Made in NuYoRico

In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negr?n tells the cultural history of salsa that traces the music?s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsa?s Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience. Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, film, and archival documents, Negr?n shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in salsa during its foundational period of the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s and impacted the music?s flows. Salsa?s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York?s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsa?s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negr?n demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.