ME SABE a PERÚ: a HISTORY of SALSA in the MANY LIMAS Alan
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ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: ME SABE A PERÚ: A HISTORY OF SALSA IN THE MANY LIMAS Alan Bryan Arellano, Master of Arts, 2020 Thesis Directed By: Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies, Department of History This thesis analyses the history of salsa music’s reception and mediation in Lima, Peru from the 1960s to the 1990s. Considering local political, social, and economic changes, the multivalent understandings in its reception throughout the decades, adds nuance to notions of transnational cultural flows, Latin American identity, and the shift of mass media consumption from the public to the private sphere. Even in its most globally appealing form of the 1970s, salsa’s reception by a Limeño public was still informed by the national political situation and local class-based affinities. Amidst an ongoing intense urbanization in the late 1960s, salsa became a voice and the local musical identity of the working class yet cosmopolitan port of Callao in Lima. After its political turn in the late seventies, salsa gained the middle and upper classes' attention and was increasingly present in the national mass media. Finally, in the mid-eighties, this attention reached its peak during salsa’s most depoliticized form, a romantic iteration enjoyed across classes and groups in neo-liberal Lima. ME SABE A PERÚ: A HISTORY OF SALSA IN THE MANY LIMAS by Alan Bryan Arellano Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts, History 2020 Advisory Committee: Professor Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Chair Chantel Rodriguez Fernando Rios © Copyright by Alan Bryan Arellano 2020 Table of Contents Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... ii List of Figures .............................................................................................................. iii Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Defining Salsa, its History, and Historiography ....................................................... 5 “El Barrio” ................................................................................................................ 8 Salsa and Lima, Peru............................................................................................... 11 Chapter One: Salsa Dura and El Callao ...................................................................... 19 El Callao/Lima and Modernity ............................................................................... 21 A Pan National Industry.......................................................................................... 24 Early Tropical Artists in Lima ................................................................................ 26 Mass Media in Lima ............................................................................................... 28 Fania’s Salsa Dura .................................................................................................. 32 Héctor Lavoe ........................................................................................................... 35 The Legend of Héctor Lavoe in El Callao .............................................................. 37 Callao’s Criollismo and Muted Blackness .............................................................. 38 Lo Mato ................................................................................................................... 46 Chapter Two: Salsa Consciente .................................................................................. 51 Societal Changes ..................................................................................................... 54 Fania Records.......................................................................................................... 58 Folk/Revolutionary Latin American Commercial Music ....................................... 61 Music During the Revolution.................................................................................. 64 Blades ...................................................................................................................... 68 Chapter Three: Salsa Romantica ................................................................................. 75 Politics in Neo-Liberal Lima .................................................................................. 78 Salsa Sensual/Romantica/Erotica............................................................................ 81 Frankie Ruiz, Solista ............................................................................................... 87 Peru’s Mass Media and the 80’s ............................................................................. 90 Feria del Hogar ....................................................................................................... 94 Romantic Escapism ................................................................................................. 95 Salsa as a Social Unifier ......................................................................................... 96 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 102 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 108 Selected Discography................................................................................................ 117 ii List of Figures Figure 1: Map of Callao .............................................................................................. 19 Figure 2: Album Cover, Lo Mato by Willie Colon .................................................... 46 Figure 3: Album Cover, Siembra by Ruben Blades and Willie Colón ....................... 51 Figure 4: Album Cover, Solista...Pero no Solo by Frankie Ruiz ................................ 87 iii Introduction “For the Chalaco born in the 1970s, they know the Jibarito’s voice as well as they know the sound of the waves of the ocean.” 1 As recently as 2017, an independent study by Peruvian market research firm GFK reveals the significance of Salsa music to Limeños. While the country indicated cumbia as its preferred musical style, salsa came in close second nationally. In Lima, however, salsa was a clear number one across all socioeconomic levels.2 Peru is an Andean country on the Pacific coast of the continent, with ostensibly few cultural connections to Cuba or Puerto Rico, much less the United States, where the music par excellence of Pan-Latinidad hails. Its capital, Lima, has two golden busts dedicated to Héctor Lavoe, the enigmatic salsa legend, another of Cuban legend Celia Cruz, and various murals of other foreign salsa artists. Lima began its ascent in the 1960s to become one of Salsa music’s major centers of culture.3 1 Mario Aragón, Salsa y Sabor En Cada Esquina: Mi Visión de Héctor Lavoe En El Perú, Primera edición, Selección Gallera (San Borja: Ediciones Altazor, 2015). 18. 2 GFK Perú, "Las preferencias musicales de los peruanos: Encuesta nacional urbano Rural." Pdf. Lima: GFK Perú. 2017.https://www.gfk.com/fileadmin/user_upload/country_one_pager/PE/documents/GfK_Opinio_ _n_Enero_2017-_Los_peruanos_y_la_musica_2.pdf. Cumbia: a dance style from Colombia with stylistic and rhythmic influences from the Caribbean. The music was popular throughout Latin America, particularly in live settings and working-class neighborhoods from the 1960s onward. For more see: Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Pablo Vila, Cumbia!: Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre (Duke University Press, 2013). 3 Andres Espinoza Agurto, “Una Sola Casa: Salsa Consciente and the Poetics of the Meta-Barrio” (Ph.D., United States -- Massachusetts, Boston University, 2014), https://search.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/1556761003/abstract/E5B57E1BA3AE47ACPQ/1. 413. Espinoza mentions that Peru is today considered the capital of timba, a type of salsa, “that has become the dominant popular style in Cuba during the periodo especial, the name given by Fidel Castro to the dramatic economic crisis that followed the demise of the Soviet Union…shows remarkable parallels with African-American hip-hop.” 2 in Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (Routledge, 2017). The poetics and lyrical aesthetics make it a type of Cuban neo-Salsa dura, see Salserísimo Perú, “Pirulo: ‘La timba no es más que la evolución de la salsa,’” Salserísimo Perú | Salsa es Cultura (blog), 1 In her 2001 work, Latinos, Inc., anthropologist, and American studies scholar Arlene Dávila argues that Latinos in the United States have been historically codified as an "other" by American marketing institutions.4 These corporations produced knowledge of an immigrant Latin American ethnocultural identity regardless of birthplace.5 Viewed from this lens, it is not surprising that scholarship on the musical marker of pan Latin American identity, salsa music, recognizes its commercially produced nature and its role in the construction of a collective identity. As the music of an imagined metabarrio, a symbolic space where salsa is a vehicle for latinidad (latin American identity), did this hold true in Lima, where audiences venerated and appropriated salsa as a local musical identifier?6 Was salsa music a way for the North American culture industry to reach South American