Discutiendo la autenticidad en la música salsa

Abstract

Salsa grew out of Cuban- and Puerto Rican-based popular dance music and, while embracing North American jazz, folklore, rock and pop, it became a new horizon among the Latino community in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s. Far more than being just entertaining dance music, salsa soon became an emblem of Latino identity and was used as a cultural and sociopolitical concept in many parts of Latin America. Nonetheless, in the middle of the 1980s the music changed to a point where it was even seen as counter-revolutionary, lacking aesthetics, expression and pretension, so that it hardly merits to still be called salsa. This paper is about aesthetical debates on musical qualities in terms of au-thenticity in Cali, Colombia. The purpose is to deconstruct essentialist notions of authenticity by considering that salsa in Cali did not become popular for representing its people authentically. Rather it became popular for enabling people to construct notions of authenticity, truth and identity by placing its own aesthetic standards at people’s disposal.