Ebook: Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures

The pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music’s implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio combines the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women’s studies to offer a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico. She compares the music to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the United States use salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos eroticize and depoliticize it in their adaptations. The close examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict, and Aparicio’s interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it.

“Destined to be a landmark in the study of Latin music, gender studies, and of modern popular culture in general.” (Peter Manuel, City University of New York)

“A sophisticated and insightful analysis of the complex relationships between Latin(o) popular musics and constructions of gender, race, class, and national identities among Puerto Ricans. Aparicio takes into account not only traditional Puerto Rican musics such as danza, plena and bomba, but also pan-Caribbean genres such as bolero, and contemporary transnational dance musics such as salsa and rap en español as well. Her post-modern approach to salsa is particularly provocative, eschewing nationalistic attempts at ownership by establishing salsa?s multiple positions and meanings within various Latino and Latin American communities. Moreover, she powerfully challenges Latin(o) music’s problematic representations of women and the marginalization of women musicians, contrasting patriarchal and misogynistic song lyrics with those written and sung by women musicians.” (Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Brown University)

Frances R. Aparicio is Associate Professor of Spanish and American Culture at the University of Michigan, author of 'Versiones, interpretaciones, creaciones' (1991), coeditor of 'Tropicalizations' (1997), and editor of 'Latino Voices' (1994).