In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa that traces the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized 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, film, and archival documents, Negrón shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in salsa during its foundational period of the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s and impacted the music’s flows. 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 racialization 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 Assistant Professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

List of Illustrations  ix
List of Abbreviations  xi
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Rican/Struction: The Social Life of Salsa  1
Part I: Anatomy of a Salsa Boom, 1964–1979
1. Our Latin Thing: Salsa’s NuYoRican Histories  29
2. Los malotes de la salsa: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood  70
3. Salsa’s Dirty Secret: Liberated Women, Hairy Hippies, and the End of the World  112
Part II: After the Boom is Gone, 1980–2000s
4. Puerto Rico’s (Un)Freedom: The Soundscape of Nation Branding  139
5. Entre la letra y la nota: Becoming “El Cantante de los Cantantes”  178
6. (Copy)Rights and Wrongs: “El Cantante” and the Legislation of Creative Labor  213
Notes  245
Sources  283
Index