Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings

by Marisol Negrón

In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsa’s 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, Negrón 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. Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsa’s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrón demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

344 pages, Paperback

Published October 25, 2024

Reviews

[Steve Roylance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look into the creation of salsa music and its role in Puerto Rican culture and identity. Not a book for people looking for a chronological history of Fania records

[Stephanie Pitsirilos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a cerebral, in-depth book. It even ventures into fascinating copyright questions that pair with philosophy and the arts. the Fania era in NYC is such a timestamp of my family life. It tells the story of many.

Pair this book with your reads on salsa music, Fania Records, vinyl album cover design, New York Puerto Rican Identity , Nuyorico and music copyright.

[Pedro Pinhel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great research work.