Made in NuYoRico

In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrn tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the musics Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsas Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience. Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, films, and archival documents, Negrn shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in and impacted salsa music's flows during its foundational period in the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s. Salsas Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New Yorks poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsas complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrn demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.