flood of Dominicans pouring out of the country, especially to New York City, where they now number about half a million...
...The group's modest success offers a hopeful model for creative community organizing...
...Musica Against Drug's emphasis on Puerto Rican identity and culture, as expressed though music and art, works because it builds on the legacy of previous struggles in the Puerto Rican community...
...A midst the past decade's proliferating hybridity, salsa still enjoys its stable niches on the radio and in the club network...
...He remembers his parents listening to boleros and ple- nas, while the kids in the street blasted music from WADO, the only Spanish-language radio station at the time...
...The change is also reflected in the fact that most of today's bandleaders are not trained musicians and seasoned club performers like Willie Colon, but cuddly, exclusively white singers distinguished by their pretty-boy looks and supposed sex appeal...
...This music had flourished for decades not only in Puerto Rico, but in New York City itself-the crucible of some of the most vital developments in Latin music, including the big-band mambo of the fifties...
...During this period Mal- donado joined a street gang called the Keep Bays- a gang politicized by the radical social activism of the time...
...It was the brassy, sophisticated, mature son of the 1950s that became the stylistic backbone of what came to be called "salsa...
...Under the dictator's patronage and control, Musica Against Drugs: The music echoed down Broadway as the salsa I musicians drummed their congas, blew their horns, and sang on one of the busiest streets in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn...
...business, was largely kept out of the country, and with Dominicans discouraged from emigrating or even traveling locally, Dominican musical culture flourished in its own isolated way...
...U VoL XXVIII, No 2 SEF'rIOcr 1994 27 Musica Against Drugs founder Manny Ma/donado at a "testimonio exhibition" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.REPORT ON CULTURE merengue became the national dance...
...Meanwhile, as happened with other Caribbean musics, the merengue world's center of gravity has shifted to New York, with its music industry infrastructure and concentrated population, leading bandleader Wilfrido Vargas to refer to the city as "a province of the Dominican Republic...
...By 1970, salsa, whether performed by local or foreign groups, had become the favored music of Caracas' popular classes, who related as much to its infectious rhythms as to its barrio-oriented lyrics...
...Salsa embodied the moment's affirmative and sanguine spirit in its unabashedly proletarian flavor and hymns to Latino solidarity...
...NA6CIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON CULTURE Fighting AIDS with Salsa Puerto Ricans in New York...
...Musica Against Drugs is the realization of the dreams of Manny Maldonado...
...The new social consciousness called for a new musical movement, which could at once embrace Puerto Rican tradition and capture the spirit of the barrio in all its alienated energy and heightened sense of self-awareness...
...Salsa-Fania's name for its product-went on to become the popular music of choice for some ten million Latinos...
Vol. 28 • September 1994 • No. 2
