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This chapter details the longstanding formal and informal Latin music education settings and networks in New York City, as well as some of the ways in which the musicians benefited from them. It introduces three Puerto Rican women, from the 1920s through 1950s, who taught some of the greatest pianists to emerge from the New York scene. The chapter then presents a Panamanian pianist and a Cuban flautist who imparted musicianship, theory, and piano lessons to countless musicians who were influential performers, composers, and arrangers. The Afro-Latin folkloric music scene in New York was an incubator for musical innovation and preservation; musicians from across ethnic groups have studied, performed, and recorded ritual and folkloric genres. New York City, unlike sites within the Caribbean, offered a wide range of formal and informal study opportunities for musicians from throughout the Caribbean. It explores some of the institutions that served as meeting grounds for musicians, and provided both rehearsal and performance opportunities for aspiring musicians.

This chapter explores how Puerto Rican and Nuyorican (New York-born Puerto Rican) musicians in New York City used jazz harmony, arranging, improvisation, and musical aesthetics to broaden the sound of Latin popular music from the postwar period into the 1990s and beyond. It argues that the Puerto Rican connection to jazz was extensive and encompassed a variety of styles and eras. The chapter challenges the debate over salsa's patrimony and development, by demonstrating how particular Puerto Rican musicians in New York City were fluent in jazz and incorporated it into Latin music. Much discourse has unfortunately centered on pitting Puerto Rican against Cuban musicians or looking only at commercial or sociocultural considerations when considering Latin music in New York. Proficiency in both jazz and Latin music allowed Puerto Rican musicians to innovate in ways that did not happen in Puerto Rico or elsewhere. The chapter also explores other themes discussed in the introduction, such as the importance of clave, the impact and extent of music education among Puerto Rican musicians, family lineages, the importance of folklore, and inter-ethnic collaboration.

This chapter analyzes the understudied, multidimensional relationship of New York Jews with Latin music. Jewish engagement with Latin music took place throughout New York beyond the Palladium Ballroom, and the chapter presents the dance announcements in New York newspapers from 1947 to 1961 in order to show the extent of activities. It also details the historical depth of Jewish New Yorkers' involvement in Spanish Caribbean music by examining performance venues and events beyond the Catskills as well as the specific contributions of Eydie Gormé, Abbe Lane, Barry Rogers, and the dancer Ira Goldwasser. Ultimately, the chapter explores Jewish self-representations in Latin music and portrayals of Jews by non-Jews in Latin music. While there have been Jewish performers of Latin music throughout the Americas, Jewish New Yorkers' ongoing and nuanced relationship to Latin music has been unique and distinct.

This chapter examines contemporary representations of Latin(o) music's presence in the United States. It emphasizes Miami's unique positionality and Colombian music's role in the Latin(o) music industry at the moment of Miami's conversion into a “post-Cuban” city—a moment in which Latin(o) popular music undergoes a critical shift from “invisibility” to a brand of “carefully regulated, segregated visibility.” It deconstructs the prevailing and largely superficial depictions of the Latin(o) music boom that exist in the popular media. In particular, it foregrounds the decontexualized, dehistoricized language and subject matter of various recordings, television programs, and popular print media produced, written, and/or performed by non-Latinos and U.S. Latino performers and industry figures alike, with emphasis on the unique role played by the Miami-based entrepreneurs Gloria and Emilio Estefan.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the musical urbanism of Los Angeles through the ear of Latin America. It argues that the musical life of this dispersed and dynamic metropolis is shaped by immigrant musicians and migrating, cross-border musical cultures that not only have determined LA's “harmonies of scenery,” but have also been active participants in the making of the city's modern aesthetics and modern industries. The remainder of the chapter discusses just how intertwined the music of Los Angeles and the music of Latin America have been since the very birth of the city in the eighteenth century.

What do we in the United States know about Latin American art music, and how do we know it? From the 1920s until the end of World War II, U.S. critics applauded this repertory as universalist. During the cold war, however, Latin American music was represented as “exotic” or “nationalist” in the United States; that is, it was seen through a filter of difference. This chapter introduces the concept of Pan Americanism and how it has influenced the way we in the United States have represented Latin American art music.

This chapter assesses Shakira's Fijación oral, Volumen I and Oral Fixation, Volume II double-album production and performances in terms of the Freudian metaphors that inform our interpretations of her as a pan-Arab, pan-American figure in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, it addresses the implications of this focus on Shakira and her Oral Fixation(s) at this particular moment in the political and pedagogical trajectory of Latin American, American, Ethnic, and Middle Eastern Studies. Through a cross-media analysis of Shakira's recent music video production, it illustrates how she epitomizes the emancipatory possibilities embedded in the hybrid subject and the homogenized Latina popular icon. Her status prompts us to question the prevailing frameworks applied to the analysis of contemporary Latin(a) Americans in music video as a means of elucidating the present and future role of Latino Studies in the ongoing transnationalization of U.S. Ethnic and Area Studies. Against the historical and socioeconomic backdrop of the “Latin music boom,”the chapter concludes that the individual performers and the counterdiscourses that they engender have heralded the introduction of new possibilities for imagining Colombianidad, mainstream U.S. identity, and the very notion of the nation, both within Latin America and among its U.S.-based diaspora.

This chapter discusses the immediate musical impact of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift by examining some of the dancers and musicians who arrived in New York City at that time: Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, Manuel Martínez Olivera “El llanero solitario” (The Lone Ranger), Roberto Borrell, Rita Macías, Xiomara Rodríguez, Félix “Pupy” Insua, Pedro Domech, Daniel Ponce, Fernando Lavoy, Gerardo “Taboada” Fernández, Gabriel “Chinchilita” Machado, and many others. The chapter highlights the musical activities of these people and other musicians and its long-term effects on the folkloric and Latin popular dance music scenes in New York and the greater United States, not only in the performance realm but in many cases also as teachers for subsequent generations of Cuban and non-Cuban musicians, particularly Puerto Ricans in New York City. This group of artists who arrived during El Mariel would also serve as important points of connection for the next major wave of newly arriving musicians and dancers in the early 1990s, known as the balseros (raft people). Ultimately, the chapter provides an analysis of and insight into this overlooked era of Cuban musical history in New York and how it would impact Latin music in New York and elsewhere.

This chapter draws the main themes of the book together and offers ideas for a clearer and more coherent overview of Latin music in New York, as well as ideas for future scholarship. It outlines Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes' ten points to defend the position that salsa might or might not exist as a genre. Using this as a model, the chapter presents ten themes from the book that show how musicians based in New York City shaped the international sound of Latin music. These include: (1) the physical and metaphysical aspects of clave, (2) the importance of folklore, (3) the emphasis on music education, (4) musical biculturalism and triculturalism, (5) the evolution of the anticipated bass part, (6) instrument making and its impact on performance and recording, (7) the role of dance, (8) lineages of musicians, (9) interethnic collaboration, and (10) the role of jazz. All of these are not treated in each chapter, but they recur throughout and overlap considerably.

Several centuries of interaction between musicians and audiences from diverse backgrounds in Cuba have produced the most intricate and appealing dance music of the world. An analysis of the music forms known collectively as salsa provides a good starting point for the study of Cuban music. This chapter examines the rise of the salsa music movement in the United States, its evolution, maturation, social and historical context, and especially, the musicians that created and developed it. Salsa cannot be limited to a musical definition, but is a collective term of recent vintage that encompasses several Afro-Latin musical forms. The core of salsa stems from the Cuban turn-of-the-twentieth-century country style, a marriage of southern Spanish and West African forms. Musicians attest to the centrality of Cuban dance music in the salsa phenomenon. Salsa began to enter the U.S. popular music scene in a substantial manner in the 1970s and 1980s. Appreciating the music took more than including an excluded culture; musical concepts as well as the culture of listening were rethought. Salsa is also analyzed as a vehicle for ethnic identity as it became identified with Latino urban communities in New York and other U.S. cities, as well as cities in the Caribbean. In the last two decades, it has exhibited a new twist in its development: the appearance of the salsa sensual, a romantic ballad with a steady salsa-rhythm background. This new approach represents a shift from Latin American music traditions characterized until then by rather strict separations between dance music and romantic listening music.

This chapter suggests that new media and sound technologies in the early and mid-20th century—especially radios, gramophones, and films—introduced select audiences in Bombay to a wide variety of Latin American popular music and increased the demand for Latin American themes in live performances in local entertainment venues. It offers a brief discussion of the 19th and early 20th century, but largely focuses on the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. During these latter decades, foreign films made strong headways into the life of public entertainment among select populations in India, including films such as Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way that promoted and idealized the edgy exotics of Latin America. These and other films influenced the content and character of jazzy cabarets in hotel ballrooms, social clubs, for-profit clubs, cinema ballrooms, and railway institutes in Bombay and all of India. Audiences in these venues supported a general process of commodification and popularization of foreign artistic trends, so much so that by the mid-20th century, Goan Christian, Parsi, and Anglo-Indian minority communities also regularly attended jazzy cabarets and performed in dance band orchestras that boasted Latin American popular sounds. The chapter ends by suggesting that localized live performance practices in Bombay intersected with the Hindi film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, and influenced the character and content of cabaret and nightclub sequences in films.

This chapter outlines the important history and role of craftsmen based in New York City who produced and repaired traditional instruments used in the performance of Latin music. It introduces individuals who came from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Jewish communities, and examines how their instruments physically represented the actual sound of Latin Music to New York and the world on widely disseminated recordings. Many of these instrument makers also sold their instruments beyond New York City and the United States. The chapter also discusses the work of builders and musicians in New York City to create and modify the tools used to forge the sound of Latin music and diffuse both the instruments and their aesthetic throughout the world. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to unify into one coherent narrative, the efforts of folklorists, journalists, and authors who paid attention to the origins of hand percussion instruments in New York, their subsequent mass production, and the people who built the instruments used to play Latin music in New York City.

This chapter describes, first, the diverse and scattered musical markets, agents, institutions, and discourses that operated within what today is considered to be Latin America, but back then were considered disparate local, urban, diasporic, and transregional musical circuits. It shows the absence of unifying factors, either economic or ideological, that could sustain any encompassing regional aesthetic discourse or practice. Then the chapter presents the appearance, in disparate geographic spaces, of early intellectual, journalistic, and musicological notions of Latin America as a single regional musical space. It shows how, by the 1930s, a variety of regionalist discourses on Latin and Pan-American music gained legitimacy.

In this final chapter research findings are summarized, defining a variety of distinctive New York performance aesthetics and sounds that go beyond the usual description of New York-based Latin music as being simply loud, gritty, and aggressive. Conclusions are drawn here which have implications for future studies on the history of clave-based Latin dance music, performance aesthetics, and improvisational creativity.

This chapter examines the relationship between African America, Latin America, and the Caribbean through the music and its associated performance practices realized on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem from 1934 to the early 2000s. Through the lens of race, nation, and ethnicity, the complex and often tenuous relations among the diverse peoples who colluded and collided on the stage of the Apollo to produce some of the most significant and influential contributions to popular cultural expression in the United States throughout the twentieth century are explored. Though the Apollo is considered one of the most significant and influential venues in the twentieth century for African American music, studying the discourse and historical narratives concerning the theater’s history and traditions reveals that the venue was also one of the most important Caribbean and Latin American stages in the United States during that time. Situated just blocks from one of the most vibrant Caribbean and Latin American neighborhoods in North America, Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, the Apollo Theater was and continues to be a nexus for intercultural exchange between African American, Latin American, and Caribbean musics.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses an in-depth study of the US Navy Steel Band and its relationship within the scope of two overarching narratives: the development of post-WWII military public relations and recruiting, and American popular culture's fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century. The chapter then explains what a steelpan is, along with the steelband movement in Trinidad and Tobago, and how it impacted the development of steelbands in America. It also explores how the American calypso craze of the late 1950s influenced the formation of the US Navy Steel Band.