University of Texas Press

Popular Music in Puerto Rico: Toward an Anthropology of "Salsa"

Author(s): Jorge Duany
Source: Latin American Music Review / Revista de Msica Latinoamericana, Vol. 5, No. 2
(Autumn - Winter, 1984), pp. 186-216
Published by: University of Texas Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/780072
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Jorge Duany

Popular Music in Puerto

Rico: Toward an
Anthropology of Salsa

Music is a system of communication

whose meaning ultimately lies in the context of social interaction. It not
only mirrors but also patterns interpersonalrelations in society. According to the anthropologistJohn Szwed (1970:220), "Song forms and
performances are themselves models of social behavior that reflect strategies of adaptation to human and natural environments." A traditional
song-like a piece of pottery, a religious ritual, or a folk legend-cannot
fail to create and re-create the most important cultural values of the
group that produced it. In other words, popular music synthesizes many
elements of a people's ethos.
This article attempts to uncover the underlying concepts upon which
popular music is ordered in Puerto Rican society.1 First it examines the
historical development of musical tastes on the island, placing them in
the context of major socioeconomic trends before and during the twentieth century. Then it analyzes the social function and the symbolic content of the contemporary genre known as salsa. The purpose of this essay
is to explore the meaning of salsa from an anthropologicalperspective,
something that, to my knowledge, has not been attempted before.

Salsa: A Definition
What exactly is "salsa"?The term may refer variously to the musical
style of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the entire Spanish Caribbean; it has even
been extended to the music of any "Latin" country. In this paper,
salsa will be reduced to a more specific and concrete phenomenon: popular Puerto Rican song and dance forms as they have evolved in the last
two decades. Salsacan be further characterizedas the typical musical
manifestation of the urban proletariat both on the island and in the
Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the United States (Cortes, Falc6n, Flores
1976). In fact, the genre's center of diffusion, in terms of commercial

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 187

production and distribution, has not been San Juan as much as New
York City. This has led some superficial observers to the exaggerated
conclusion that it is an exclusively "neo-Rican" or even North American
product. In fact, salsahas profound historicaland cultural roots in Puerto
Rico and the Caribbean.
The problem of defining and interpreting the significance of salsa
stems in part from the fact that the term is essentially a commercial
label, a kind of musical hodgepodge for anything that has an Afro-Latin
flavor. The word was first used as the title of a record in the 1960s and
gained universal currency after 1975, with the release of a popular
movie and record called Salsa(Rond6n 1980:33).
Salsa, however, is neither a musical style nor a particularrhythm, but
rather a hybrid genre performed mostly by Puerto Ricans in New York
and on the island. It is also very popular in the Dominican Republic,
Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru. Essentially, it is an
amalgamation of Afro-Caribbean musical traditions centered around the
Cuban son. Its main characteristicsare a call-and-responsesong structure; polyrhythmic organization with abundant use of syncopation; instrumental variety with extensive use of brass and percussion, and strident orchestral arrangements;jazz influence; and, above all, a reliance
on the sounds and themes of lower-classlife in the Latin American barrios
of U.S. and Caribbean cities. The following sections trace its most important antecedents.

Historical Background
My point of departure is that salsa is a mixture of mixtures, the result of
a long process of syncretization. Puerto Rican music, like any other
Caribbean folk music, is "a mixture of rhythmic figures, melodic movements, and harmonic formulas due to the contact between diverse cultures" (L6pez Cruz 1967:ix). Nothing survives of the music of the

original inhabitants of the Larger Antilles, the ta'nos,except for the

giiiro and the maraca, two gourd instruments used for percussion. The
two main strands of Puerto Rican popular music come from Southern
Spain and West Africa, but it also displays at least five other ethnic influences (which are themselves heterogeneous): Cuban, North American,
Dominican, Brazilian, and, to a lesser extent, French/Haitian. The latter
traditions have been incorporated into the Puerto Rican cultural mainstream through a process of reinterpretation-in Herskovits's senserather than of passive borrowing.
Puerto Rico shares the ethnic heterogeneity of the Caribbean area. By
the seventeenth century the Amerindian population of the Larger Antilles

188 : Jorge Duany

(Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico) had been decimated by
war, disease, slavery, emigration, and biological absorption (G6mez
Acevedo and Ballesteros Gaibrois 1980:74-76). To compensate, African
slaves were imported to substitute for the waning indigenous labor force
in the mines and plantations of the Europeans. The process of transculturation thus took place at various levels of interaction: between
Europeans and Amerindians, between Europeans and Africans, and between Africans and Amerindians. After the trauma of the Spanish Conquest the contact situation in Puerto Rico fundamentally involved the
encounters-and
clashes-between
two foreign segments: Spaniard and
West African, white and black, master and slave. This duality would
mark the island's social history indelibly.
Still, the encounters between Africans and Europeans cannot be interpreted in terms of two bodies of belief and value, each coherent, functioning, and intact (Mintz and Price 1976:9). To begin with, neither
the African nor the European migrant population was culturally homogeneous. The majority of the white settlers in Puerto Rico during the
sixteenth century came from Andalusia and Extremadura, the poorest
regions of Spain, and later from the Canary Islands. These groups came
to predominate in the formation of a Puerto Rican peasant culture. A
similar diversity of origins characterized the Africans who were enslaved
and transported to the island, including people from the achante (Ashanti)
and carabali cultures, and most of all, from the yoruba and the bantu.
We have, in sum, two heterogeneous human contingents, equally uprooted, in the process of adapting to an alien environment in the Caribbean. Both sectors of the population-white
and black-were incapable
of fully reproducing their ancestral lifestyles in the colonial setting. The
great diversity of the slaves, with their tribal languages and their customs,
meant that they could reconstruct their collective past only fragmentarily. The slave plantation forced African laborers and their descendants to create new forms of social relations and new ways of viewing
the world-but the same was true of Europeans. Ecological constraints
on the class of free persons made impossible the survival of many of its
folk practices. For instance, poor whites borrowed extensively from aboriginal housing patterns and slave eating habits in order to adjust to a
tropical habitat (Moreno Fraginals 1977).
This new institutional and material environment made mutual accommodation inevitable. "The conception of a society divided into hermetically sealed sectors can be seen for what it really was: the masters'
ideal, never achieved" (Mintz and Price 1976: 13). In practice, the two
groups did not for long remain distinct and separate cultural strata.
Social relationships cut across racial lines to erode the dual caste structure. An intermediate mulatto sector emerged, which militated against

Popular Music in Puerto Rico : 189

the maintenance of ethnic boundaries based on color alone. By the end

of the eighteenth century, the majority of the Puerto Rican population
was apparently of a "blended" physical type, that is, of Amerindian,
Caucasoid, and Negroid ancestry, and so was their culture. As in many
other New World societies, racial mixture went hand in hand with cultural interbreeding (M6rner 1967; Duany, in press).

The Counterpoint of Coffee and Sugar

Like many Latin American countries, Puerto Rico was internally divided
into two distinct geographic and economic spheres: highland and lowland, alturaand bajura.The inner highlands were colonized by a large
mass of free but economically underprivileged farmers of European and
mixed ancestry. Here they led an isolated and independent way of life
based on subsistence agriculture and cattle raising from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries. This was the land of thejibaro-the rustic,
seminomadic peasant-idealized by modern Puerto Ricans in many
nostalgic writings and submitted to the status of debt peonage in the
coffee haciendas that came to dominate the mountain economy after
1850 (Pic6 1979). Jibaros,peones,and agregados
(sharecroppers)were preindustrial rural types who cultivated coffee, tobacco, and other minor
crops on small plots of land in groups of families and with their hired
hands. The main ethnic antecedent of this peasant population was migrants from the Canary Islands, who came on a massive scale to Puerto
Rico in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the small towns
of the interior and the tobacco-growing municipalities near the coast
were founded by Canary Islanders and their creole descendants (Alvarez
Nazario 1974).
A different type of agricultural enterprise and social organization took
shape on the coastal plains: the sugar plantation. This system of production required a large labor force for the cutting and manufacturing of
sugarcane, and enslaved Africans were imported to fill this demand.
Slaves were concentrated around the major urban centers that were the
capitals of plantation agriculture: San Juan, Ponce, Mayagiiez, Arecibo,
and Guayama (Alvarez Nazario 1974:81). This location was determined
by the nature of the landscape and the access to seaports from which
cane could be exported. To this day, the two most "African" towns in
Puerto Rico remain Loiza Aldea, a black community on the northern
shore east of San Juan, and Guayama, "the city of the witches," as it is
commonly known, on the southern coast near Ponce. It was in these
lowlands that an Afro-Puerto Rican subculture evolved among the rural

190 : JorgeDuany
proletariatof the plantations, as opposed to the highland hacienda communities (Mintz 1974).

The Seis and the Spanish Heritage

The contrast between rugged interior and coastal plain, coffee hacienda
and sugar plantation, peasantry and proletariat, was carried over to the
sphere of folk music in Puerto Rico. For example, the seis is one of
Puerto Rico's most popular, and most Spanish, song types. According
to L6pez Cruz (1967), the seis forms the backbone of Puerto Rican
was the preferred dance
music, and one of its variants, the seis chorreao,
in
The
seis
is
the
among
peasants.
usually sung decimas-stanzas with ten
an
and
lines
octosyllabic
alternating rhyme structure. Dicimasbegan to
be cultivated in Spain in the sixteenth century and are still the favorite
traditional poetic form in Puerto Rico. The instruments used to accompany the seis are the guitar, the cuatro (a smaller creole version of
the Spanish guitar), and the guiro (the indigenous percussion instrument). The seis is in simple duple meter based on a single musical motive. Many of its themes can be traced back to the medieval and Renaissance romances
popular during the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico
Parsi
(Campos
1976). Some seisespreserve intact the melodies of Golden
from
Andalusia and Extremadura.
Age songs
The seis and the many variations it engendered (seis de bomba,seis
are distinctiveof a particulargeographic and sociopanuelo,seis bayamones)
economic sphere of the Puerto Rican population. Ecologically, the seis
belongs to the mountainous central areas of the island where coffee and
tobacco became the dominant cash crops. Sociologically, it is the musical
expression of a large class of subsistence farmers and sharecroppers.
Culturally, it remains closely attached to its Spanish colonial models,
fundamentally of Andalusian, Extremaduran, and Canary Island origin.
Like the music of the Cuban guajiros,the music of the jibarosis basically conservative in the sense that the traditional melodies and rhythms
are maintained, and innovation takes place mainly in text composition
(cf. Carpentier 1946:232). This traditionalismwas, of course, perpetuated
by the production arrangements, the primitive technology, the physical
separation, and the nature of the crops cultivated by Puerto Rican highland farmers. The creole folk culture that emerged in the mountains of
the interior was molded by a large spread of landownership, a high proportion of family to hired labor, the strength of Catholic popular customs, and the absence of great social differences prior to 1800 (Pico
1979). Like the language of the jibaros,the music of the highland farmers
was archaic by the standardsof the urban upper class.

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 191

The Bomba and the African Tradition

The bombadance, on the other hand, has unmistakable African roots.
According to McCoy (1968:96), this musical style came directly from the
Guinea Coast of West Africa. It is closely related to Ghanan, Haitian,
and French Antillean genres such as the Martinican vide. The bomba
probably originated with the migration of French planters and slaves
from St. Domingue (Haiti), Louisiana, and other Caribbean territories
after 1815, when a decree by the Spanish crown facilitated their entry
into Cuba and Puerto Rico. As a result of this migration, the music of
the Spanish Antilles broadened its cultural bases. Both the salon dances
of the elite (the danza or the habanera,for example) and the folk music of
the masses were marked by this influence (cf. Carpentier 1946: 101-103).
The French/Haitian origin of some bombadances is clear in the names
of six subtypes known as bamulY,calinde, cuayd, grasimd, lero, and sicd.
Alvarez Nazario believes that some bombasongs have Haitian lyrics,
and that the bombasdanced around the Loiza Aldea area resemble French
Antillean types. Otherwise, it is difficult to substantiate the specific influence of French black slaves on the bombatradition (Alvarez Nazario
1974).
Be that as it may, the bombasynthesizes several African musical currents as they converged in the plantation environment. It is characterized
by melodic repetition and complex rhythm; by an antiphonal structure
and the use of the pentatonic scale; by duple meter and the predominance of percussion. The bombauses the onomatopoeic and rhythmic
values of the human voice, and the texts are usually composed of nonsensical vocables designed to follow and emphasize the rhythm. That is,
words are employed primarily for their phonetic rather than their semantic value. The chorus sings in unison and harmony is altogether
absent (McCoy 1968; Lopez Cruz 1967). It is often polyrhythmic and is
accompanied by two drums called bombas, two sticks (claves), and a
maraca.
Bombas were sung and danced principally around sugar mill areas, on
Saturday evenings and other holidays such as the closing of the harvest
season (the zafra). Hence they were closely tied to the life cycle of the
plantation and followed the ebbs and flows of the sugar industry. The
bombadid not gain the popularity of the seis or the plena, but was confined mostly to the colored population in the lowlands. Today it is still
danced in the towns of Loiza, Fajardo, Guayama, and Salinas, where
the percentage of people of African ancestry is larger than elsewhere.
This phenomenon is clearly conditioned by cultural values. Since the
bomba is associated with black people on the coasts, it is considered
"African" by Puerto Ricans. Rhythm, drumming, dancing are thought

192 : JorgeDuany
of as African and are often linked to witchcraft in Puerto Rican lore.
Mintz (1974: 128) finds that "darker people are believed to be inherently more skilled mechanically." They are also supposed to carry rhythm
in their blood ("llevar el ritmo en la sangre," "tener la salsa por dentro"). I would argue that the bombawas not entirely accepted by many
Puerto Ricans precisely because of their perception of race and the stigma of African features. In a country where one's customs and beliefs
largely determine one's racial identity, to dance the bombais a sign of
lowly status, a confession of degrading ancestry. It is what negrosdo.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Puerto Rican danzawas also
often rejectedas the society dance of the blanquitos
(upper-class"whites").
The danza,originated within the nineteenth-century creole aristocracy,
has fared somewhat better than the bomba,however, precisely because it
is associated with the Europeanized bourgeoisie. Some classical danzas,
such as those written by Morell Campos, have been assimilated by the
lower classes. But the popular definition of what constitutes acceptable
music in Puerto Rican society today lies somewhere in between the two
poles of the danzaand the bomba.It would take a mulatto synthesis such
as the plena-or, later on, salsa- to reach a wide audience among the
Puerto Rican working classes.

The Plena: A Mulatto Genre

The plena, like the bomba,has many African elements. It is composed of
an alternating scheme between the soloist and the chorus, in the antiphonal style characteristicof most West African songs. Both rhythmic
and textual improvisation are important aspects of its performance. It
often utilizes diatonic melodies and even eight-beat phrases in a syncopated duple meter. The instruments used to accompany it may be those
of any typical dance orchestra, but they must at least include two panderetas or tambourines.
The plenaalso displays clearly non-African elements. The lyrics are
usually composed in Spanish rhetorical forms such as the cuartetaor the
sextilla.Like the Spanish romance,the plenachronicles memorable or unusual events taken from the contemporary scene (Chase 1959). A kind of
musical newspaper, the plenadeals with the topics that most impress the
coastal populations, ranging from the everyday incident to the international happening. The theme of one popular song-"Cortaron a
Elena"-is apparently a crime of passion: a woman is cut and taken to
the hospital. Another plenacomments on the famous Dempsey-Tunney
boxing match, and yet a third focuses on a German submarine that
raided Caribbean waters during World War I. History and legend mingle

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 193

in plenalyrics, whose essential character can be described as simple,

direct, and epigrammatic, and their general tone as playful and ironic
(Cadilla de Martinez 1938).
Where did the plenacome from? Many Puerto Ricans-especially
from Ponce-will quote Cesar Concepci6n's famous plenaline: "En
Ponce nacio la plena" ("The plena was born in Ponce"). Ponce, of
course, the island's second-largest city, has been the capital of the sugar
and rum industry since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although
proud of its Spanish traditions, it received a large proportion of the
African slaves brought to Puerto Rico after 1815, who eventually settled down in the peripheralslums of the city. Whatever the ultimate origin
of the plena-and there are many ingenious folk tales about its supposedly foreign roots in other Caribbean islands like Haiti or St. Thomas-it
first became popular among the sugar proletariat on the south coast,
and from there spread to the north. As a popular dance form it emerged
from Ponce in the 1920s and was later made famous by the Puerto
Rican singer Manuel Canario in New York (L6pez Cruz 1967:67-68).

Musical Trends to the Twentieth Century

To sum up, for most of its history Puerto Rico was not a homogeneous
national culture and hence could not develop an overarching framework
of musical values. Instead, a series of regional and class subsystems
evolved and coexisted until at least the advent of this century: the culture of the wealthy hacendados,
the urban merchants, the sharecropping
rural
the
peasants,
proletarians, and so on (Steward 1956). The basic
units of internal differentiation were ecological, economic, ethnic, and
racial in nature.
Popular music reflected and helped reinforce these social distinctions.
The seis was typical of the physically and socially marginal inner frontierspeople, with its allegiance to Spanish folklore and minimal African
component. The bombawas an African transculturatedform influenced
by the migration of French slaves to Puerto Rico's sugar plantations.
The plena, finally, arose among creolized blacks, mulattoes, and whites
in coastal suburbs like San Ant6n in Ponce. In other terms, these forms
of singing and dancing were characteristicof different forms of agricultural production and social organization: the seis, the bomba,and the
plenaultimately respond to different combinations of land, labor, and
capital. They are the musical forms of preindustrial farmers and townspeople in a Puerto Rico that has ceased to exist, along with the plantation, the hacienda, and the small farm in the countryside.

194 : Jorge Duany

Changes under American Colonial Rule

Throughout most of its history, Puerto Rico was a country of highland
subsistence farmers. But the American occupation of the island in 1898
began to transform the whole agrarian structure to suit the demands of
huge sugar corporations. These enterprises tended to concentrate landownership into a few large estates, thus reversing an earlier trend
toward the dispersion of property. In less than ten years, the new metropolis converted the seigneurial hacienda economy into a modern
plantation economy. By 1930 the process was completed: Puerto Rico
was a typical sugar island, characterized by the latifundio, the extreme
concentration of labor and capital, the predominance of capitalist relations of production, and the structural deformations of a monocultural
export economy producing for a single foreign market and importing
most of its basic goods from the metropolis (Lewis 1963:89-97).
The principal casualty was the coffee industry, which had become the
island's chief enterprise in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s,
coffee made up two thirds of Puerto Rico's total exports; in 1930 it
represented less than one percent (Quintero Rivera 1977:28,52). Unable
to eke out an existence from the soil, the peasants and the hacienda
workers began to come down from the mountains, to the sugar plantations and to the towns and cities on the coast, which were fast becoming
the dynamic centers of the economy. Many left for the United States,
other parts of the Caribbean, or even Hawaii. During the nineteenth
century people migrated to the central highlands in search of better economic opportunities; in the twentieth century they took the road back
to the coast for the same reason.
The Great Depression shook the foundations of the colonial system
based on the plantation and export trade. Sugar agriculture was never
quite able to recover from the international crisis of the capitalist market, and since then the history of Puerto Rican agriculture is one of
progressive deterioration. In 1940, the Popular Democratic party of
Mufioz Marin came to power. After 1945 it initiated the famous "Operation Bootstrap" in an attempt to modernize the island economy. This
program came to be known as "industrialization by invitation," because
it relied on massive capital investments from the United States lured by
tax exemption laws and a cheap labor force. By reorganizing the system
of land tenure and the utilization of human resources, Operation Bootstrap imposed a death sentence on the already moribund plantation
economy. It accentuated the migration to the urban areas and exported
the unemployed surplus labor to the mainland. By the mid-1950s Puerto
Rico was more urban than rural for the first time in its entire history;
its economy depended more on manufacturing than on agriculture, and

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 195

the factory replaced the sugar centralas the basic unit of the economy
(Lewis 1963: 167-187). The quiet, rural, agriculturalisland of former
days was gone.

The Trend toward Urbanization

At this point the social and numerical significance of the urban masses
for Puerto Rican cultural dynamics becomes clear. Whereas Puerto
Rican cities in the nineteenth century had grown slowly, their population has multiplied geometrically in the last fifty years. The capital,
San Juan, has absorbed most of the internal migration, doubling its
population from 1940 to 1960. In 1900 the San Juan metropolitan area
representedonly 4 percent of the island population;by 1970 it had soared
to 31.4 percent, and it has continued to grow (Safa 1974:5-7). Meanwhile, New York City has become the most populous Puerto Rican city,
with more than one million Puerto Ricans living there in 1980. It is in
this context of migration, urbanization, industrialization, and proletarianization of the Puerto Rican labor force that the salsa phenomenon
emerges.
I have already pointed out that the rural-urbanmigration increased on
a massive scale as a result of the decline in the demand for agricultural
labor. The urban proletariat was fed mostly by former peons, sharecroppers, small farmers, artisans, and rural wage-earners, forced to flee
the countryside since the turn of this century, especially after the 1930s.
Those who had squatted in the countryside now occupied whatever space
was available in the cities, places without any commercial value, like the
public marshlands along the CafnoMartin Pefia. Thus began many
(slums) in the 1930s. La Perla, one
fanguitos(shantytowns) and arrabales
of the best-known and most-feared slums in San Juan, immortalized in
Oscar Lewis's La Vida,was built on the fringes of the old city walls near
the beach front. Overcrowded, filthy, lacking even basic public services,
these self-built houses sometimes managed to develop into full-fledged
urban communities such as Barrio Obrero in Cantera. But more often,
they became breeding grounds for tuberculosis, venereal disease, and
delinquency.
On the more positive side, the urbanization process has thrown white,
black, and colored persons into close interaction with each other in the
context of marginal urban spaces. Shared misery and lack of opportunity
have bred highly egalitarian social relations along with further cultural
and racial mixing among the urban migrants. Thus the daughter of
Utuado peasants has learned to dance the plenawhile the descendant of
black slaves has come to improvise dicimas.From this intense and con-

196 : Jorge Duany

tinuing syncretization has emerged the music of salsa, neither black nor
white, African nor European, but negriblanca.Salsa should be understood as part of this displacement of poor Puerto Ricans from the countryside to the coastal cities and, beyond, to the United States. It is profoundly rooted in the subculture of the Puerto Rican barrios.

The Puerto Rican Barrio in New York City

Puerto Rican migration to New York began at almost the same time as
U.S. troops occupied the island during the Spanish-American War or
1898, but the really massive movement to the mainland took place after
World War II. This migration resulted from the depressed conditions in
the rural sector, the scarcity of urban jobs, and the new opportunities for
unskilled and semiskilled labor on the eastern seaboard of the United
States. Since 1950 the population of mainland Puerto Ricans has nearly
doubled each decade, and today about 35 percent of all Puerto Ricans
live in the United States (Bonilla and Campos 1981:155).
The migrants have been predominantly rural and lower class in origin, and thus have lacked necessary occupational, language, and other
skills that could help them find decent jobs and housing facilities. Many
are of mixed or Negroid physical appearance and have been viewed as
strangers in American society. Today the largest numbers of Puerto
Ricans in the United States, most of whom had been agricultural laborers on the island, are employed as factory workers. The majority
have come from impoverished small towns and isolated farms, but are
now crowded into the largest metropolises of the United States: New
York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities (Dominguez
1975).
The Puerto Rican emigration process has involved not only the urbanization of rural migrants, but also their "ghettoization" into segregated
inner city enclaves. Puerto Rican settlements in New York are largely
extensions of black neighborhoods such as Harlem, the Bronx, or the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. They are pockets of poverty located in
the old tenements of the central areas, lacking in good housing and public services. The typical Puerto Rican barrioin New York can be described as socially and physically marginal to the rest of the city, although it may be close to a commercial district.
Daily life in the barriois framed by economic deprivation and ecological isolation. It preserves much of the face-to-face quality of a rural
community through reciprocity networks among friends, relatives, and
neighbors-but it is also marked by violence, crime, racism, unemployment, family instability, and physical deterioration. As Rond6n (1980:

Popular Music in Puerto Rico : 197

63) puts it, "The Latin barriosof New York are turbulent and miserable
islands floating awkwardly amidst the progress of strangers."
This environment is not very different from the proletarian neighborhoods of Caribbean cities like San Juan, Santo Domingo, Panama City,
Caracas, or even Havana. The similarities are even more striking if one
remembers that there is "a permanent and restless traffic, a massive
circulation of workers without fixed abodes or occupations between Puerto
Rico and a growing number of regional concentrations scattered throughout the United States" (Bonilla and Campos 1981:152). The barriois
continually being replenished by incoming Puerto Ricans from the island,
so that the ties with the homeland are never totally severed. Job insecurity, lack of education, inequality of opportunity, reliance on informalsector employment, and exclusion from the benefits of industrialization
are as characteristic of lower-class migrants as of those who remain in
Puerto Rico; the experiences of New York Puerto Ricans and of the
island's urban poor differ in degree but not in kind.
The continuous exchange between New York and San Juan, intensified by cheap commercial flights after World War II, has created a migratory circuit between the two cities that maintains kinship and friendship ties on both shores. Many Puerto Ricans have returned to the
island, temporarily or permanently, to create some neo-Rican enclaves
such as Levittown in Cataiio or Santa Juanita in Bayam6n. In these
comings and goings, among bags full of forbidden tropical fruits, vegetables, and bottles of rum, among letters and relatives and Quiquiriqui
flights, among records and night club orchestras, among conga players
in Isla Verde beach and New York's Central Park, little by little a
influenced by Cuban
hybrid Afro-Antillean genre was forged-strongly
music-the style that we now call salsa. Salsa, then, is the product of a
seminomadic population, perpetually in transit between its homeland
and exile.

The Son and the Influence of Cuban Music

The most direct (as well as the most controversial) influence on salsa is
Cuban music of the 1950s. Some-especially
Cubans-think
that salsa is
just a new name for a very old rhythm. Doubtless the Cuban son constitutes the principal basis for salsa, but this does not mean that salsa is
some
simply an adulterated version of Afro-Cuban music-although
salsa music has been criticized by Rond6n (1980) as matancerista,from the
well-known Sonora Matancera of prerevolutionary Cuba. First of all,
it should be remembered that the son, which originated in the mountains of Oriente province in the nineteenth century and gained inter-

198 : JorgeDuany
national fame in the 1920s, was influenced by successive migrations of
Africans, Spaniards, Haitians, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, and other
Caribbean peoples to Cuba. That is to say, the son is a typically Caribbean musical form, which, for instance, has its equivalents in the calypso
of Trinidad, the Haitian meringue,and the Puerto Rican plena(Urfe
1981). Perhaps this is why the son received such a warm welcome in
the Hispanic colony of New York City, especially among Puerto Ricans:
Caribbean migrants to the United States recognize themselves musically
in the son.
The main pattern for salsa music remains the son montuno,built on the
alternation between soloist and chorus. Its formal arrangement is a fixed
choral scheme and features the improvisation of the singer within a basic
motive. As in the son, salsalyrics often employ the Spanish copla.Both
use the tres or the cuatro, the two creole versions of the guitar, extensively. These are not exclusively Cuban elements, however. As noted above,
the plenais also performed in call-and-responsefashion, and for the seis,
the cuatro is a cornerstone of the musical style.
As a result, the tradition of the Cuban son was far from alien to the
musical taste of Puerto Ricans in New York. In fact, Cuba and Puerto
Rico had developed musically along similar lines, due to their close cultural contact throughout the colonial period. Not surprisingly, the typical
orchestrasof both islands had the same instruments and played the same
song and dance types, such as the guarachaor the bolero.
There are significant differences as well between the son and salsa.
Most important, salsa has a stronger metallic sound, provided by the introduction of the trombone, than the smoother son, which employs one
or two trumpets at most. At the same time, the salsa orchestra reinforces the classical percussion of the bongo and the conga with the timball or the cencerro (something that was not done by Cuban orchestras
in the 1950s), often in substitution for the clave and the giiro (Diaz
Ayala 1981). In comparison with the older son or the cha-cha-cha, salsa's
distinctive sound is less subdued, more violent, even strident. Some of
this is due to the influence of jazz, with its use of chromaticism and dissonant harmonies.
Salsais, in any case, the unmistakable voice of the Puerto Rican barrio.
It reflects the sorrows and dreams of the rapidly growing urban proletariat of the last four decades. It combines indigenous folk traditions
such as the plenaand the Afro-Caribbean bombawith foreign musical
elements such as the Cuban son and American jazz to express the problems and aspirations of this underprivileged sector of society.

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 199

Salsa as a Syncretic Musical Genre

Like much of the music heard in the Caribbean, salsa results from the
fusion of African and Hispanic sources. The African heritage is evidenced in the preponderant part that the rhythmic aspect plays in all
salsa. The very term "salsa"-roughly
equivalent to "soul" among
North American blacks-hints that percussion, and especially drumming, is central to this type of music. Above all, this is music to be
danced to: a song that doesn't make you move your feet doesn't have
any "salsa." The call-and-response structure of most salsa songs can
also be traced to West African sources.
Most salsa songs, written and performed in Spanish, follow Spanish
rhetorical forms such as the copla or the romance.Hispanic traditions are
present in certain recurring themes, part of the colonial legacy: unrequited love; criminal intrigue; the figure of the mora encantada(the femme
fatale, usually a mulatta); the picaresque underworld of thieves, pimps
and petty gangsters; the cuadrode costumbres,or the colorful local event.
As in Spanish folk poetry, the topic of romantic love predominates in
many variants: the requiebroor the galanteo, the desengaio and the despecho.
Often the lyrics of a salsa song preserve the language patterns of the sixteenth century as well as folk wisdom in the form of proverbs and tales.
It is true that salsa, like the Brazilian bossa nova or the Jamaican
reggae, has become an article for commercial consumption, a development that often betrays its authentic folk sources. A salsa record is a
commodity to be bought and sold like any other merchandise, subject to
the capitalist system's laws of supply and demand. To this extent salsa is
a victim of the cultural colonialism of the North American communications industry (Linares 1974), which has not only permitted but also
fostered the development of Puerto Rican music, especially after the
closing of the Cuban market in the early 1960s. As Lauria Perricelli
(1980:303) underlines, " 'Puerto Rican culture' has become fashionable
in the sphere of the circulation of commodities." It should be remembered that Puerto Rico's consumer market has expanded dramatically
since the 1950s and is now one of the United States's best customers.
The Hispanic market within the United States is the fastest-growing
today, with Latinos the largest minority on the mainland.
But the manipulation by the communications industry is only part
of the story. Salsa music, as I have tried to show, is deeply rooted in
Puerto Rico's popular sectors, despite the recent disco and rock fever
and the proverbial upper-class disdain for "native" music. Salsa is above
all a symbol of resistence to the loss of national identity, whether through
the migration experience or the cultural penetration of the island. Like
comida criolla (creole cuisine) or the Spanish language, salsa is one of the

200 : Jorge Duany

ways through which the popular sectors can resort to their cultural traditions to realign their mode of life. When a group of youngsters gathers
to listen to, sing, and dance salsa, it is celebrating and re-creating the
values, beliefs, and practices of its cultural heritage. When new salsa
orchestras invade Puerto Rican TV and radio stations-like the legendary Guaracha del Macho Camacho of Luis Rafael Sanchez's novel-they
are expressing and reaffirming a staunch collective will not to assimilate,
not to lose themselves within the Anglo-Saxon cultural orbit. This is expressed in the often-heard phrase, "La salsa es de aqui como el coqui"
("Salsa is as Puerto Rican as the coqui," a species of toad that grows
only on the island).

Salsa, Cocolos, and Rockeros

The significance of salsa in terms of cultural nationalism can be traced in
the transformations of the word cocolo. Cocolowas originally a pejorative
term for very dark-skinned persons, similar to negroretinto. In the 1960s
and early 1970s it was used synonymously withjibaro to refer to someone
with unpolished manners, definitely lower class, regardless of race (charro
and cafrehave a similar meaning today). Cocolonow symbolizes an entire
way of life associated with salsa music.
The stereotype of the contemporary cocolois a teenager who wears
outmoded, flowered shirts, polyester pants, tennis shoes, and an Afro
pick in the hair. Cocolos sport monstruous radios or cassette players
wherever they go and listen to an all-salsa station like Zeta 93. They live
in Nemesio Canales or another of the public housing projects in San
Juan. The cocolo's antithesis is the rockero:a teenager dressed in tight
jeans, Playero T-shirt, sandals, the latest in American fashion, and long,
tousled hair. Rockeroscan be seen windsurfing at Isla Verde beach or
listening to a radio station like Alpha Rock 105 in their cars. They probably live in Garden Hills or one of the more exclusive urbanizaciones.
These are of course caricatures, but physical appearance, like a language
of signs, announces an individual's social identity. Such cues give information about one's relative status, knowledge of English, acquaintance with prestigious foreign models, family background, and even ideological orientation. In sum, the racial term "cocolo" has been converted
into a fundamentally cultural and class concept.
What does this mean for the understanding of salsa music in a social
context? First, salsa is not considered musica de negros, like the bomba, but
rather muzsicacocola, plebeian music, lower-class music. Second, it is seen
as an indigenous cultural movement. It matters little that the plena, the
bomba, and the seis are put in the same bag with the son, the guaracha
and the guaguanco. What really matters is that they are all counterposed

PopularMusic in PuertoRico : 201

to the "top 40" hit parades of American pop music. Salsathus presents
an element of cultural struggle in attempting to recuperate and upgrade
local musical traditions. Buying a salsa record, playing rock full blast on
the streets of Condado so that everyone can hear it, placing a sticker on
the car that says Salsa 63 or 95x, attending one of the fiestaspatronales
and dancing in the main plaza, or going to a New Wave disco, become
symbolic behaviors. They represent where one stands on the acculturain
tion/resistance spectrum. The opposition between cocolosand rockeros,
the end, is nothing but another expression of the eternal conflict between
the attachment to one's own cultural traditions and the desire to assimilate into the dominant U.S. culture.

El barriode guapos
I propose to look now at three salsa songs written and sung by Ruben
Blades. Analysis of song texts is undertaken as a means of exploring the
psychological processes of the people to whom this music is directed
(Merriam 1964:201). The main questions I shall be asking of this material are: What does it communicate, and how does it communicate?
The hit single "Pedro Navaja" was released in 1978 as part of the
album Siembra,which has broken salsa sales records (see the appendix for
a transcriptionof the lyrics). It has since been sung and danced in numerous dance halls, house parties, and other places where groups of
Puerto Ricans congregate to celebrate and socialize. It is still popular
both on the island and on the mainland. In fact, it has become part of
Puerto Rican folklore, like some all-time favorite bolerosby Rafael Hernandez. The only satisfying way to explain the song's continuing popularity seems to be to posit a deep connection between the writer, the
lyrics of his song, and the people for whom he writes. In short, Blades's
lyrics reflect the prevailing concerns of his reference group: Puerto
Ricans in New York.
What is this song about? Character, situation, atmosphere, and language in "Pedro Navaja" all have a concrete sociological referent: an
urban lower-class community in the United States. The protagonist,
Pedro Navaja, represents a familiar figure in this environment: the guapo
or maton,the bully. Rond6n (1980) notes that this is the classic malandro
type of many Cuban sones.The setting is the Puerto Rican ghetto in
New York City; the language is colloquial and streetwise; the tone of the
narrator, conversational and ironic, reminds one of the Spanish picaresque tradition.
Although the main character is depicted as an individual, the sketch
aims to be emblematic. The title itself (navaja,switchblade) is significant.

202 : JorgeDuany
Pedro Navaja incarnates the criminal villain; the unnamed woman (a
prostitute) represents his innocent victim. The final irony lies in the reversal of these roles, as the apparently defenseless streetwalkershoots
her assailant. Dagger and gun, man and woman, guapoand puta are
contrasting pairs of elements that blend only in death, their common
destiny. The whole song is built on this binary structure, and from there
derives its metaphorical meaning. First delivered by a drunkard, the
chorus tells the moral of the story: "La vida te da sorpresas" ("Life is
full of surprises"). "Pedro Navaja" has all the elements of a folktale,
and its didactic, fablelike intention draws it close to the genres of satire
and allegory.
The song is narrated in the third person by an observer who stands
by ("I saw him passing"), but, who like the rest of the barrio,does not
get involved in the action of the story; hence, the point of view is testimonial but detached. The narrator sees with the eyes of his peers and
thus becomes their accomplice in keeping the crime quiet. When the
police arrive toward the end of the story, the murder remains a mystery,
because they are outsiders. The implicit author voices his criticism of
this situation in the second part of the song especially, through the use
of proverbs that tend to invalidate the impersonal perspective of the
first part. This technique, however, places the source of criticism in the
anonymous power of the collectivity.
Why did "Pedro Navaja" strike a cord in Puerto Rico as well as in
the Hispanic barriosof the United States? Clearly, the lyrics are meaningful and relevant to an audience composed largely of working-class
people. Policemen, prostitutes, drunkards, and bullies are part of the
social scenario of the urban poor, and bloody events such as the one
narrated here are widely reported in the newspapers. The ending of the
song-simulating a radio broadcast about the crime-further accentuates
the realism of the story. I think the key to why this song works lies in
the combination of its formal resources-rhyme, rhythm, structural
opposition, dramatic ending-and the folk wisdom embodied in the
grandmother'swords: "El que uiltimorie se rie mejor" ("He who laughs
last, laughs best"). Blades seems to suggest that the time-tested knowledge transmitted by means of oral tradition is not superseded by the
new and more complex situations that arise in the metropolis. On the
contrary, "Pedro Navaja" provides a linkage between Hispanic folk
beliefs and the present realities of modern urban life; it reinforces a continuity of thought and behavior between the people's past and their
goals. The song condemns social indifference and collective anomie and,
conversely, incites slum dwellers to organize and commit themselves to
the welfare of their community.

Popular Music in Puerto Rico : 203

You can't beg for love

In "Juan Pachanga" Blades takes on another human type and situation.
Pachanga is slang for "party," "fooling around," "disorder," so again
the protagonist's name is symbolic. If the object of parody in the other
song was the guapo, here it is the mamito, or playboy. As in "Pedro
Navaja," the character is fixed by his dress and physical appearance.
But whereas Pedro Navaja adopts a studious gangster pose, Juan Pachanga chooses the most fashionable clothes: he wears flashy colors and
smells of cologne. The first is a deviant social type; the second is a dandy
who belongs in Blades's category of the pldsticos-people who are more
concerned about looks than about spiritual qualities.
Both of these characters are depicted in situations that reveal their
true nature, hidden beneath carefully cultivated facades. Nothing seems
to be certain in this world of appearances and disguise. Juan Pachanga
is caught in the act without his mask: his prestigious macho image is
only outward gestures. The narrator pierces the character's mind to
show the contrast between his inner life and the way others see him. In
the last analysis, this is the story of a Don Juan betrayed by a woman,
the conquered conquistador-again,
the perpetrator becomes the victim.
As in "Pedro Navaja," we glimpse the protagonist's life in a moment
of silence, solitude, and immobility. In "Juan Pachanga" it is early
dawn, everyone is sleeping, there is nobody before whom the show must
go on. And yet, the barriois there; it is always there. It is as if the individuals who live in it can never escape its enveloping presence: they
are present, even when they are behind their windows, looking, saying
nothing or sleeping in ignorant bliss. The barrioacquires a meaning beyond its physical dimension; it is a collective conscience within and without its individual members.
In this context the chorus toward the end of the story line functions as
the anonymous voice of the barrio: "Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala"
("Listen to me, Juan Pachanga, forget her"). And the alternating voice
of the soloist, as in "Pedro Navaja," speaks directly to the protagonist,
giving him advice. His last words, "El amor no se mendiga" ("You can't
beg for love"). Without a doubt, this song supports the moral teachings
of Puerto Rican folk, in the best tradition of the amorous despechoand
the desengaio.
Ultimately "Juan Pachanga" is a commentary on stereotypical sex
roles and the eternal tug of war between men and women. The song
implies that its character's superficial life is the result of romantic disillusionment. It gives a psychological explanation for the extreme behavior of a typical Latin American male: heavy drinking, smoking, late-

204 : Jorge Duany

night partying and dancing. The deceptive appearance of the mamito

hides a deeper level of frustrationand emotional pain. The pachanga-the
fiesta, the rum, the rumba-is simply a defense mechanism against
reality. Juan Pachanga, like many Latin men, compensates for the loss
of a woman's love by pretending to be "cool," aloof, untouched.
Although the song does not question the validity of the norms that
govern male-female relations in Hispanic cultures, it does seem to reject the antisocial pattern of conduct that results from some of these relations. Here the man has been abandoned by a woman, and it is he
who must learn to forget. This is clearly a male's image of the world;
like most salsa songs, it was conceived and written by a man, sung and
executed largely by men. Yet the message is clear that there is something pathological in Juan Pachanga's role playing. The macho is invulnerable and is not supposed to feel or to become entangled with the
women he seduces. In the end the text conforms to its Hispanic cultural
context, since it continues to treat the female (la morena)as an alien object that is never fully understood, at once feared and desired. Here
again is the vision of the woman as a source of pain and pleasure, but
not as a person in her own right.

A Collection of Broken Dreams

The last song I wish to discuss is "Pablo Pueblo," which, not surprisingly, carries a generic term in its title. Pueblomeans "people". The name
Pablo-Paul-is quite resounding, particularlywhen we relate it to the
other two first names in the songs. Pedro, Juan, and Pablo are all biblical in origin, but it is not clear how much further one can go in associating them with particular signs. Perhaps Blades's major goal was to select
common, simple names from the Spanish heritage, not to suggest any
strong religious connotations.
The elemental difference between "Pablo Pueblo" and the two previous texts is that here the narrator identifies himself with his main character. Pablo Pueblo is a humble worker and a family man; his life is a
collection of broken dreams. His story is the story of so many poor
people who are unable to improve their lot within the system, no matter
how hard they try. This is why the narrator does not ridicule the protagonist; on the contrary, his tone is tender and compassionate. He even
calls him "Pablito," the affectionate diminutive.
The prevailing mood of the song is melancholy and reflexive. In contrast to the other songs, this one chooses twilight as the time of narration. Humor is totally absent and so is the elaborate slang language of
the other texts. Once more, the chorus is a key to the whole composi-

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 205

tion: "Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano" ("Pablo Pueblo, Pablo my brother"). This is an unequivocal statement of social solidarity with the urban
poor whom Pablo represents.
Puerto Rican migrants in New York and other large U.S. cities have
seen their traditional lifestyles transformedby the experience of industrialization, proletarianization, and bureaucratization(Cortes, Falc6n,
Flores 1976), and it is this situation that forms the core of "Pablo Pueblo." The text functions on two primary levels: first, it documents the
material conditions of an alienated existence; second, it stresses the contrast between the present surroundings and the customary ways of
coping with daily life. Pablo Pueblo works, votes, prays, buys lottery
tickets, bets on horses, plays dominoes, and drinks. But he is unable to
change his or his family's situation. He remains trapped in the vicious
cycle of poverty, much like many of his compatriots who came to the
United States with many dreams but few skills and little money. The
culture of the Puerto Rican barriowould seem to be reduced in this song
to a number of ritualized gestures that express-but also provide an
escape from-the depression and desperation of living marginally.

Ruben Blades's Brand of Salsa

The foregoing points to some recurring themes in Ruben Blades's lyrics.
First of all, he is clearly trying to write salsa with a message. In practice,
this turns out to be a song type that uses folkloristicmaterials and social
concerns to tell the story of archetypal Latin American charactersin an
urban ambience. These narratives are usually critical of the way social
relations are organized in the present circumstances. They are also
strongly attached to popular language forms; the lyrics are no more and
no less than stylizations of the everyday Caribbean Spanish spoken in
the barrios.Words such as gaban, sala, giiro, and chavosare found not in
standard academic dictionaries but in Puerto Rican colloquial speech. In
sum, Blades's songs have much in common with Latin American oral
literature, especially the satirical vein of social commentary.
They are also deeply embedded in folk music traditions. Blades was
born in Panama and grew up in the lower-class neighborhoods of the
capital city. His mother was a Cuban singer and his father, a Panamanian, used to play the bong6. In New York City, he learned the
vocal style of Puerto Rican singers like Tito Rodriguez and Cheo Feliciano. He continues to be associated with the Puerto Rican community; in
fact, his most successful songs, including "Plastico," "Manuela," and
"Ligia Elena," have been produced by the Puerto Rican musician Willie Colon. Although white in physical appearance, Blades is culturally a

206 : JorgeDuany
mulatto who synthesizes Caribbean musical currents transplantedto a
North American urban-industrialcontext. IncorporatingCuban, Puerto
Rican, and Panamanian styles, he dominates the slow tempo of the bolero,
the confessional love song, the popular ballad, and the fast-moving son.

Conclusion
Salsais an amalgamation of Caribbean folk traditions, musical styles,
and rhythms. Its most characteristictrait is precisely this transculturation of songs, instruments, and dances from various groups of Caribbean migrants to the United States. The North American contribution
should also be noted in the influences of jazz and soul, especially. Salsa
thus represents a new phase in the evolution of Afro-Hispanic culture:
that of the urban-industrialworking class. The backbone of salsa music
is the Puerto Rican proletariat-and its counterparts in other major
Caribbean cities-which uses the Cuban son, the Dominican merengue,
or
the Puerto Rican plenato represent symbolically the multifaceted universe of the urban ghetto.
The best salsa songs voice the problems of this disadvantaged class.
Scarcity, violence, inequality, marginality, and desperation are translated into the words and music of the popular singers and performers
from the barrio.Street fights and love affairs marked by treason and
suspicion have replaced the romantic themes of the jibaritoand the coqui
and the smell of freshly ground coffee from the mountain as meaningful
reference points. Instead, the world of salsa is full of allusions to the
factory, the supermarket, welfare programs, or urban decay.
Musically, salsa is as far removed from the cha-cha-cha as is the trombone from the violin: the carefully arranged sound of the latter has
yielded to the violent orchestrationof the former. The pace of life has
quickened, and so has the rhythm of the music. The traditional genres
of Puerto Rico have been urbanized along with the other customs of
rural migrants. Some salsa groups have even begun to experiment with
the electric piano, thus increasing the distance from those simple trios of
guitars and giiiros that sang Christmas aguinaldosand love serenades
from door to door. In short, salsa communicates, reproduces, and elaborates the social order in which the Puerto Rican urban proletariat is
inserted (cf. Williams 1981).
Salsaprovides models of behavior for facing the realities of economic
dependence and the social marginality of the barrio.The messages range
from Ruben Blades's spirited indictments of inequality and injustice, to
the humorous depiction of these issues by El Gran Combo, to the alienated tropical babble of many salsa songs. But these are all inside views of

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 207

the lower-class community, views that have their own inner logic and
express their own values. What is vulgar or meaningless from an outside
perspective (especially in terms of the language of salsa) is from another
standpoint-that of the audience-nothing more than an accurate reflection of daily life, at its worst, and folk poetry, at its best. It should
not be forgotten that, for the vast majority of Puerto Ricans, salsalyrics,
along with the bolero,make up their only poetry as well as a major source
of public morality. Salsa songs propose a complex, alternative image of
Puerto Rican culture that directly contradicts its trivialization and idealization in the mass media (for example, WestSideStory).
It is plain, then, that the Puerto Rican popular sectors-the so-called
cocolos-define musical performanceaccordingto a set of concepts derived
from creole culture. Salsa represents a sort of reconciliation between the
two basic sources of Puerto Rican folk music: the predominantly mulatto
plenaand the black bomba,on the one hand, and the predominantly white
seis on the other. Or, to put it another way, it reflects a synthesis of
Afro- and Hispano-Puerto Rican trends, of the coastal lowlands and the
inner highlands. Of course, these have been fused with some foreign
musical currents, but that does not invalidate its basically nationalistic
appeal. At any rate, one should worry less about the precise origins of
cultural practices than about their use and meaning in interpersonal
encounters.
Salsa is as much a part of the Puerto Rican heritage as the typical
asopaosoup or the popular cockfight. Bloch's (1973:181) dictum, "Puerto
Rican music is the most convincing evidence of the existence of the
Puerto Rican people's own cultural personality," makes one wonder
why this fact was ever questioned. It is well to remember that this socalled cultural personality may be a hybrid cross primarily between Hispanic and African elements, and that it may have been eroded by American assimilationpolicies as much as by the massive migration movements
to and from the island; but there is no doubt that in their popular music
the Puerto Rican masses express and celebrate a coherent sensibility, a
distinctly creole identity that has not falteredbut, if anything, has been reaffirmed in the recent history of their nationality.

208 : JorgeDuany

APPENDIX
Three Songs by Ruben Blades
PEDRO NAVAJA
Por la esquina del viejo barrio lo vi pasar
con el tumbao que tienen los guapos al caminar.
Las manos siempre en los bolsillos de su gaban,
pa' que no sepan en cual de ellas lleva el puiial.
Usa un sombrero de ala ancha de medio lao,
y zapatillas por si hay problemas, salir volao.
Lentes oscuros, pa' que no sepan que esta mirando,
y un diente de oro que cuando rie se ve brillando.
Como a tres cuadras de aquella esquina una mujer
va recorriendo la acera entera por quinta vez.
Y en un zaguan entra y se da un trago para olvidar
que el dia esta flojo y no hay clientes pa' trabajar.
Un carro pasa, muy despacito, por la avenida,
no tiene marcas pero to's saben que es policia.
Pedro Navaja, las manos siempre dentro del gaban,
mira y sonrie y el diente de oro vuelve a brillar.
Mientras camina pasa la vista de esquina a esquina,
no se ve un alma, esta desierta toa la avenida.
Cuando de pronto esa mujer sale del zaguan,
y Pedro Navaja aprieta un puno dentro del gaban.
Mira pa' un lado, mira pa'l otro y no ve a nadie,
y a la carrera, pero sin ruido, cruza la calle.
Y mientras tanto, en la otra acera, va esa mujer
refunfuiiando pues no hizo pesos con que comer.
Mientras camina del viejo abrigo saca un revolver, esa mujer,
y va a guardarlo en su cartera pa' que no estorbe:
un treinta y ocho, Smith and Wesson, del especial
que carga encima pa' que la libre de todo mal.
Y Pedro Navaja, pufial en mano, le fue pa' encima,
el diente de oro iba alumbrando toa la avenida, iguiso facil!

Popular Music in Puerto Rico : 209

Mientras refa, el punal hundia, sin compasi6n,
cuando de pronto, son6 un disparo como un cai6on.
Y Pedro Navaja cay6 en la acera mientras veia, a esa mujer,
que revolver en mano y de muerte herida a 1e le decia:
"Yo que pensaba, hoy no es mi dia, estoy sala,
pero Pedro Navaja, tu estas peor, no estas en na!"
Y creanme gente, que aunque hubo ruido, nadie sali6.
No hubo curiosos, no hubo preguntas, nadie llor6.
S6lo un borracho con los dos muertos se tropezo,
cogio el revolver, el pufial, los pesos y se march6.
Y tropezando, se fue cantando desafinao
el coro que aquf les traje y da el mensaje de mi canci6n:
"La vida te da sorpresas,
sorpresas te da la vida, jay Dios!
Coro: La vida te da sorpresas,
sorpresas te da la vida, i ay Dios!
Valiente pescador, mal anzuelo que tiraste,
en vez de una sardina, un tibur6n enganchaste.
Coro: I'd like to live in America!
La vida te da . . .
Ocho millones de historias tiene la ciudad de Nueva York.
Coro: La vida te da . . .
Como decia mi abuelita, el que uiltimo rie se rfe mejor.
Coro: I'd like to live in America!
La vida te da . ..
Cuando lo manda el destino, no lo cambia ni el mas bravo.
Si naciste pa' martillo, del cielo te caen los clavos.
Coro: La vida te da . .
En barrio de guapos, cuidao en la acera,
cuidao camara, que el que no corre vuela.

210 : Jorge Duany

Coro: La vida te da . . .
Como en una novela de Kafka, el borracho doblo por el callej6n.
Coro: La vida te da.
Hablado: En la ciudad de Nueva York, dos personas fueron encontradas
muertas. Esta madrugada los cuerpos sin vida de Pedro . . .

JUAN PACHANGA
Son las cinco 'e la maniana y amanece,
Juan Pachanga bien vestido aparece.
Todos en el barrio estan descansando
Y Juan Pachanga en silencio va pensando
Que aunque su vida es fiesta y ron, noche y rumba,
Su plante es falso igual que aquel amor que lo engafi6.
Y la luz del sol se ve alumbrando
Y Juan Pachanga el mamito va penando,
Vestido a la ultima moda y perfumado
Con zapatos 'e colores ye-ye bien lustrados.
Los que encuentra en su camino lo saludan, hey men!
Que feliz es Juan Pachanga, todos juran.
Pero lleva en el alma el dolor de una traici6n
Que s6lo calman los tragos, los tabacos y el tambor.
Y mientras la gente duerme aparece
Juan Pachanga con su pena y amanece.
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala.
Aparece con la pena
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala
No no no no te quiere la morena
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala
Mira que esta amaneciendo
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala
Por amor, por amor te estas muriendo
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga, olvidala
Olvidala que olvidala que olvidala

PopularMusic in PuertoRico : 211

Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga
Ay despierta y botala
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga
Porque nunca te ha querido
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga
Dale tambien olvido
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga
Deja el cuento y la mentira
Coro: Oyeme Juan Pachanga
Que el amor no se mendiga

olvidala
olvidala
olvidala
olvidala
olvidala

PABLO PUEBLO
Regresa un hombre en silencio
De su trabajo cansado,
Su paso no lleva prisa,
Su sombra nunca lo alcanza.
Lo espera el barrio de siempre,
Con el farol en la esquina,
Con la basura alla en frente
Y el giiro de la cantina.
Pablo Pueblo llega hasta el zaguan oscuro
Y vuelve a ver las paredes
Con las viejas papeletas
Que prometian futuros
En lides politiqueras.
Y en su cara se dibuja
La decepci6n de la espera.
Pablo Pueblo, hijo del grito y la calle,
De la miseria y el hambre,
Del callej6n y la pena.
Pablo Pueblo, tu alimento es la esperanza.
Su paso no lleva prisa,
Su sombra nunca lo alcanza.
Llega al patio pensativo y cabizbajo
Con su silencio de pobre,
Con los gritos por abajo.

212 : JorgeDuany
La ropa alla en los balcones
El viento la va secando.
Escucha un trueno en el cielo,
Tiempo de lluvia avisando.
Entra al cuarto y se queda mirando
A su mujer y a los nifios,
Y se pregunta Chastacuando?
Toma sus sueniosraidos,
Los parcha con esperanza.
Hace del hambre una almohada
y se acuesta triste de alma.
[Se repite Pablo Pueblo, hijo del grito, etc.]
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Trabaj6 hasta jubilarse y nunca sobraron chavos
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Votando en las elecciones, pa' despues comerse un clavo
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Pablo con el silencio del pobre, con los gritos por abajo
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Echa pa'lante Pablito y a la vida mete mano
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
A un crucifijo rezando y el cambio esperando en Dios
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Mira a su mujer y a los nenes y se pregunta hasta cuando
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Llega a su barrio de siempre cansao de la factoria
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Buscando suerte en caballos y comprando loteria
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Ganandose un dinerito en domin6 y tomandose un par de tragos
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Hijo del grito y la calle, de la pena y el quebranto
Coro:Pablo Pueblo, Pablo hermano
Ay Pablo Pueblo, ay Pablo hermano

Popular Music in PuertoRico : 213

Note
1. I am grateful to Marian Z. Sugano and to Thomas Turino for many
helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. I am also indebted
to Prof. Michel S. Laguerre for his insights into Caribbean ethnohistory.

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