La memoria de la salsa: Estampas sonoras de un Puerto Rico moderno (1950-1980)

This dissertation presents salsa music as a memory artifact to study the past of Puerto Rico. If salsa, at the height of its popularity in the 1970s, served as a medium for expressing the disillusionments and fortunes of its creators and their people, then today it functions as a cultural document that reconstructs the past from a very particular perspective. In this dissertation, we will focus on the processes of modernization in Puerto Rico and their subsequent decline in the decades following those processes, during which the sounds of salsa were born. Specifically, we will examine a thirty-year time span, from the 1950s—the "golden" years of modernization and industrialization on the island—to the 1980s, when the decline of that modernization process became more pronounced. At the center of this time span, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, salsa emerged under the onslaught of industrial enchantment and inherited the frustrations that arose in the most affected communities. In the first chapter, we explore salsa songs that focus on the jíbaro, the Puerto Rican peasant, and the countryside he inhabited. Drawing on theoretical (Sarlo) and literary texts (Pedreira, González) from the era, we consider the ambiguity present in salsa songs about the Puerto Rican peasant. In the second chapter, we follow the journey of the jíbaro, who, displaced from the countryside, arrives in the city. There, deprived of home, he crowds together with thousands of other displaced people in the slums surrounding the city. Based on the selected songs, the chapter highlights the hardships faced by these residents in the slums in the face of state violence, which displaces them without a proper urban planning strategy to provide them with dignified housing. In the third and final chapter, we use the classic concept of the "flâneur" (Baudelaire, Benjamin) to study various wandering characters that appear in salsa songs. In addition, comparing different types of wanderers, acknowledging the leisure time they must have to engage in their walks, we conduct a Marxist reading of the concepts of time and labor in an industrial society.