Economic Emergency, Emergent Strategies: Puerto Rico, Salsa, and Economic Development

• In Event: Latinx Neoliberalism

Abstract

ASA Proposal 2018

Economic Crisis, Emergent S
While political and media analyses date Puerto Rico’s current fiscal crisis to the mid 2000s, the U.S. territory has been in a state of economic crisis since the mid-1970s. Two decades earlier, U.S. economic development policies promoted rapid industrialization and oriented Puerto Rico’s development toward an export economy largely dominated by U.S.-owned manufacturing. Economic fluctuations that began in the 1960s, however, threatened to derail Puerto Rico’s image as a showcase for Caribbean and Latin American economic development during the Cold War. Structural shifts in Puerto Rico’s economy, the widespread recession of the mid-1970s, and the economic downturns of the U.S. economy in the 1980s combined to not only put an end to Puerto Rico’s historic economic growth, but also initiate a decade-long recession. U.S. federal transfers to Puerto Rico doubled in the 1970s and 1980s to prevent economic collapse but the aid remained insufficient to offset the inability of Puerto Rico to sustain economic growth. In 1988, governor Rafael Hernández Colón decided to use Puerto Rico’s participation at the 1992 Seville Universal Expo as a launching pad for a nation branding campaign to attract internationalized capital and thereby decrease economic dependence on the US. In this paper, I examine the decision of the Puerto Rican government to organize this campaign around the concert “Puerto Rico es salsa” (“Puerto Rico is salsa”) at Expo ‘92.

I argue that the motto and concert itself capitalized on the music’s status as a global commodity to transmit an image of Puerto Rico’s political and economic maturity, its cultural particularity, and its openness to foreign capital. I highlight the ways in which the deployment of salsa forms reproduced hegemonic narratives of a territorially bound Hispanophile national identity. In so doing, the campaign that accompanied “Puerto Rico es salsa”) reproduced developmental language of the 1950s through which Puerto Rico promoted itself as a site for US development and tourism while exploiting the symbolic capital of expressive culture. “Puerto Rico es salsa”, however, made invisible the music’s emergence within the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States as well as the music’s racialized meanings in Puerto Rico. Exploiting the music’s transnational flows while capitalizing on its identification with Puerto Rico, the governor expected Puerto Rico to emerge as a hub for European commerce and a bridge to Latin American and Caribbean markets, on the other. To this end, the incorporation of salsa into the cultural patrimony relied on palatable forms of Afro­Puerto Rican cultural expression that largely marginalized poor and working class Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora.

I end the paper with reflections on how “Puerto Rico es salsa” foreshadowed (1) the attempt in summer 2007 by Puerto Rico tourism to capitalize on the popularity of the hit single “Despacito” and increase tourism and (2) role of expressive culture in economic recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Author

• Marisol Negrón, University of Massachusetts-Boston