Listening to Salsa

Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures

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by Francis R. Aparicio

Wesleyan University Press

Due/Published June 1997, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0819563080

What are the implications of Puerto Rico's salsa music as an expression of Lation/a culture? Aparicio places this music in context by combining perspectives of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women's studies. She offers a detailed genealogy of Afro-Carribbean music in Puerto Rico, comparing it to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the U.S. have used salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos have eroticized and depoliticized it in their adaptiations. Aparicio's detailed examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict. Her interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it. Add this to the new books that do the same sort of thing for Tango and Merangue. . . . Then, get out and dance!!