Salsa Music as Expressive Liberation

In the span of a singe decade, the 1970s, young people in urban centers all over Latin America came to embrace salsa music as their preferred musical style and expression. Salsa s unprecedented international popularity resulted from the confluence of several distinct social conditions and historical events: the Puerto Rican dilemma of colonial status, the civil rights and black pride movements in the U.S., the Cuban revolution s promise of upliftment for the lower classes, urban migration, and the need for a Latino alternative to the hegemony of Anglo rock. In this paper I will argue that salsa s popularity needs to be understood in terms of a musical sound and a social style that responded effectively to these circumstances, captured beautifully in the film Our Latin Thing. I propose, furthermore, that the colonial dilemma of Puerto Ricans in the island and in New York motivated their creative contributions to salsa, which they experienced as a form expressive liberation and decolonization.