Marisol Negrón's new book Made in NuYoRico tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalised on salsa’s Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience.
Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, films and archival documents, Negrón shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in and impacted salsa music's flows during its foundational period in the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s.
Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialisation and colonial power. By outlining salsa’s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal and political entanglements, Negrón demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.
Marisol Negrón is Associate Professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Duke University Press, 344pp, 15cm x 23cm, illustrated paperback, 2024
