The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
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in the Caribbean. There is a strong degree of racial essentialism among dark-skinned Colombian salsa fans, who often explained to me that they loved this music because it was “born in their skin” or “in their blood.” I heard such claims not only in Cali, but from Afro-Colombians of different socioeconomic classes in the rural black towns of the Cauca Valley, in Buenaventura, in Quibdó, and in Cartagena and Barranquilla, on the Atlantic coast. While these ideological assertions flow more from socially constructed notions of racial identity than from any “natural” correlation between ethnicity and musical preferences, there are strong historical precedents for the successful entry of música antillana into Cali’s black and mixed-race culture.
Elsewhere I have explored the role that transnational popular styles of the African diaspora have played in establishing contemporary, self-affirming identities for people of African descent in Colombia (Waxer 1997). Following Paul Gilroy (1993), we can link this process to the Black Atlantic—a transnational space born out of the terrors of the slave trade, in which black people’s double consciousness about being simultaneously self and other has given rise to a particularly cosmopolitan approach to expressive culture. If the contributions of black people have been crucial for the rise of modernity, as Gilroy and other scholars maintain, it is hardly surprising that people of African descent have asserted their own modes of participating in the contemporary world: after all, this world was virtually constructed on their backs. In the case of Colombia, however, the necessity to index cosmopolitan identity has been made all the more urgent by the historical placement, in national discourse, of black people on the margins of time and space.
Gender and Generation in Cali
When I arrived in the field in the mid-1990s, I discovered several local all-woman salsa bands active on the scene. Founded between 1989 and 1995, these bands, known as orquestas femeninas, mark an unprecedented and unique development in international salsa. The women in these bands were overwhelmingly young, in their teens or early twenties. My curiosity about these all-woman bands led me to larger questions about gender in Caleño society and generational shifts in gender patterns and social roles among men and women. What opportunities did these young salseras have that their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers did not? How did this relate to changing gender roles for women and men in Colombia and Latin America generally? Is this reflected in other areas of salsa’s local consumption in Cali?
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, economic shifts for women in Colombia and Latin America in general resulted in a transformation of gender roles for Caleño men and women. These changes were particularly notable along generational lines: younger Caleños were raised in an environment of increasingly open economic and social opportunities for women to participate in domains that had been previously restricted to men. I explore the ways this played out in local salsa consumption and musical performance in the following chapters, but it is worth establishing a larger context for understanding these developments here.
In her book Listening to Salsa (1998), Frances Aparicio analyzes at length the ways in which salsa music has been produced as “a man’s world.” This construction relates to general codes of patriarchy and male dominance in Latin American cultures, which have traditionally operated to keep women from assuming public roles as performers. Few Latina musicians have received attention in the history of salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots. Women instrumentalists are even further obscured, and so only vocalists such as Celia Cruz, La Lupe, and La India have become famous (172–73). Although Latina singers and instrumentalists have gained increasing international prominence since the mid-1980s, their careers have still largely fallen under male control. Men control the music industry and own the nightclubs. Most Latina artists and all-woman bands have male managers, who exert an enormous influence on their public image. The fact that many women perform songs that are written by men also subverts the notion that women’s voices are finally being heard in Latin music. Salsa tunes tend to reinforce patriarchal standards in Latin American society, exalting macho definitions of maleness in lyrics that center around male bravado and sexual conquest. In the rituals of salsa dancing, men enact their relative superiority over women through ballroom dance styles in which the man leads the woman.24 In Latin America, men can also exert control over “their women” (wives, girlfriends, and sisters) off the dance floor through social codes that regulate how and with whom women can interact. Where, then, do we begin to understand a phenomenon such as Cali’s all-woman bands?
In Cali people often cite the adage that Caleña women are the prettiest in all Colombia. Those who hail from other cities (particularly on the Atlantic coast) are wont to contest this, but the saying did become the basis for one the first Colombian salsa hits, “Las caleñas son como las flores” (Caleña Women Are Like Flowers), recorded by the Caleño salsa pioneer Piper Pimienta in 1975 and quickly adopted as a local anthem. Cali’s all-woman salsa bands mirror important shifts for women in Colombian society as a whole during the late twentieth century (see Velásquez Toro 1995). The image of Caleña women as beautiful flowers stems from a traditional patriarchal attitude in which women are objects of aesthetic and sensuous contemplation. Using new economic and social opportunities open to them, however, young Caleña musicians appropriated this objectifying gaze to their own benefit, gaining access to the male-dominated sphere of salsa performance. Cali’s orquestas femeninas, hence, upheld the image of Caleña women as delicate flowers but simultaneously transcended that stereotype by carving out a space for the women as respected professional musicians (see Waxer 2001a).
While my initial concern with gender issues has been rooted in my own response, as a woman, to the sexual stereotypes reproduced in salsa, in this book I am concerned with the gender dynamics that shape musical production and consumption practices in Caleño popular culture as a whole. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, salsa is enjoyed and consumed by both men and women. Frances Aparicio observes that salsa can be used both to reaffirm standard constructions of gender and as a point of contestation in struggles over traditional roles and identities (1998). In a groundbreaking study of gender and Latin popular music, she looks not only at how images of women have been constructed in Latin popular music, but also at how women musicians have responded to and negotiated gender portrayals through songs of their own. Importantly, Aparicio not only examines the ways in which processes of musical production bear a decidedly gendered stamp, but also looks at how salsa audiences filter their consumption practices and interpretations of salsa songs through their own understanding of gender roles and identities.
The rise of Cali’s orquestas femeninas raises two questions central to scholarship about gender and music. One issue concerns the processes through which gender has become a significant category of social difference for salsa performance in Cali. In other words, why are current local salsa orquestas divided into male and female categories, and what do these distinctions mean? How have recent international shifts in the definition of male and female musical roles affected local musical identities? Historically, Cali’s orquestas femeninas mark an important break with the predominance of male performers in Latin popular music. That Caleña women choose to become salsa musicians, bandleaders, and even composers illustrates their courage in challenging and reappropriating social conventions while struggling with men’s continued economic control over their sound and commercial image.
The second question concerns whether there is anything essentially “female” or “male” about the style of salsa performed by all-female and all-male bands, or in the styles of salsa listened to and purchased by Caleño men and women. Although these distinctions are easy to determine in societies where specialization of musical roles and repertoire is clearly assigned to the sexes,25 no such division exists in Cali. Musical sound and behavior do not convey inherently “male” or “female” properties. As Susan McClary (1991) and Marcia Citron (1993) have argued, the attribution of “male” or “female” characteristics to musical composition and performance is historically constructed. The categorization of music along gender lines grows out of (and feeds back into) the larger system of power relations prevalent at a given moment, and the ways in which differences between men and women are defined so as to maintain a particular social order.
In addition to examining how issues of race, ethnicity, and class have framed the Caleño adoption of salsa, we must also look at how gender roles and age differences