Salsa Consciente

ANDRÉS ESPINOZA AGURTO currently serves as assistant professor in the Department of Music at Florida Atlantic University. He studied Afro-Cuban percussion at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (Cuba), graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music with a degree in jazz composition, and holds an MA in music from the University of York (England). He received his PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology from Boston University. He is the composer, musical director, and percussionist of his own group, Ayé. He is also a consecrated drummer in the lineage of Añá Ilu Kan and is currently conducting research on the lineage, performance practice, and aesthetics of Afro-Cuban batá drummers and drumming. He is an active participant in the Percussive Arts Society where he serves as the cochair of the World Percussion Committee.

• Contents Foreword, by Rubén O. Martinez Preface Acknowledgments Section One. Performing Consciencia: Salsa as a Chronicle of El Pueblo Chapter One. Salsa as Class Consciousness Chapter Two. Salsa as the Engine of Latino Consciousness Section Two. Literizing Salsa: The Compositions of Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso and Rubén Blades Chapter Three. The Works of Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso Chapter Four. Rubén Blades’s Move into Salsa Chapter Five. Rubén Blades’s Move Out of Salsa Conclusion Appendix One. Cross-Referenced Table of Songs Included in This Book Appendix Two. Table Showing the Album Personnel and Arrangers of the Songs Analyzed Notes Bibliography Index

A significant account of the role of popular music in the political project of Latinidad. Andrés Espinoza Agurto dispenses with parochial squabbles over Salsa’s name or origins to describe its role in the collective seizing of a decolonized consciousness of shared African and Native histories and the common experience of working-class barrio life, both across the hemisphere and around the way. Through close readings of the music and lyrics of Salsa composers (rather than performers), he traces the steps in the emergence of Latinx class consciousness in the twentieth century and, in an important final gesture, the continuation of Salsa’s political project of Latinidad in the musical movements of today.—Michael Birenbaum Quintero, associate professor of music and chair, musicology and ethnomusicology, Boston University