Salsa is not easily defined. Who invented salsa? The Cubans, Puerto Ricans? Salsa is a distillation of many Latin and Afro-Caribbean dances. Each played a large part in its evolution.

It is now more than 30 years since band leader Johnny Pacheco founded Fania Records as a fledgling Latin record company, contracting the up-and-coming New York dance bands and distributing his records to area stores from the trunk of his car. By 1970, with the input of entrepreneur Jerry Masucci, Fania had turned the New York Latin beat into the soundtrack for the Latino pride movement that spread from Spanish Harlem throughout the urban Caribbean Basin. Salsa, Fania's name for its product, went on to become the popular music of choice for some ten million Latinos. Its trajectory can serve as an index for much of what has happened in Spanish Caribbean culture over the last three decades. Salsa was never confined to the hermetic world of dance clubs and record studios. Rather, its style and its role in Latino culture have always been conditioned by changing demographic and socioeconomic patterns, the workings of the music industry, interaction with rival music styles, and changing political orders.

Fania Records, with a combination of entrepreneurial skill, aggressive marketing, and energetic talent scouting, rode the crest of the socio stylistically musical moment, explicitly linking the fresh, new sound of the New York Latin bands to the buoyant spirit of the barrio. Curiously, perhaps, the chosen musical vehicle was neither stylistically new nor distinctively Puerto Rican; rather, it was essentially Cuban-style dance music a modern version of the son, which had dominated Cuban music since the 1920s. In the early decades of the century, the son had emerged as a medium-tempo urban folk idiom featuring vocals backed by sextets or septets of guitar, the guitar-like tres, trumpet, bass, and light percussion. In the 1940s the son was further Afro-Cubanized by the use of congas and faster tempos, and the incorporation of more horns and sophisticated, jazz-influenced harmonies and arrangements. It was the brassy, sophisticated, mature son of the 1950s that became the stylistic backbone of what came to be called "salsa."

The choice of Cuban dance music was in many respects quite natural and logical. This music had flourished for decades not only in Puerto Rico, but in New York City itself--the crucible of some of the most vital developments in Latin music, including the big-band mambo of the fifties. To some, labeling this music "salsa" seemed artificial, especially in the case of "salsa stars" like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, whose musical styles had evolved 25 years before the term was coined. To Cubans who knew that many of Johnny Pacheco's hits were simply note-for-note renditions of Cuban records of the 1950s, the use of the rubric "salsa" seemed like an attempt to obscure the music's Cuban origins by capitalizing on the Cold-War quarantine of the island bands and recordings.

But if Cuban music constituted the core of salsa style, Newyoricans had resignified the music in a way that largely justified the adoption of a new name, however commercial in origin. As the music become reborn as a symbol of the Newyoricans, and by extension, pan-Latino ethnic identity, its Cuban stylistic origins, like those of the rumba played by street drummers throughout the city, became essentially irrelevant. While Cuba was remote and isolated, salsa, in the words of a popular Spanish-language radio program, was “el alma del barrio” -the soul of the barrio.

Then, as a tree, Salsa has many roots and many branches, but one trunk that unites us all. The important thing is that Salsa is played throughout the Hispanic world and has received influences of many places within it. It is of all of us and it is a sample of our flexibility and evolution. If you think that a single place can take the credit for the existence of Salsa, you are wrong. And if you think that one style of dance is better, imagine that the best dancer of a style, without his partner, goes to dance with whomever he can find, in a club where a different style predominates. He wouldn't look as good as the locals. Each dancer is accustomed to dance his/her own style. None is better, only different. Viva la variedad!!!, Viva la Salsa!!!