Popular Music in Puerto Rico Toward an Anthropology of Salsa

University of Texas Press

Popular Music in Puerto Rico: Toward an Anthropology of "Salsa"Author(s): Jorge DuanySource: Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana, Vol. 5, No. 2(Autumn - Winter, 1984), pp. 186-216Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/780072 .Accessed: 13/09/2011 19:14

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Jorge Duany Popular Music in Puerto

Rico: Toward an

Anthropology of Salsa

Music is a system of communication whose meaning ultimately lies in the context of social interaction. It not only mirrors but also patterns interpersonal relations in society. Ac- cording to the anthropologist John Szwed (1970:220), "Song forms and performances are themselves models of social behavior that reflect strate- gies of adaptation to human and natural environments." A traditional song-like a piece of pottery, a religious ritual, or a folk legend-cannot fail to create and re-create the most important cultural values of the group that produced it. In other words, popular music synthesizes many elements of a people's ethos.

This article attempts to uncover the underlying concepts upon which popular music is ordered in Puerto Rican society.1 First it examines the historical development of musical tastes on the island, placing them in the context of major socioeconomic trends before and during the twentieth century. Then it analyzes the social function and the symbolic con- tent of the contemporary genre known as salsa. The purpose of this essay is to explore the meaning of salsa from an anthropological perspective, something that, to my knowledge, has not been attempted before.

Salsa: A Definition

What exactly is "salsa"? The term may refer variously to the musical style of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the entire Spanish Caribbean; it has even been extended to the music of any "Latin" country. In this paper, salsa will be reduced to a more specific and concrete phenomenon: popular Puerto Rican song and dance forms as they have evolved in the last two decades. Salsa can be further characterized as the typical musical manifestation of the urban proletariat both on the island and in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the United States (Cortes, Falc6n, Flores 1976). In fact, the genre's center of diffusion, in terms of commercial

Popular Music in Puerto Rico : 187

production and distribution, has not been San Juan as much as New York City. This has led some superficial observers to the exaggerated conclusion that it is an exclusively "neo-Rican" or even North American

product. In fact, salsa has profound historical and cultural roots in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

The problem of defining and interpreting the significance of salsa stems in part from the fact that the term is essentially a commercial label, a kind of musical hodgepodge for anything that has an Afro-Latin flavor. The word was first used as the title of a record in the 1960s and

gained universal currency after 1975, with the release of a popular movie and record called Salsa (Rond6n 1980:33).

Salsa, however, is neither a musical style nor a particular rhythm, but rather a hybrid genre performed mostly by Puerto Ricans in New York and on the island. It is also very popular in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru. Essentially, it is an

amalgamation of Afro-Caribbean musical traditions centered around the Cuban son. Its main characteristics are a call-and-response song structure; polyrhythmic organization with abundant use of syncopation; in- strumental variety with extensive use of brass and percussion, and strident orchestral arrangements; jazz influence; and, above all, a reliance on the sounds and themes of lower-class life in the Latin American barrios of U.S. and Caribbean cities. The following sections trace its most im-

portant antecedents.

Historical Background

My point of departure is that salsa is a mixture of mixtures, the result of a long process of syncretization. Puerto Rican music, like any other Caribbean folk music, is "a mixture of rhythmic figures, melodic movements, and harmonic formulas due to the contact between diverse cultures" (L6pez Cruz 1967:ix). Nothing survives of the music of the

original inhabitants of the Larger Antilles, the ta'nos, except for the

giiiro and the maraca, two gourd instruments used for percussion. The two main strands of Puerto Rican popular music come from Southern Spain and West Africa, but it also displays at least five other ethnic influences (which are themselves heterogeneous): Cuban, North American, Dominican, Brazilian, and, to a lesser extent, French/Haitian. The latter traditions have been incorporated into the Puerto Rican cultural main- stream through a process of reinterpretation-in Herskovits's sense- rather than of passive borrowing.

Puerto Rico shares the ethnic heterogeneity of the Caribbean area. By the seventeenth century the Amerindian population of the Larger Antilles

188 : Jorge Duany

(Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico) had been decimated by war, disease, slavery, emigration, and biological absorption (G6mez Acevedo and Ballesteros Gaibrois 1980:74-76). To compensate, African slaves were imported to substitute for the waning indigenous labor force in the mines and plantations of the Europeans. The process of trans- culturation thus took place at various levels of interaction: between

Europeans and Amerindians, between Europeans and Africans, and between Africans and Amerindians. After the trauma of the Spanish Con-

quest the contact situation in Puerto Rico fundamentally involved the encounters-and clashes-between two foreign segments: Spaniard and West African, white and black, master and slave. This duality would mark the island's social history indelibly.

Still, the encounters between Africans and Europeans cannot be in-

terpreted in terms of two bodies of belief and value, each coherent, func-

tioning, and intact (Mintz and Price 1976:9). To begin with, neither the African nor the European migrant population was culturally homo-

geneous. The majority of the white settlers in Puerto Rico during the sixteenth century came from Andalusia and Extremadura, the poorest regions of Spain, and later from the Canary Islands. These groups came to predominate in the formation of a Puerto Rican peasant culture. A similar diversity of origins characterized the Africans who were enslaved and transported to the island, including people from the achante (Ashanti) and carabali cultures, and most of all, from the yoruba and the bantu.

We have, in sum, two heterogeneous human contingents, equally up- rooted, in the process of adapting to an alien environment in the Carib- bean. Both sectors of the population-white and black-were incapable of fully reproducing their ancestral lifestyles in the colonial setting. The

great diversity of the slaves, with their tribal languages and their customs, meant that they could reconstruct their collective past only fragmen- tarily. The slave plantation forced African laborers and their descendants to create new forms of social relations and new ways of viewing the world-but the same was true of Europeans. Ecological constraints on the class of free persons made impossible the survival of many of its folk practices. For instance, poor whites borrowed extensively from ab-

original housing patterns and slave eating habits in order to adjust to a

tropical habitat (Moreno Fraginals 1977). This new institutional and material environment made mutual ac-

commodation inevitable. "The conception of a society divided into her-

metically sealed sectors can be seen for what it really was: the masters'

ideal, never achieved" (Mintz and Price 1976: 13). In practice, the two

groups did not for long remain distinct and separate cultural strata. Social relationships cut across racial lines to erode the dual caste structure. An intermediate mulatto sector emerged, which militated against


the maintenance of ethnic boundaries based on color alone. By the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of the Puerto Rican population was apparently of a "blended" physical type, that is, of Amerindian, Caucasoid, and Negroid ancestry, and so was their culture. As in many other New World societies, racial mixture went hand in hand with cultural interbreeding (M6rner 1967; Duany, in press).

The Counterpoint of Coffee and Sugar

Like many Latin American countries, Puerto Rico was internally divided into two distinct geographic and economic spheres: highland and low- land, altura and bajura. The inner highlands were colonized by a large mass of free but economically underprivileged farmers of European and mixed ancestry. Here they led an isolated and independent way of life based on subsistence agriculture and cattle raising from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This was the land of thejibaro-the rustic, seminomadic peasant-idealized by modern Puerto Ricans in many nostalgic writings and submitted to the status of debt peonage in the coffee haciendas that came to dominate the mountain economy after 1850 (Pic6 1979). Jibaros, peones, and agregados (sharecroppers) were preindustrial rural types who cultivated coffee, tobacco, and other minor crops on small plots of land in groups of families and with their hired hands. The main ethnic antecedent of this peasant population was migrants from the Canary Islands, who came on a massive scale to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the small towns of the interior and the tobacco-growing municipalities near the coast were founded by Canary Islanders and their creole descendants (Alvarez Nazario 1974).

A different type of agricultural enterprise and social organization took shape on the coastal plains: the sugar plantation. This system of production required a large labor force for the cutting and manufacturing of sugarcane, and enslaved Africans were imported to fill this demand. Slaves were concentrated around the major urban centers that were the capitals of plantation agriculture: San Juan, Ponce, Mayagiiez, Arecibo, and Guayama (Alvarez Nazario 1974:81). This location was determined by the nature of the landscape and the access to seaports from which cane could be exported. To this day, the two most "African" towns in Puerto Rico remain Loiza Aldea, a black community on the northern shore east of San Juan, and Guayama, "the city of the witches," as it is commonly known, on the southern coast near Ponce. It was in these lowlands that an Afro-Puerto Rican subculture evolved among the rural

190 : Jorge Duany

proletariat of the plantations, as opposed to the highland hacienda communities (Mintz 1974).

The Seis and the Spanish Heritage

The contrast between rugged interior and coastal plain, coffee hacienda and sugar plantation, peasantry and proletariat, was carried over to the sphere of folk music in Puerto Rico. For example, the seis is one of Puerto Rico's most popular, and most Spanish, song types. According to L6pez Cruz (1967), the seis forms the backbone of Puerto Rican music, and one of its variants, the seis chorreao, was the preferred dance among the peasants. The seis is usually sung in decimas-stanzas with ten octosyllabic lines and an alternating rhyme structure. Dicimas began to be cultivated in Spain in the sixteenth century and are still the favorite traditional poetic form in Puerto Rico. The instruments used to accompany the seis are the guitar, the cuatro (a smaller creole version of the Spanish guitar), and the guiro (the indigenous percussion instru- ment). The seis is in simple duple meter based on a single musical motive. Many of its themes can be traced back to the medieval and Renais- sance romances popular during the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico

(Campos Parsi 1976). Some seises preserve intact the melodies of Golden Age songs from Andalusia and Extremadura.

The seis and the many variations it engendered (seis de bomba, seis panuelo, seis bayamones) are distinctive of a particular geographic and socioeconomic sphere of the Puerto Rican population. Ecologically, the seis belongs to the mountainous central areas of the island where coffee and tobacco became the dominant cash crops. Sociologically, it is the musical expression of a large class of subsistence farmers and sharecroppers. Culturally, it remains closely attached to its Spanish colonial models, fundamentally of Andalusian, Extremaduran, and Canary Island origin.

Like the music of the Cuban guajiros, the music of the jibaros is basically conservative in the sense that the traditional melodies and rhythms are maintained, and innovation takes place mainly in text composition (cf. Carpentier 1946:232). This traditionalism was, of course, perpetuated by the production arrangements, the primitive technology, the physical separation, and the nature of the crops cultivated by Puerto Rican highland farmers. The creole folk culture that emerged in the mountains of the interior was molded by a large spread of landownership, a high proportion of family to hired labor, the strength of Catholic popular customs, and the absence of great social differences prior to 1800 (Pico 1979). Like the language of the jibaros, the music of the highland farmers was archaic by the standards of the urban upper class.


The Bomba and the African Tradition

The bomba dance, on the other hand, has unmistakable African roots.

According to McCoy (1968:96), this musical style came directly from the Guinea Coast of West Africa. It is closely related to Ghanan, Haitian, and French Antillean genres such as the Martinican vide. The bomba

probably originated with the migration of French planters and slaves from St. Domingue (Haiti), Louisiana, and other Caribbean territories after 1815, when a decree by the Spanish crown facilitated their entry into Cuba and Puerto Rico. As a result of this migration, the music of the Spanish Antilles broadened its cultural bases. Both the salon dances of the elite (the danza or the habanera, for example) and the folk music of the masses were marked by this influence (cf. Carpentier 1946: 101-103).

The French/Haitian origin of some bomba dances is clear in the names of six subtypes known as bamulY, calinde, cuayd, grasimd, lero, and sicd. Alvarez Nazario believes that some bomba songs have Haitian lyrics, and that the bombas danced around the Loiza Aldea area resemble French Antillean types. Otherwise, it is difficult to substantiate the specific influence of French black slaves on the bomba tradition (Alvarez Nazario

1974). Be that as it may, the bomba synthesizes several African musical cur-

rents as they converged in the plantation environment. It is characterized

by melodic repetition and complex rhythm; by an antiphonal structure and the use of the pentatonic scale; by duple meter and the predominance of percussion. The bomba uses the onomatopoeic and rhythmic values of the human voice, and the texts are usually composed of non- sensical vocables designed to follow and emphasize the rhythm. That is, words are employed primarily for their phonetic rather than their se- mantic value. The chorus sings in unison and harmony is altogether absent (McCoy 1968; Lopez Cruz 1967). It is often polyrhythmic and is

accompanied by two drums called bombas, two sticks (claves), and a maraca.

Bombas were sung and danced principally around sugar mill areas, on

Saturday evenings and other holidays such as the closing of the harvest season (the zafra). Hence they were closely tied to the life cycle of the plantation and followed the ebbs and flows of the sugar industry. The bomba did not gain the popularity of the seis or the plena, but was con- fined mostly to the colored population in the lowlands. Today it is still danced in the towns of Loiza, Fajardo, Guayama, and Salinas, where the percentage of people of African ancestry is larger than elsewhere.

This phenomenon is clearly conditioned by cultural values. Since the bomba is associated with black people on the coasts, it is considered "African" by Puerto Ricans. Rhythm, drumming, dancing are thought

192 : Jorge Duany

of as African and are often linked to witchcraft in Puerto Rican lore. Mintz (1974: 128) finds that "darker people are believed to be inher- ently more skilled mechanically." They are also supposed to carry rhythm in their blood ("llevar el ritmo en la sangre," "tener la salsa por dentro"). I would argue that the bomba was not entirely accepted by many Puerto Ricans precisely because of their perception of race and the stig- ma of African features. In a country where one's customs and beliefs largely determine one's racial identity, to dance the bomba is a sign of lowly status, a confession of degrading ancestry. It is what negros do.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Puerto Rican danza was also often rejected as the society dance of the blanquitos (upper-class "whites"). The danza, originated within the nineteenth-century creole aristocracy, has fared somewhat better than the bomba, however, precisely because it is associated with the Europeanized bourgeoisie. Some classical danzas, such as those written by Morell Campos, have been assimilated by the lower classes. But the popular definition of what constitutes acceptable music in Puerto Rican society today lies somewhere in between the two poles of the danza and the bomba. It would take a mulatto synthesis such as the plena-or, later on, salsa- to reach a wide audience among the Puerto Rican working classes.

The Plena: A Mulatto Genre

The plena, like the bomba, has many African elements. It is composed of an alternating scheme between the soloist and the chorus, in the antiphonal style characteristic of most West African songs. Both rhythmic and textual improvisation are important aspects of its performance. It often utilizes diatonic melodies and even eight-beat phrases in a synco- pated duple meter. The instruments used to accompany it may be those of any typical dance orchestra, but they must at least include two pande- retas or tambourines.

The plena also displays clearly non-African elements. The lyrics are usually composed in Spanish rhetorical forms such as the cuarteta or the sextilla. Like the Spanish romance, the plena chronicles memorable or un- usual events taken from the contemporary scene (Chase 1959). A kind of musical newspaper, the plena deals with the topics that most impress the coastal populations, ranging from the everyday incident to the international happening. The theme of one popular song-"Cortaron a Elena"-is apparently a crime of passion: a woman is cut and taken to the hospital. Another plena comments on the famous Dempsey-Tunney boxing match, and yet a third focuses on a German submarine that raided Caribbean waters during World War I. History and legend mingle


in plena lyrics, whose essential character can be described as simple, direct, and epigrammatic, and their general tone as playful and ironic

(Cadilla de Martinez 1938). Where did the plena come from? Many Puerto Ricans-especially

from Ponce-will quote Cesar Concepci6n's famous plena line: "En Ponce nacio la plena" ("The plena was born in Ponce"). Ponce, of course, the island's second-largest city, has been the capital of the sugar and rum industry since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although proud of its Spanish traditions, it received a large proportion of the African slaves brought to Puerto Rico after 1815, who eventually set- tled down in the peripheral slums of the city. Whatever the ultimate origin of the plena-and there are many ingenious folk tales about its supposed- ly foreign roots in other Caribbean islands like Haiti or St. Thomas-it first became popular among the sugar proletariat on the south coast, and from there spread to the north. As a popular dance form it emerged from Ponce in the 1920s and was later made famous by the Puerto Rican singer Manuel Canario in New York (L6pez Cruz 1967:67-68).

Musical Trends to the Twentieth Century

To sum up, for most of its history Puerto Rico was not a homogeneous national culture and hence could not develop an overarching framework of musical values. Instead, a series of regional and class subsystems evolved and coexisted until at least the advent of this century: the culture of the wealthy hacendados, the urban merchants, the sharecropping peasants, the rural proletarians, and so on (Steward 1956). The basic units of internal differentiation were ecological, economic, ethnic, and racial in nature.

Popular music reflected and helped reinforce these social distinctions. The seis was typical of the physically and socially marginal inner fron- tierspeople, with its allegiance to Spanish folklore and minimal African component. The bomba was an African transculturated form influenced

by the migration of French slaves to Puerto Rico's sugar plantations. The plena, finally, arose among creolized blacks, mulattoes, and whites in coastal suburbs like San Ant6n in Ponce. In other terms, these forms of singing and dancing were characteristic of different forms of agricultural production and social organization: the seis, the bomba, and the plena ultimately respond to different combinations of land, labor, and capital. They are the musical forms of preindustrial farmers and towns- people in a Puerto Rico that has ceased to exist, along with the plantation, the hacienda, and the small farm in the countryside.

194 : Jorge Duany

Changes under American Colonial Rule

Throughout most of its history, Puerto Rico was a country of highland subsistence farmers. But the American occupation of the island in 1898

began to transform the whole agrarian structure to suit the demands of

huge sugar corporations. These enterprises tended to concentrate land-

ownership into a few large estates, thus reversing an earlier trend toward the dispersion of property. In less than ten years, the new me-

tropolis converted the seigneurial hacienda economy into a modern

plantation economy. By 1930 the process was completed: Puerto Rico was a typical sugar island, characterized by the latifundio, the extreme concentration of labor and capital, the predominance of capitalist relations of production, and the structural deformations of a monocultural

export economy producing for a single foreign market and importing most of its basic goods from the metropolis (Lewis 1963:89-97).

The principal casualty was the coffee industry, which had become the island's chief enterprise in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, coffee made up two thirds of Puerto Rico's total exports; in 1930 it

represented less than one percent (Quintero Rivera 1977:28,52). Unable to eke out an existence from the soil, the peasants and the hacienda workers began to come down from the mountains, to the sugar plantations and to the towns and cities on the coast, which were fast becoming the dynamic centers of the economy. Many left for the United States, other parts of the Caribbean, or even Hawaii. During the nineteenth

century people migrated to the central highlands in search of better economic opportunities; in the twentieth century they took the road back to the coast for the same reason.

The Great Depression shook the foundations of the colonial system based on the plantation and export trade. Sugar agriculture was never

quite able to recover from the international crisis of the capitalist mar-

ket, and since then the history of Puerto Rican agriculture is one of

progressive deterioration. In 1940, the Popular Democratic party of Mufioz Marin came to power. After 1945 it initiated the famous "Oper- ation Bootstrap" in an attempt to modernize the island economy. This

program came to be known as "industrialization by invitation," because it relied on massive capital investments from the United States lured by tax exemption laws and a cheap labor force. By reorganizing the system of land tenure and the utilization of human resources, Operation Boot-

strap imposed a death sentence on the already moribund plantation economy. It accentuated the migration to the urban areas and exported the unemployed surplus labor to the mainland. By the mid-1950s Puerto Rico was more urban than rural for the first time in its entire history; its economy depended more on manufacturing than on agriculture, and


the factory replaced the sugar central as the basic unit of the economy (Lewis 1963: 167-187). The quiet, rural, agricultural island of former days was gone.

The Trend toward Urbanization

At this point the social and numerical significance of the urban masses for Puerto Rican cultural dynamics becomes clear. Whereas Puerto Rican cities in the nineteenth century had grown slowly, their population has multiplied geometrically in the last fifty years. The capital, San Juan, has absorbed most of the internal migration, doubling its population from 1940 to 1960. In 1900 the San Juan metropolitan area represented only 4 percent of the island population; by 1970 it had soared to 31.4 percent, and it has continued to grow (Safa 1974:5-7). Mean- while, New York City has become the most populous Puerto Rican city, with more than one million Puerto Ricans living there in 1980. It is in this context of migration, urbanization, industrialization, and proletarianization of the Puerto Rican labor force that the salsa phenomenon emerges.

I have already pointed out that the rural-urban migration increased on a massive scale as a result of the decline in the demand for agricultural labor. The urban proletariat was fed mostly by former peons, sharecroppers, small farmers, artisans, and rural wage-earners, forced to flee the countryside since the turn of this century, especially after the 1930s. Those who had squatted in the countryside now occupied whatever space was available in the cities, places without any commercial value, like the public marshlands along the Cafno Martin Pefia. Thus began many fanguitos (shantytowns) and arrabales (slums) in the 1930s. La Perla, one of the best-known and most-feared slums in San Juan, immortalized in Oscar Lewis's La Vida, was built on the fringes of the old city walls near the beach front. Overcrowded, filthy, lacking even basic public services, these self-built houses sometimes managed to develop into full-fledged urban communities such as Barrio Obrero in Cantera. But more often, they became breeding grounds for tuberculosis, venereal disease, and delinquency.

On the more positive side, the urbanization process has thrown white, black, and colored persons into close interaction with each other in the context of marginal urban spaces. Shared misery and lack of opportunity have bred highly egalitarian social relations along with further cultural and racial mixing among the urban migrants. Thus the daughter of Utuado peasants has learned to dance the plena while the descendant of black slaves has come to improvise dicimas. From this intense and con-

196 : Jorge Duany

tinuing syncretization has emerged the music of salsa, neither black nor

white, African nor European, but negriblanca. Salsa should be understood as part of this displacement of poor Puerto Ricans from the coun-

tryside to the coastal cities and, beyond, to the United States. It is pro- foundly rooted in the subculture of the Puerto Rican barrios.

The Puerto Rican Barrio in New York City

Puerto Rican migration to New York began at almost the same time as U.S. troops occupied the island during the Spanish-American War or

1898, but the really massive movement to the mainland took place after World War II. This migration resulted from the depressed conditions in the rural sector, the scarcity of urban jobs, and the new opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled labor on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Since 1950 the population of mainland Puerto Ricans has nearly doubled each decade, and today about 35 percent of all Puerto Ricans live in the United States (Bonilla and Campos 1981:155).

The migrants have been predominantly rural and lower class in ori-

gin, and thus have lacked necessary occupational, language, and other skills that could help them find decent jobs and housing facilities. Many are of mixed or Negroid physical appearance and have been viewed as

strangers in American society. Today the largest numbers of Puerto Ricans in the United States, most of whom had been agricultural la-

borers on the island, are employed as factory workers. The majority have come from impoverished small towns and isolated farms, but are now crowded into the largest metropolises of the United States: New

York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities (Dominguez 1975).

The Puerto Rican emigration process has involved not only the urbanization of rural migrants, but also their "ghettoization" into segregated inner city enclaves. Puerto Rican settlements in New York are largely extensions of black neighborhoods such as Harlem, the Bronx, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They are pockets of poverty located in the old tenements of the central areas, lacking in good housing and public services. The typical Puerto Rican barrio in New York can be described as socially and physically marginal to the rest of the city, al-

though it may be close to a commercial district.

Daily life in the barrio is framed by economic deprivation and eco-

logical isolation. It preserves much of the face-to-face quality of a rural

community through reciprocity networks among friends, relatives, and

neighbors-but it is also marked by violence, crime, racism, unemploy- ment, family instability, and physical deterioration. As Rond6n (1980:


63) puts it, "The Latin barrios of New York are turbulent and miserable islands floating awkwardly amidst the progress of strangers."

This environment is not very different from the proletarian neighborhoods of Caribbean cities like San Juan, Santo Domingo, Panama City, Caracas, or even Havana. The similarities are even more striking if one remembers that there is "a permanent and restless traffic, a massive circulation of workers without fixed abodes or occupations between Puerto Rico and a growing number of regional concentrations scattered throughout the United States" (Bonilla and Campos 1981:152). The barrio is

continually being replenished by incoming Puerto Ricans from the island, so that the ties with the homeland are never totally severed. Job inse-

curity, lack of education, inequality of opportunity, reliance on informal- sector employment, and exclusion from the benefits of industrialization are as characteristic of lower-class migrants as of those who remain in Puerto Rico; the experiences of New York Puerto Ricans and of the island's urban poor differ in degree but not in kind.

The continuous exchange between New York and San Juan, intensi- fied by cheap commercial flights after World War II, has created a mi-

gratory circuit between the two cities that maintains kinship and friend-

ship ties on both shores. Many Puerto Ricans have returned to the island, temporarily or permanently, to create some neo-Rican enclaves such as Levittown in Cataiio or Santa Juanita in Bayam6n. In these

comings and goings, among bags full of forbidden tropical fruits, vege- tables, and bottles of rum, among letters and relatives and Quiquiriqui flights, among records and night club orchestras, among conga players in Isla Verde beach and New York's Central Park, little by little a

hybrid Afro-Antillean genre was forged-strongly influenced by Cuban music-the style that we now call salsa. Salsa, then, is the product of a seminomadic population, perpetually in transit between its homeland and exile.

The Son and the Influence of Cuban Music

The most direct (as well as the most controversial) influence on salsa is Cuban music of the 1950s. Some-especially Cubans-think that salsa is

just a new name for a very old rhythm. Doubtless the Cuban son constitutes the principal basis for salsa, but this does not mean that salsa is

simply an adulterated version of Afro-Cuban music-although some salsa music has been criticized by Rond6n (1980) as matancerista, from the well-known Sonora Matancera of prerevolutionary Cuba. First of all, it should be remembered that the son, which originated in the mountains of Oriente province in the nineteenth century and gained inter-

198 : Jorge Duany

national fame in the 1920s, was influenced by successive migrations of Africans, Spaniards, Haitians, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Caribbean peoples to Cuba. That is to say, the son is a typically Carib- bean musical form, which, for instance, has its equivalents in the calypso of Trinidad, the Haitian meringue, and the Puerto Rican plena (Urfe 1981). Perhaps this is why the son received such a warm welcome in the Hispanic colony of New York City, especially among Puerto Ricans: Caribbean migrants to the United States recognize themselves musically in the son.

The main pattern for salsa music remains the son montuno, built on the alternation between soloist and chorus. Its formal arrangement is a fixed choral scheme and features the improvisation of the singer within a basic motive. As in the son, salsa lyrics often employ the Spanish copla. Both use the tres or the cuatro, the two creole versions of the guitar, extensively. These are not exclusively Cuban elements, however. As noted above, the plena is also performed in call-and-response fashion, and for the seis, the cuatro is a cornerstone of the musical style.

As a result, the tradition of the Cuban son was far from alien to the musical taste of Puerto Ricans in New York. In fact, Cuba and Puerto Rico had developed musically along similar lines, due to their close cultural contact throughout the colonial period. Not surprisingly, the typical orchestras of both islands had the same instruments and played the same

song and dance types, such as the guaracha or the bolero. There are significant differences as well between the son and salsa.

Most important, salsa has a stronger metallic sound, provided by the in- troduction of the trombone, than the smoother son, which employs one or two trumpets at most. At the same time, the salsa orchestra reinforces the classical percussion of the bongo and the conga with the tim- ball or the cencerro (something that was not done by Cuban orchestras in the 1950s), often in substitution for the clave and the giiro (Diaz Ayala 1981). In comparison with the older son or the cha-cha-cha, salsa's distinctive sound is less subdued, more violent, even strident. Some of this is due to the influence of jazz, with its use of chromaticism and dis- sonant harmonies.

Salsa is, in any case, the unmistakable voice of the Puerto Rican barrio. It reflects the sorrows and dreams of the rapidly growing urban proletariat of the last four decades. It combines indigenous folk traditions such as the plena and the Afro-Caribbean bomba with foreign musical elements such as the Cuban son and American jazz to express the problems and aspirations of this underprivileged sector of society.


Salsa as a Syncretic Musical Genre

Like much of the music heard in the Caribbean, salsa results from the fusion of African and Hispanic sources. The African heritage is evi- denced in the preponderant part that the rhythmic aspect plays in all salsa. The very term "salsa"-roughly equivalent to "soul" among North American blacks-hints that percussion, and especially drum-

ming, is central to this type of music. Above all, this is music to be danced to: a song that doesn't make you move your feet doesn't have

any "salsa." The call-and-response structure of most salsa songs can also be traced to West African sources.

Most salsa songs, written and performed in Spanish, follow Spanish rhetorical forms such as the copla or the romance. Hispanic traditions are

present in certain recurring themes, part of the colonial legacy: unre-

quited love; criminal intrigue; the figure of the mora encantada (the femme

fatale, usually a mulatta); the picaresque underworld of thieves, pimps and petty gangsters; the cuadro de costumbres, or the colorful local event. As in Spanish folk poetry, the topic of romantic love predominates in

many variants: the requiebro or the galanteo, the desengaio and the despecho. Often the lyrics of a salsa song preserve the language patterns of the sixteenth century as well as folk wisdom in the form of proverbs and tales.

It is true that salsa, like the Brazilian bossa nova or the Jamaican reggae, has become an article for commercial consumption, a development that often betrays its authentic folk sources. A salsa record is a

commodity to be bought and sold like any other merchandise, subject to the capitalist system's laws of supply and demand. To this extent salsa is a victim of the cultural colonialism of the North American communications industry (Linares 1974), which has not only permitted but also fostered the development of Puerto Rican music, especially after the

closing of the Cuban market in the early 1960s. As Lauria Perricelli

(1980:303) underlines, " 'Puerto Rican culture' has become fashionable in the sphere of the circulation of commodities." It should be remembered that Puerto Rico's consumer market has expanded dramatically since the 1950s and is now one of the United States's best customers. The Hispanic market within the United States is the fastest-growing today, with Latinos the largest minority on the mainland.

But the manipulation by the communications industry is only part of the story. Salsa music, as I have tried to show, is deeply rooted in Puerto Rico's popular sectors, despite the recent disco and rock fever and the proverbial upper-class disdain for "native" music. Salsa is above all a symbol of resistence to the loss of national identity, whether through the migration experience or the cultural penetration of the island. Like comida criolla (creole cuisine) or the Spanish language, salsa is one of the

200 : Jorge Duany

ways through which the popular sectors can resort to their cultural traditions to realign their mode of life. When a group of youngsters gathers to listen to, sing, and dance salsa, it is celebrating and re-creating the

values, beliefs, and practices of its cultural heritage. When new salsa orchestras invade Puerto Rican TV and radio stations-like the legend- ary Guaracha del Macho Camacho of Luis Rafael Sanchez's novel-they are expressing and reaffirming a staunch collective will not to assimilate, not to lose themselves within the Anglo-Saxon cultural orbit. This is ex-

pressed in the often-heard phrase, "La salsa es de aqui como el coqui" ("Salsa is as Puerto Rican as the coqui," a species of toad that grows only on the island).

Salsa, Cocolos, and Rockeros

The significance of salsa in terms of cultural nationalism can be traced in the transformations of the word cocolo. Cocolo was originally a pejorative term for very dark-skinned persons, similar to negro retinto. In the 1960s and early 1970s it was used synonymously withjibaro to refer to someone with unpolished manners, definitely lower class, regardless of race (charro and cafre have a similar meaning today). Cocolo now symbolizes an entire

way of life associated with salsa music. The stereotype of the contemporary cocolo is a teenager who wears

outmoded, flowered shirts, polyester pants, tennis shoes, and an Afro

pick in the hair. Cocolos sport monstruous radios or cassette players wherever they go and listen to an all-salsa station like Zeta 93. They live in Nemesio Canales or another of the public housing projects in San

Juan. The cocolo's antithesis is the rockero: a teenager dressed in tight jeans, Playero T-shirt, sandals, the latest in American fashion, and long, tousled hair. Rockeros can be seen windsurfing at Isla Verde beach or

listening to a radio station like Alpha Rock 105 in their cars. They probably live in Garden Hills or one of the more exclusive urbanizaciones. These are of course caricatures, but physical appearance, like a language of signs, announces an individual's social identity. Such cues give information about one's relative status, knowledge of English, acquaint- ance with prestigious foreign models, family background, and even ideo-

logical orientation. In sum, the racial term "cocolo" has been converted into a fundamentally cultural and class concept.

What does this mean for the understanding of salsa music in a social context? First, salsa is not considered musica de negros, like the bomba, but rather muzsica cocola, plebeian music, lower-class music. Second, it is seen as an indigenous cultural movement. It matters little that the plena, the

bomba, and the seis are put in the same bag with the son, the guaracha and the guaguanco. What really matters is that they are all counterposed


to the "top 40" hit parades of American pop music. Salsa thus presents an element of cultural struggle in attempting to recuperate and upgrade local musical traditions. Buying a salsa record, playing rock full blast on the streets of Condado so that everyone can hear it, placing a sticker on the car that says Salsa 63 or 95x, attending one of the fiestas patronales and dancing in the main plaza, or going to a New Wave disco, become symbolic behaviors. They represent where one stands on the accultura- tion/resistance spectrum. The opposition between cocolos and rockeros, in the end, is nothing but another expression of the eternal conflict between the attachment to one's own cultural traditions and the desire to assimilate into the dominant U.S. culture.

El barrio de guapos

I propose to look now at three salsa songs written and sung by Ruben Blades. Analysis of song texts is undertaken as a means of exploring the

psychological processes of the people to whom this music is directed (Merriam 1964:201). The main questions I shall be asking of this material are: What does it communicate, and how does it communicate?

The hit single "Pedro Navaja" was released in 1978 as part of the album Siembra, which has broken salsa sales records (see the appendix for a transcription of the lyrics). It has since been sung and danced in nu- merous dance halls, house parties, and other places where groups of Puerto Ricans congregate to celebrate and socialize. It is still popular both on the island and on the mainland. In fact, it has become part of Puerto Rican folklore, like some all-time favorite boleros by Rafael Her- nandez. The only satisfying way to explain the song's continuing popularity seems to be to posit a deep connection between the writer, the lyrics of his song, and the people for whom he writes. In short, Blades's lyrics reflect the prevailing concerns of his reference group: Puerto Ricans in New York.

What is this song about? Character, situation, atmosphere, and language in "Pedro Navaja" all have a concrete sociological referent: an urban lower-class community in the United States. The protagonist, Pedro Navaja, represents a familiar figure in this environment: the guapo or maton, the bully. Rond6n (1980) notes that this is the classic malandro type of many Cuban sones. The setting is the Puerto Rican ghetto in New York City; the language is colloquial and streetwise; the tone of the narrator, conversational and ironic, reminds one of the Spanish picaresque tradition.

Although the main character is depicted as an individual, the sketch aims to be emblematic. The title itself (navaja, switchblade) is significant.

202 : Jorge Duany

Pedro Navaja incarnates the criminal villain; the unnamed woman (a prostitute) represents his innocent victim. The final irony lies in the re- versal of these roles, as the apparently defenseless streetwalker shoots her assailant. Dagger and gun, man and woman, guapo and puta are

contrasting pairs of elements that blend only in death, their common destiny. The whole song is built on this binary structure, and from there derives its metaphorical meaning. First delivered by a drunkard, the chorus tells the moral of the story: "La vida te da sorpresas" ("Life is full of surprises"). "Pedro Navaja" has all the elements of a folktale, and its didactic, fablelike intention draws it close to the genres of satire and allegory.

The song is narrated in the third person by an observer who stands by ("I saw him passing"), but, who like the rest of the barrio, does not

get involved in the action of the story; hence, the point of view is testi- monial but detached. The narrator sees with the eyes of his peers and thus becomes their accomplice in keeping the crime quiet. When the

police arrive toward the end of the story, the murder remains a mystery, because they are outsiders. The implicit author voices his criticism of this situation in the second part of the song especially, through the use of proverbs that tend to invalidate the impersonal perspective of the first part. This technique, however, places the source of criticism in the anonymous power of the collectivity.

Why did "Pedro Navaja" strike a cord in Puerto Rico as well as in the Hispanic barrios of the United States? Clearly, the lyrics are mean-

ingful and relevant to an audience composed largely of working-class people. Policemen, prostitutes, drunkards, and bullies are part of the social scenario of the urban poor, and bloody events such as the one narrated here are widely reported in the newspapers. The ending of the

song-simulating a radio broadcast about the crime-further accentuates the realism of the story. I think the key to why this song works lies in the combination of its formal resources-rhyme, rhythm, structural opposition, dramatic ending-and the folk wisdom embodied in the grandmother's words: "El que uiltimo rie se rie mejor" ("He who laughs last, laughs best"). Blades seems to suggest that the time-tested knowledge transmitted by means of oral tradition is not superseded by the new and more complex situations that arise in the metropolis. On the contrary, "Pedro Navaja" provides a linkage between Hispanic folk beliefs and the present realities of modern urban life; it reinforces a con- tinuity of thought and behavior between the people's past and their goals. The song condemns social indifference and collective anomie and, conversely, incites slum dwellers to organize and commit themselves to the welfare of their community.


You can't beg for love

In "Juan Pachanga" Blades takes on another human type and situation.

Pachanga is slang for "party," "fooling around," "disorder," so again the protagonist's name is symbolic. If the object of parody in the other

song was the guapo, here it is the mamito, or playboy. As in "Pedro

Navaja," the character is fixed by his dress and physical appearance. But whereas Pedro Navaja adopts a studious gangster pose, Juan Pa-

changa chooses the most fashionable clothes: he wears flashy colors and smells of cologne. The first is a deviant social type; the second is a dandy who belongs in Blades's category of the pldsticos-people who are more concerned about looks than about spiritual qualities.

Both of these characters are depicted in situations that reveal their true nature, hidden beneath carefully cultivated facades. Nothing seems to be certain in this world of appearances and disguise. Juan Pachanga is caught in the act without his mask: his prestigious macho image is

only outward gestures. The narrator pierces the character's mind to show the contrast between his inner life and the way others see him. In the last analysis, this is the story of a Don Juan betrayed by a woman, the conquered conquistador-again, the perpetrator becomes the victim.

As in "Pedro Navaja," we glimpse the protagonist's life in a moment of silence, solitude, and immobility. In "Juan Pachanga" it is early dawn, everyone is sleeping, there is nobody before whom the show must

go on. And yet, the barrio is there; it is always there. It is as if the in- dividuals who live in it can never escape its enveloping presence: they are present, even when they are behind their windows, looking, saying nothing or sleeping in ignorant bliss. The barrio acquires a meaning be-

yond its physical dimension; it is a collective conscience within and without its individual members.

In this context the chorus toward the end of the story line functions as the anonymous voice of the barrio: "Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala"

("Listen to me, Juan Pachanga, forget her"). And the alternating voice of the soloist, as in "Pedro Navaja," speaks directly to the protagonist, giving him advice. His last words, "El amor no se mendiga" ("You can't

beg for love"). Without a doubt, this song supports the moral teachings of Puerto Rican folk, in the best tradition of the amorous despecho and the desengaio.

Ultimately "Juan Pachanga" is a commentary on stereotypical sex roles and the eternal tug of war between men and women. The song implies that its character's superficial life is the result of romantic dis- illusionment. It gives a psychological explanation for the extreme behavior of a typical Latin American male: heavy drinking, smoking, late-

204 : Jorge Duany

night partying and dancing. The deceptive appearance of the mamito hides a deeper level of frustration and emotional pain. The pachanga-the fiesta, the rum, the rumba-is simply a defense mechanism against reality. Juan Pachanga, like many Latin men, compensates for the loss of a woman's love by pretending to be "cool," aloof, untouched.

Although the song does not question the validity of the norms that govern male-female relations in Hispanic cultures, it does seem to re- ject the antisocial pattern of conduct that results from some of these relations. Here the man has been abandoned by a woman, and it is he who must learn to forget. This is clearly a male's image of the world; like most salsa songs, it was conceived and written by a man, sung and executed largely by men. Yet the message is clear that there is something pathological in Juan Pachanga's role playing. The macho is in- vulnerable and is not supposed to feel or to become entangled with the women he seduces. In the end the text conforms to its Hispanic cultural context, since it continues to treat the female (la morena) as an alien object that is never fully understood, at once feared and desired. Here again is the vision of the woman as a source of pain and pleasure, but not as a person in her own right.

A Collection of Broken Dreams

The last song I wish to discuss is "Pablo Pueblo," which, not surprisingly, carries a generic term in its title. Pueblo means "people". The name Pablo-Paul-is quite resounding, particularly when we relate it to the other two first names in the songs. Pedro, Juan, and Pablo are all bibli- cal in origin, but it is not clear how much further one can go in associat- ing them with particular signs. Perhaps Blades's major goal was to select common, simple names from the Spanish heritage, not to suggest any strong religious connotations.

The elemental difference between "Pablo Pueblo" and the two pre- vious texts is that here the narrator identifies himself with his main character. Pablo Pueblo is a humble worker and a family man; his life is a collection of broken dreams. His story is the story of so many poor people who are unable to improve their lot within the system, no matter how hard they try. This is why the narrator does not ridicule the protagonist; on the contrary, his tone is tender and compassionate. He even calls him "Pablito," the affectionate diminutive.

The prevailing mood of the song is melancholy and reflexive. In contrast to the other songs, this one chooses twilight as the time of narra- tion. Humor is totally absent and so is the elaborate slang language of the other texts. Once more, the chorus is a key to the whole composi-


tion: "Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano" ("Pablo Pueblo, Pablo my broth- er"). This is an unequivocal statement of social solidarity with the urban poor whom Pablo represents.

Puerto Rican migrants in New York and other large U.S. cities have seen their traditional lifestyles transformed by the experience of industrialization, proletarianization, and bureaucratization (Cortes, Falc6n, Flores 1976), and it is this situation that forms the core of "Pablo Pueb- lo." The text functions on two primary levels: first, it documents the material conditions of an alienated existence; second, it stresses the contrast between the present surroundings and the customary ways of coping with daily life. Pablo Pueblo works, votes, prays, buys lottery tickets, bets on horses, plays dominoes, and drinks. But he is unable to change his or his family's situation. He remains trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty, much like many of his compatriots who came to the United States with many dreams but few skills and little money. The culture of the Puerto Rican barrio would seem to be reduced in this song to a number of ritualized gestures that express-but also provide an escape from-the depression and desperation of living marginally.

Ruben Blades's Brand of Salsa

The foregoing points to some recurring themes in Ruben Blades's lyrics. First of all, he is clearly trying to write salsa with a message. In practice, this turns out to be a song type that uses folkloristic materials and social concerns to tell the story of archetypal Latin American characters in an urban ambience. These narratives are usually critical of the way social relations are organized in the present circumstances. They are also strongly attached to popular language forms; the lyrics are no more and no less than stylizations of the everyday Caribbean Spanish spoken in the barrios. Words such as gaban, sala, giiro, and chavos are found not in standard academic dictionaries but in Puerto Rican colloquial speech. In sum, Blades's songs have much in common with Latin American oral literature, especially the satirical vein of social commentary.

They are also deeply embedded in folk music traditions. Blades was born in Panama and grew up in the lower-class neighborhoods of the capital city. His mother was a Cuban singer and his father, a Pana- manian, used to play the bong6. In New York City, he learned the vocal style of Puerto Rican singers like Tito Rodriguez and Cheo Felici- ano. He continues to be associated with the Puerto Rican community; in fact, his most successful songs, including "Plastico," "Manuela," and "Ligia Elena," have been produced by the Puerto Rican musician Wil- lie Colon. Although white in physical appearance, Blades is culturally a

206 : Jorge Duany

mulatto who synthesizes Caribbean musical currents transplanted to a North American urban-industrial context. Incorporating Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Panamanian styles, he dominates the slow tempo of the bolero, the confessional love song, the popular ballad, and the fast-moving son.

Conclusion

Salsa is an amalgamation of Caribbean folk traditions, musical styles, and rhythms. Its most characteristic trait is precisely this transcultura- tion of songs, instruments, and dances from various groups of Carib- bean migrants to the United States. The North American contribution should also be noted in the influences of jazz and soul, especially. Salsa thus represents a new phase in the evolution of Afro-Hispanic culture: that of the urban-industrial working class. The backbone of salsa music is the Puerto Rican proletariat-and its counterparts in other major Caribbean cities-which uses the Cuban son, the Dominican merengue, or the Puerto Rican plena to represent symbolically the multifaceted uni- verse of the urban ghetto.

The best salsa songs voice the problems of this disadvantaged class. Scarcity, violence, inequality, marginality, and desperation are trans- lated into the words and music of the popular singers and performers from the barrio. Street fights and love affairs marked by treason and suspicion have replaced the romantic themes of the jibarito and the coqui and the smell of freshly ground coffee from the mountain as meaningful reference points. Instead, the world of salsa is full of allusions to the factory, the supermarket, welfare programs, or urban decay.

Musically, salsa is as far removed from the cha-cha-cha as is the trombone from the violin: the carefully arranged sound of the latter has yielded to the violent orchestration of the former. The pace of life has quickened, and so has the rhythm of the music. The traditional genres of Puerto Rico have been urbanized along with the other customs of rural migrants. Some salsa groups have even begun to experiment with the electric piano, thus increasing the distance from those simple trios of guitars and giiiros that sang Christmas aguinaldos and love serenades from door to door. In short, salsa communicates, reproduces, and elabo- rates the social order in which the Puerto Rican urban proletariat is inserted (cf. Williams 1981).

Salsa provides models of behavior for facing the realities of economic dependence and the social marginality of the barrio. The messages range from Ruben Blades's spirited indictments of inequality and injustice, to the humorous depiction of these issues by El Gran Combo, to the alienated tropical babble of many salsa songs. But these are all inside views of


the lower-class community, views that have their own inner logic and express their own values. What is vulgar or meaningless from an outside perspective (especially in terms of the language of salsa) is from another standpoint-that of the audience-nothing more than an accurate re- flection of daily life, at its worst, and folk poetry, at its best. It should not be forgotten that, for the vast majority of Puerto Ricans, salsa lyrics, along with the bolero, make up their only poetry as well as a major source of public morality. Salsa songs propose a complex, alternative image of Puerto Rican culture that directly contradicts its trivialization and ideali- zation in the mass media (for example, West Side Story).

It is plain, then, that the Puerto Rican popular sectors-the so-called cocolos-define musical performance according to a set of concepts derived from creole culture. Salsa represents a sort of reconciliation between the two basic sources of Puerto Rican folk music: the predominantly mulatto plena and the black bomba, on the one hand, and the predominantly white seis on the other. Or, to put it another way, it reflects a synthesis of Afro- and Hispano-Puerto Rican trends, of the coastal lowlands and the inner highlands. Of course, these have been fused with some foreign musical currents, but that does not invalidate its basically nationalistic appeal. At any rate, one should worry less about the precise origins of cultural practices than about their use and meaning in interpersonal encounters.

Salsa is as much a part of the Puerto Rican heritage as the typical asopao soup or the popular cockfight. Bloch's (1973:181) dictum, "Puerto Rican music is the most convincing evidence of the existence of the Puerto Rican people's own cultural personality," makes one wonder why this fact was ever questioned. It is well to remember that this so- called cultural personality may be a hybrid cross primarily between His- panic and African elements, and that it may have been eroded by Ameri- can assimilation policies as much as by the massive migration movements to and from the island; but there is no doubt that in their popular music the Puerto Rican masses express and celebrate a coherent sensibility, a distinctly creole identity that has not faltered but, if anything, has been re- affirmed in the recent history of their nationality.

208 : Jorge Duany

APPENDIX Three Songs by Ruben Blades

PEDRO NAVAJA

Por la esquina del viejo barrio lo vi pasar con el tumbao que tienen los guapos al caminar. Las manos siempre en los bolsillos de su gaban, pa' que no sepan en cual de ellas lleva el puiial.

Usa un sombrero de ala ancha de medio lao, y zapatillas por si hay problemas, salir volao. Lentes oscuros, pa' que no sepan que esta mirando, y un diente de oro que cuando rie se ve brillando.

Como a tres cuadras de aquella esquina una mujer va recorriendo la acera entera por quinta vez. Y en un zaguan entra y se da un trago para olvidar

que el dia esta flojo y no hay clientes pa' trabajar.

Un carro pasa, muy despacito, por la avenida, no tiene marcas pero to's saben que es policia. Pedro Navaja, las manos siempre dentro del gaban, mira y sonrie y el diente de oro vuelve a brillar.

Mientras camina pasa la vista de esquina a esquina, no se ve un alma, esta desierta toa la avenida. Cuando de pronto esa mujer sale del zaguan, y Pedro Navaja aprieta un puno dentro del gaban.

Mira pa' un lado, mira pa'l otro y no ve a nadie, y a la carrera, pero sin ruido, cruza la calle. Y mientras tanto, en la otra acera, va esa mujer refunfuiiando pues no hizo pesos con que comer.

Mientras camina del viejo abrigo saca un revolver, esa mujer, y va a guardarlo en su cartera pa' que no estorbe: un treinta y ocho, Smith and Wesson, del especial que carga encima pa' que la libre de todo mal.

Y Pedro Navaja, pufial en mano, le fue pa' encima, el diente de oro iba alumbrando toa la avenida, iguiso facil!


Mientras refa, el punal hundia, sin compasi6n, cuando de pronto, son6 un disparo como un cai6on.

Y Pedro Navaja cay6 en la acera mientras veia, a esa mujer, que revolver en mano y de muerte herida a 1e le decia: "Yo que pensaba, hoy no es mi dia, estoy sala, pero Pedro Navaja, tu estas peor, no estas en na!"

Y creanme gente, que aunque hubo ruido, nadie sali6. No hubo curiosos, no hubo preguntas, nadie llor6. S6lo un borracho con los dos muertos se tropezo, cogio el revolver, el pufial, los pesos y se march6.

Y tropezando, se fue cantando desafinao el coro que aquf les traje y da el mensaje de mi canci6n: "La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida, jay Dios!

Coro: La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida, i ay Dios!

Valiente pescador, mal anzuelo que tiraste, en vez de una sardina, un tibur6n enganchaste.

Coro: I'd like to live in America! La vida te da . . .

Ocho millones de historias tiene la ciudad de Nueva York.

Coro: La vida te da . . .

Como decia mi abuelita, el que uiltimo rie se rfe mejor.

Coro: I'd like to live in America! La vida te da . ..

Cuando lo manda el destino, no lo cambia ni el mas bravo. Si naciste pa' martillo, del cielo te caen los clavos.

Coro: La vida te da . .

En barrio de guapos, cuidao en la acera, cuidao camara, que el que no corre vuela.

210 : Jorge Duany

Coro: La vida te da . . .

Como en una novela de Kafka, el borracho doblo por el callej6n.

Coro: La vida te da.

Hablado: En la ciudad de Nueva York, dos personas fueron encontradas muertas. Esta madrugada los cuerpos sin vida de Pedro . . .

JUAN PACHANGA

Son las cinco 'e la maniana y amanece,

Juan Pachanga bien vestido aparece. Todos en el barrio estan descansando Y Juan Pachanga en silencio va pensando

Que aunque su vida es fiesta y ron, noche y rumba, Su plante es falso igual que aquel amor que lo engafi6. Y la luz del sol se ve alumbrando Y Juan Pachanga el mamito va penando,

Vestido a la ultima moda y perfumado Con zapatos 'e colores ye-ye bien lustrados. Los que encuentra en su camino lo saludan, hey men!

Que feliz es Juan Pachanga, todos juran.

Pero lleva en el alma el dolor de una traici6n

Que s6lo calman los tragos, los tabacos y el tambor. Y mientras la gente duerme aparece Juan Pachanga con su pena y amanece.

Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala.

Aparece con la pena Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala No no no no te quiere la morena Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala Mira que esta amaneciendo Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala Por amor, por amor te estas muriendo Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala Olvidala que olvidala que olvidala


Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga olvidala

Ay despierta y botala Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga olvidala

Porque nunca te ha querido Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga olvidala Dale tambien olvido Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga olvidala

Deja el cuento y la mentira Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga olvidala

Que el amor no se mendiga

PABLO PUEBLO

Regresa un hombre en silencio De su trabajo cansado, Su paso no lleva prisa, Su sombra nunca lo alcanza.

Lo espera el barrio de siempre, Con el farol en la esquina, Con la basura alla en frente Y el giiro de la cantina.

Pablo Pueblo llega hasta el zaguan oscuro Y vuelve a ver las paredes Con las viejas papeletas Que prometian futuros En lides politiqueras. Y en su cara se dibuja La decepci6n de la espera.

Pablo Pueblo, hijo del grito y la calle, De la miseria y el hambre, Del callej6n y la pena. Pablo Pueblo, tu alimento es la esperanza. Su paso no lleva prisa, Su sombra nunca lo alcanza.

Llega al patio pensativo y cabizbajo Con su silencio de pobre, Con los gritos por abajo.

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La ropa alla en los balcones El viento la va secando. Escucha un trueno en el cielo, Tiempo de lluvia avisando.

Entra al cuarto y se queda mirando A su mujer y a los nifios, Y se pregunta Chasta cuando? Toma sus suenios raidos, Los parcha con esperanza. Hace del hambre una almohada y se acuesta triste de alma.

[Se repite Pablo Pueblo, hijo del grito, etc.]

Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Trabaj6 hasta jubilarse y nunca sobraron chavos Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Votando en las elecciones, pa' despues comerse un clavo Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Pablo con el silencio del pobre, con los gritos por abajo Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Echa pa'lante Pablito y a la vida mete mano Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano A un crucifijo rezando y el cambio esperando en Dios Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Mira a su mujer y a los nenes y se pregunta hasta cuando

Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Llega a su barrio de siempre cansao de la factoria Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Buscando suerte en caballos y comprando loteria Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Ganandose un dinerito en domin6 y tomandose un par de tragos Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Hijo del grito y la calle, de la pena y el quebranto Coro: Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano Ay Pablo Pueblo, ay Pablo hermano


Note

1. I am grateful to Marian Z. Sugano and to Thomas Turino for many helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. I am also indebted to Prof. Michel S. Laguerre for his insights into Caribbean ethno-

history.

References

Alvarez Nazario, Manuel 1974 El elemento afronegroide en el espanol de Puerto Rico. San Juan:

Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquefia.

Bloch, Peter 1973 La-Le-Lo-Lai. Puerto Rican Music and Its Performers. New

York: Plus Ultra.

Bonilla, Frank, and Ricardo Campos 1981 "Puerto Ricans in the New Economic Order." Daedalus

110, no. 2:133-176.

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Popular Music in Puerto Rico Toward an Anthropology of Salsa

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