Celebrating Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable serves as both a space for celebration and as a site of resistance—resistance to empire, to colonization, to disciplinary boundaries, to ethnic and racial fixity, and to rigid geographies used to police and authenticate belonging. We, in turn, join together as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholars of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, performance, and sound to attend to the politics of salsa as a musical genre with a particular cultural and social history. Specifically, we aim to examine salsa as a cultural signifier of Puerto Rico and its diasporas and as a meaning making cultural production that serves as a powerful tool for sonically challenging empire and coloniality. This roundtable is grounded in a celebration of Marisol Negrón’s recent book, Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings wherein she analyzes “Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics” and how these “challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness” in order to produce “an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power.” Negrón’s book and its engagement with Puerto Rican diasporic, sonic flows, enables us to imagine and reimagine conditions of possibility for sociality, while challenging us to (re) think our own ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. Our coming together in celebration of this book, of Negrón’s labor and her scholarship, in Puerto Rico, is a way to counteract and challenge institutional structures seeking to delimit the conditions of possibility for kinship and shared joy as tools for communal survival.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Karen Jaime, Cornell University

Panelists

• Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, University of Texas At Austin

• Deborah Vargas, Yale University

• Marisol Negrón, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Scott Poulson-Bryant, University of Michigan

• Faith L. Smith

• Wilson Valentin, The New School

Comment

• Sandra Ruiz, University of Illinois- Champaign

Biographical Information

Jossianna Arroyo (University of Texas at Austin), jarroyo@austin.utexas.edu
Jossianna Arroyo is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in the analysis of Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures in the Americas. She obtained her PhD in Hispanic and African Diaspora Studies from The University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana, 2003 and Almenara P 2019) a critique of cultural racism in the work of Gilberto Freyre (Brasil) and Fernando Ortiz (Cuba) and several Cuban and Brazilian novels, and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (Palgrave, 2013), an analysis of transnational, racial and colonial dimensions of Masonic encounters in the circum-Caribbean and the United States (1850-1898). Her new book, Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization and the Afterlives of Disaster (2023, Race and Media series, Rutgers UP) analyzes the role of media and new media in the Caribbean and its diasporas. She has contributing essays on Brazilian, Caribbean, and U.S Latina/o Literatures at Lusosex Sexualities in the Portuguese Speaking World (2002) and Technofuturos (2008). She has published at Encuentro de la cultura cubana, La Habana Elegante, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Journal of Latino Studies, among many other national and international publications; and she has been the recipient of awards from the Ford and Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment from the Humanities.

Karen Jaime (Cornell University), kj12@cornell.edu
Karen Jaime is Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. An award-winning scholar, professor, and author, Karen is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). She is the author of The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (New York University Press, 2021) which argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. She is currently working on two book projects, Framily: Queer Kinship as a Way of Life, and The Anachronistic Butch.

Marisol Negrón (University of Massachusetts Boston), Marisol.Negron@umb.edu
Marisol Negrón is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her areas of specialization include Nuyorican and Puerto Rican intellectual history, expressive culture, culture and commodification, diasporic world-making, and copyright. She is the author of Made in NuYoRico: Fania, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings (Duke University Press 2024), which recuperates salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics, its social and relational contours, and the music’s multivalent meanings in New York and Puerto Rico over half a century. Her work has appeared in CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Journal of Popular Music, and the Latino Studies Journal. As a consultant for Boston Public Schools, Marisol worked with an interdisciplinary group of scholars to design place-based Critical Ethnic Studies syllabi and case studies for grades 9-12. She also leads workshops for high school educators incorporating Ethnic Studies into their US history courses as well as university faculty and administrators learning to mobilize the racial capital of students of color. She is a founding member of the New England Latina/o Studies Association. She is the Director of the Latino Studies Program at UMass Boston and a member of the American Studies Association National Council.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (University of Michigan), Scottpb@umich.edu
Scott Poulson-Bryant is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America and a novel The VIPS. He is currently finishing two monographs: Everybody is a Star: Glamour, Performance, and the Making of Blackness in the 1970s Popular Culture and a history of Prince’s 1980 Dirty Mind album track “When You Were Mine” for Duke University Press’s “Singles” book series.

Sandra Ruiz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), sandruiz@illinois.edu
Sandra Ruiz is the Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance; Left Turns in Brown Study; and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor (June 2025). Ruiz is the co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World & The Alleys: Just Dropped in to see What Condition My Condition Was In. Additionally, Ruiz is a co-editor with Uri McMillan & Shane Vogel of the book series Minoritarian Aesthetics (NYU Press) and the creator and producer of the Minor Aesthetics Lab. Ruiz is currently working on two book projects, Peril in Pedagogy and -Neuro- Divergent Dissent.

Faith Smith (Brandeis University), fsmith@brandeis.edu
Faith Smith is working on a book about contemporary novels and art entitled “DreadKin.” She teaches at Brandeis University, where she chairs the Department of African and African American Studies. Her research interests are in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora, from the late nineteenth century to the present. She edited Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (2011). Her most recent book is entitled Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Nonsovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century.

Wilson Valentín (The New School), valentinw@newschool.edu
Wilson Valentín-Escobar, PhD (he/him/él) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Humanities. A first-generation college graduate who is also a product of New York City's public schools, Valentín is a scholar, professor, curator, and activist who hails from pre-gentrified Brooklyn. The son of a former public-school janitor and homemaker, raised in Brooklyn's Farragut Public Housing Projects by working-class Puerto Rican parents who migrated to New York City, his experiences of discrimination and invisibility shaped his intellectual and scholarly interests, pedagogical philosophy, as well as his commitment to transformative social justice. Valentín is the author of two books: Bodega Surrealism: Latina/o/x Artivists in New York City (NYU Press, forthcoming) and Rican-Structing the Roots and Routes of Puerto Rican Music and Dance (Centro Press, forthcoming). He has curated numerous exhibits, including ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, Montage Quotidien: The Photographs of Máximo Rafael Colón, and Power and Memory: 50 Years of Struggle, Shared Legacies of Resistance, among others. Valentín has also presented at national and international conferences, and has published his scholarship in academic refereed journals, book anthologies, and museum catalogs.

Deborah R. Vargas (Yale University), deb.vargas@yale.edu
Deborah R. Vargas is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work engages the fields of queer studies, feminist studies, Chicana/x Latina/x Studies, and American Studies with an emphasis on the cultural politics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Vargas is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, awarded Best Book in Chicana/o Studies, The Woody Guthrie Prize for Best Book in Popular Music Studies, and an honorable mention for Outstanding Book in Latino Studies. She is also co-editor with Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes of Keywords for Latina/o Studies. Vargas is currently working on two manuscripts. “Toward a Sucialogy of Culture,” (under contract with Duke University Press) explores Chicana/x working-class aesthetic forms and queer gender performances deemed as “cultures of poverty” in relation to normative Latino citizenship. And in “The Lower Frequencies of Brown Soul,” Vargas assembles an archive of Black and brown music and art to explore alternate geographies, queer intimacies, and sonic ecologies. Vargas has conducted oral histories with Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Music Oral History Program and written for National Public Radio’s “Turning the Tables” music series. Vargas has been awarded fellowships from The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, The Ford Foundation and The Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science. Vargas received her B.S. in Communications and B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of Texas, Austin and her Ph.D. in Sociology (Feminist Studies certificate) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.