Book Forum: Marisol Negrón

The Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South is pleased to host a scholarly forum presenting the recently published book, "Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa's Nuyorican Meanings" (Duke University Press, October 2024) by Professor Marisol Negrón (University of Massachusetts, Boston).

In "Made in NuYoRico," Professor 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.

We invite you to join us in the East Duke Pink Parlor on March 19, 2025 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., when Professor Negrón will be joined by Professor Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) and Professor Juan Otero Garabís (University of Puerto Rico). Their presentations and Prof. Negrón's response will be followed by Q&A and discussion. The panel will be moderated by Verónica Cora-Castillo (Ph.D candidate, Romance Studies).

A reception with light refreshments will follow.