Situating Salsa: global markets and local meaning in Latin Popular Music - Reseña

Latin Beat Magazine, Sept, 2002 by Rudy Mangual

Edited by Lise Waxer ed., Trinity College 336 pp: 26 illustrations Routledge/May 2002 / ISBN 0-8153-4019-2

Situating Salsa is a collection of 13 new essays specifically commissioned for the purpose of this book. Edited by Lise Waxer, an Assistant Professor of Music at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, this book represents the first comprehensive consideration of salsa music and its social impact from a transnational perspective. Divided into three parts--Part I: Locating Salsa, Part II: Personalizing Salsa, and Part III: Relocating Salsa--the book explores salsa music from its Caribbean origins to the present day. Waxer and a dozen leading scholars, experts and musicians, contributed interviews, field research, memoirs, and musical analyses to trace the paths by which salsa music has moved beyond its Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican roots to become ah international music commodity. In other words, it describes and analyzes the global impact that salsa music is currently enjoying. Some of the essays shed new light on current and provocative debates on race and ethnicity, class hierarchy, gender and the generation gap, as well as the relationship between salsa and socialism in Cuba, the rise of salsa music in Colombia and Venezuela, and salsa's local meaning. Heading the list of contributors to this book are Catalino "Tite" Curet Alonso (the legendary, revered salsa composer from Borinquen), Frances R. Aparicio (author and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois), Medardo Arias Satizábal (Colombian writer and journalist), Juan Flores (professor in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York City), Steve Loza (Associate Professor of Music at UCLA), and Christopher Washburne--Assistant Professor at Columbia University in New York City, bandleader, and one of the leading trombonists in salsa music.