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Negrón, Marisol. "Hecho in Nuyorican: An Analysis of the Creation, Circulation, and Consumption of Salsa in 1970s New York," Stanford University, June 2006. Advisor: Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano & Richard Rosa
This dissertation examines the role of New York Puerto Rican communities in the production, circulation, and consumption of salsa during the 1970s “boom” through an analysis of the aesthetic form of the music and the social relations from which it emerged. Using literary analysis, ethnography, and archival research, I establish that salsa entered into a series of social relations marked largely by issues of race and ethnicity, gender, socio-economic class, and national identities. By emphasizing the impact of society and culture on market forces, I reveal that the way in which New York Puerto Ricans both participated in and challenged the commodification of salsa allowed them to employ the music to articulate, inform, and reinforce a Nuyorican subjectivity.
Salsa’s significance as a “national” music for Puerto Rico, as well as the ongoing debates within the United States and Cuba regarding the latter’s role in its development, signal the extent to which New York has become a site for both the production and contestation of Caribbean identities. To this end, this project demonstrates how salsa transformed the space of New York itself in an act of colonial resistance by employing it to articulate a Nuyorican subjectivity. This work also extends previous gender analyses of salsa to reveal how women within the corpus of the legendary vocalist Héctor LaVoe mediate (male) homosocial relations and become interchangeable with market commodities. Finally, the dissertation re-examines the existence of multiple and concurrent meanings of authorship that defy Romantic notions of the author and create a disjunct between the cultural authority of local communities and intellectual property rights.
The dialectic between New York Puerto Rican communities and the development of salsa as a cultural product reveals a complex relationship between market and culture that challenges existing paradigms of the “culture industry.” The dynamics of this process necessarily provide a broader understanding of the way in which we conceptualize the relationship between local spaces and globalized identities. In that respect, the salsa boom of the 1970s provides critical insight into the possibilities for racialized communities to negotiate their cultural, political, and economic identities.
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