Sin negro no hay guaguancó: Urban Identities and Salsa Consumption in Cali, 1975-1986

• In Event: Media, Music, and Popular Culture

Abstract

Revisiting the history of the carnival, in Latin American contexts, can further our understanding of the relevance of cultural artifacts, such as music, in the fashioning and mobilization of collective ideas of race and class, among others, during the twentieth century. Moreover, as a space of constant struggle for its meaning and permanence, carnivals also offer the possibility to explore how mass media and popular culture were crafted simultaneously, and how annual “celebrations” within cities either blur or reinforce differences among the subjects of the urban space. This paper focuses on the Colombian case of Feria de Cali, to explore through the archival research of music, local novels and press, the significance of musical consumption and production of salsa as an effective mechanism to perform and mobilize collective ideas of race and class, from 1975 to 1986. Moreover, here I will attempt to expand the possibilities that sonic archives offer to historians by exploring through a different light, the processes by which race and class have been enacted through salsa consumption in Cali, posing listening as an “interpretive site”, reconstructing historical events and its diverse interpretations from a different location: the ear.

Author

• Natalia Triana Angel, Binghamton University