The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
of salsa music, a widespread Spanish Caribbean dance style developed in the 1960s by Puerto Ricans in New York City, based upon the Afro-Cuban and (to a lesser extent) Puerto Rican roots known in Colombia as música antillana (an-tee-YA-nah). Since the late 1960s, salsa’s centrality in local culture has been particularly visible in the week-long bout of collective merrymaking known as the Feria de la Caña de Azucar, or Sugarcane Carnival, held between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Highlighted by live performances by international and local salsa bands, salsa dances, bullfights, neighborhood festivities, and huge gatherings by local salsa record collectors, the Feria is Cali’s largest event of the year. Unlike salsa’s adoption in other Latin American cities, however, such as Panama City, Caracas, or Guayaquil, the embrace of salsa in Cali has been so strong that by the late 1970s, Caleños (inhabitants of Cali) began asserting that their city was the “world capital of salsa.” This is a bold claim, given salsa’s primary performance and production nexus in New York City and Puerto Rico. I am less interested in proving or disqualifying Cali as the world salsa capital, however, than in exploring how this claim arose in the first place.
Among various factors that he cites as reasons for salsa’s adoption in Cali, Alejandro Ulloa points to Cali’s rapid urbanization, accompanied by heavy migration into the city from other regions (1992: 195).1 While he observes that urbanization and internal migration created a heterogeneous population in Cali’s working classes, he does not draw out the implications of this diversity. On the one hand, it served to create a climate wherein social and cultural difference was positively received. On the other, it also established a new cultural reality in which no single group predominated over any other—hence, no single regional musical tradition was capable of representing this complex new urban environment. Salsa and música antillana, hence, were adopted as representative styles of the increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan context of the city.2 Notably, the image of fun and tropical revelry tied to these styles stands in stark contrast to the abrupt upheavals that characterized Cali’s rapid urbanization after the 1950s and the specter of violence and civil war that engulfed the nation during this period.
Cali’s self-image as the world capital of salsa challenges core-and-periphery models of cultural diffusion. Most salsa fans, including those in Cali, have never ceased to recognize salsa’s roots in Cuba, nor the role of New York and Puerto Rico in continuing to lead the world salsa scene. The move by Caleños to claim center stage on the world salsa scene is, on the surface, a clear instance of the periphery demanding to become the core. On a deeper level, however, the “world salsa capital” claim points less to Cali’s centrality in world salsa than to the central position of salsa in local popular life. Salsa became a resource for forging a sense of location and identity on the world map during a period when Cali was virtually invisible in national political and cultural arenas. The practices shaping salsa’s localization and resignification in Cali hence enabled Caleños to bypass national channels of cultural identity (without eschewing them entirely) and allowed Caleños to voice their own participation in transnational cultural and economic flows beyond regional and national confines. A central concern of this study is the way in which salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican predecessors served as a vehicle for Caleños to formulate an alternative cosmopolitan identity as they became increasingly tied to world markets, while being excluded from national and elite spheres of cosmopolitan culture.
The contradiction that lies in Cali’s claim to be the world salsa capital while still recognizing Cuba, New York, and Puerto Rico as the artistic wellspring for this music leads us in two directions. In the first instance, it points us to the transnational network of transport and communications through which salsa was circulated throughout the Caribbean and into several Central and South American sites. By the time Cali’s media began proclaiming the “world salsa capital” banner in the late 1970s, salsa’s transnational diffusion was so broad that tastes and reception could not be governed directly from New York or Puerto Rico—if they ever were to begin with. Salsa now embraces a wider geographic and cultural context than its Cuban and Puerto Rican predecessors did. The localization and resignification of salsa in Cali offers important cultural perspectives for recent scholarship on globalization and our understanding of local-global cultural links at several levels: barrio, city, region, nation, transnational circuits, and larger global networks. The transnational circulation of música antillana and salsa and their localization in Cali forms one important trajectory of this book.
In the second instance, the contradiction behind Cali’s “world salsa capital” bid leads us to the issue of modernity in Latin America. While cultural contradictions have been the subject of postmodern studies since the late 1980s, Latin Americanists have recently observed that such incongruities are not signs of postmodernism but rather are characteristic of Latin America’s particular engagement with modernity. In a region that was excluded from the Industrial Revolution and largely underdeveloped before 1950, rapid urbanization and technological development during the twentieth century have produced several rifts and contradictory tendencies (García Canclini 1989; Rowe and Schelling 1991). Cali’s recent history provides a clear illustration of the disjunctures accompanying Latin American modernity. During the twentieth century, Caleños were abruptly inserted into an escalating series of world economic markets (coffee, sugar, and cocaine, respectively), which contributed directly to waves of urban expansion and created spaces for new, hitherto unimagined cultural links to occur. Cali’s self-image as the world salsa capital flows directly from this complex process, which forms the second trajectory of my study.
As its title suggests, this book is concerned with the nexus of music and memory as a particular affective site for understanding Latin American modernity. Particularly, I am interested in the bridges created between mass-media forms of music (e.g., records, radio, and film), cultural practice, and popular memory, and how these serve as affective links in the formation of subjective experience and popular identity in Cali. When I arrived in Cali to commence fieldwork in late 1994, I was immediately struck by the way so many of the popular practices surrounding salsa’s localization had to do with records of salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican antecedents. Indeed, sound recordings have acquired the status of fetishes in Caleño popular culture. Dancing, collecting, listening to, and talking about salsa records are activities common to salsa consumption around the world; what is different about Cali is that these practices have often superseded an emphasis on live music making. Cali’s case displaces the prevalent academic notion that live music is more “real” or “authentic” than its recorded versions, since in this city salsa recordings were until recently much more important than musicians themselves. Salsa records were the focal point of popular culture during the 1960s and 1970s, when a unique local style of dancing to salsa emerged. These same records provided the basis for the rise of salsotecas and tabernas (specialty bars for listening to records) in the 1980s, and later, in the 1990s, for the viejoteca (“oldie club”) revival of the early dance scene. Even when local live salsa boomed after 1980, recordings continued to exert a strong influence on performance practices.
Owing to the importance of recorded music in local popular culture, many Caleños see themselves as guardians of salsa tradition, which is documented and stored in the grooves of acetate and vinyl record discs. Indeed, at the same time as people began regaling me with claims about Cali as the world salsa capital, a smaller group—mainly salsa DJs and record collectors—also began telling me about Cali’s status as “the city of musical memory.” The phrase “city of musical memory” was coined by one of Cali’s most prominent DJs and collectors, Gary Domínguez, who has spearheaded many events that have further reinforced Cali’s embrace of salsa. As another collector and disc jockey explained to me, records have served as a “vinyl museum” for the preservation and maintenance of Caleño popular culture and identity.3
What does it mean for Caleños to identify their city as a site of musical memory? How did this semantic link emerge? What are the practices and rituals entailed in constructing popular memory as “musical”? Through the combined trajectories of sound, physical movement (e.g., dancing to old records), record collecting, and shared listening, local subjectivities and cultural experience have been virtually re-membered—in other words, recreated, put back together, and reaffirmed. But what memories? How does the Caleño affinity for music associated with alegría (happiness), frivolity, and good