The

City

of
Musical
Memory
Salsa,
Record Grooves,
and Popular Culture
in Cali, Colombia

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, Connecticut

Published by Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 064-59

Copyright by Lise A. Waxer, 2002

All rights reserved
0-8I95-64-4-1-9 cloth
0-8I95-64-4-2-7 paper
Printed in the United States of America
Design and composition by Chris Crochetiere,
B. Williams &Associates
ISBN

ISBN

4-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waxer, Lise.
The city of musical memory : Salsa, record grooves, and popular culture
in Cali, Colombia j by Lise A. Waxer.
p. cm. - (Musicjculture)
Includes bibliographical references, discography, and indexo
ISBN 0-8195-64-4-1-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
- ISBN 0-8195-64-4-2-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Salsa (Music)-Social aspecrs-Colombia-Cali.
2. Salsa (Music)-History and criticismo
3. Salsa (Dance)-History and criticismo
4-. Cali (Colombia)-Sociallife and customs.
l. Title. II. Series.
ML3918.S26 W38 2002
78r.64--dc21 2002066162

For Medardo Arias Satizbal,

el poeta de las noches caleas

ated the music, putting in motion the giant Caseta Panamricana,

wruch was fit to burst last night and the night before. 44
Keeping with traditon, sorne current local salsa bands perform "golden
oldies" such as "Micaela" at the accelerated 45 rpm speed, and not the original 33 rpm tempo. Indeed, one night 1 heard the all-woman salsa band
Canela perform this tune at a concert, and the combined effect of the fast
tempo and higher-pitched women's voices created an uncanny reproduction of 45 rpm playback, establishing a kind of Baudrillardean, hyperreal
feedback in the cycle between live and mediated music.
By the early 1970S Caleos could go salsa dancing every night of the
week. The scene became somewhat of a "mobile party" in which different
griles were the "in spot" on successive nights of the week. Depending on
which variation of the circuit one ascribed to, Mondays were for going to
Honka Monka, Estambul, or Aguacate; Tuesdays, La Manzana or Marcia;
Wednesdays, Mauna Loa or Escalinata; Thursdays, Scrura and, later, the
Village Game; Frdays, Sptimo Cielo; Saturdays, an open night, all clubs
were full; and Sunday afternoons and evenings, Sptimo Cielo, El Grill Ro
Call, or El Escondite. 45 Sometimes a locallive band might appear at one
of this places, usually performing cover versions of the current New York
and Puerto Rican hits. Furthermore, when griles in the city were obliged
to close their doors at 2:00 A.M., revelers could continue to dance until
dawn in Juanchito, an Afro-Colombian settlement on the city's outskirts
that was not subject to municipal ordinances and became an all-night salsa
party spot for Caleos. Although it was the rare salsmano or salsmana
who could endure going out to dance every single night of the week, most
Caleos remember these as the glory days of Call's dance scene.

Salsa Ballets and Dance Competitions

Through the late 1960s and into the 1970S, dance competitions were a regular feature at many griles, spurring dancers to further refine their moves and
invent new steps. The winners of such events usually received little more
than a free bottle of aguardiente; although sorne also received cash prizes,46
dancers competed mainly for enjoyment and social prestige (Ulloa 1992:
4n). Salsa Boor shows also emerged in the earIy 1970S, with such groups
as the Ballet de la Salsa performing choreographed salsa dance routines
(Figures 2.4-2.7). Organized in 1971 by Alfonso Prieto and Jos Pardo
Llada, the Ballet de la Salsa was a troupe of six men and four women, including such famed local dancers as Amparo "Arrebato," Telemb King, and
'tS' Chapter 2.

Jirnrny "Boogaloo."47 The effort to formalize local salsa dance styles for
public shows paved the way for other groups. These include Evelio Carabalf's Ballet Folclor Urbano, founded in the 1970S and still active,48 and the
Cali Rumba school (1985-88). More recent salsa exhibition projects include
Liliana Salinas's Ballet de Azucar and Andrs uudo's school. During the
late 1980s salsa was even fused with the elite forms of classical ballet
and modern dance to produce the Barrio Ballet, a troupe connected to Incolballet, the city dance company.
To my knowledge, the Ballet de la Salsa was the first enterprise of its
kind on the international salsa scene, appearing long before choreographed
salsa shows began to be performed in New York and Puerto Rico. Not only
the dance routines but the very costurnes troupe members wore pointed
to a creative refashioning of cosmopolitan symbols. From old Hollywood
films dancers borrowed Roaring Twenties Bapper dresses, beads, candystriped jackets, straw boaters, and canes-clothing 1 have never encountered in salsa scenes elsewhere. No doubt these garments and accessories were meant to reinforce salsa's glamorous image. Notably, if one is
to judge from photographs of salsa show dancing the era, most of the men
were black., while the women were either mestiza or light-skinned mulatas.
1 am not able to fully account for this-indeed, during the 1980s and 1990S
salsa exhibition dancers in Cali came from all racial back.grounds, while the
top teachers and most skilled dancers, men and women, tended to be darkskinned Mro-Colombians, so there is no consistent pattern here. What is
certain, however, is that even in the mid-1990s, the stereotype that MroColombians were the best dancers-prevalent during the heyday of the
Zona de Tolerancia-persisted among Caleos. 1 frequently heard stereotypical cornments (especially from light-skinned, middle-class Caleos)
about the "rhythmic power" of black. salsa dancers.
The local sphere of competitive salsa dancing reached its peak with the
staging of the Campeonato Mundial de la Salsa (World Salsa Dance Championsrup) in 1974 and I975. One of the judges in the first year was the legendary Cuban vocalist Rolando LaSerie, whose presence was seen as consecrating the evento The second year bullt on the success of the first and
featured live salsa by the rising Colombian band Fruko y sus Tesos. With
a grand prize of a 100,000 Colombian pesos (equivalent to roughly
US$15,000 back then), these were major competitions indeed. Although
nearly all the contestants were actually from Cali and there was not a single
international participant, these "world" dance competitions served as public
spectacles that not only reinforced salsa's prominence in local popular life,
but also emphasized the cosmopolitan sensibility linked to salsa and msica
The Record-Centered Dance Scene

't't

antillana. Dancing to salsa, in other words, became the expressive mode

through which Caleos conceived of and projected their own position in
the world at large. In his weekly column the expatriate Cuban journalist
Jos Pardo liada, a cofounder of the contest, wrote: "In Cali salsa is not
a passing fad, but rather a manner, a form, a style of interpreting dance by
the people of this city. And only in Cali do they dance this way. Not even
the Costeos, with their singular sense of rhythm, dance salsa 'the Caleo
way.' Salsa is, definitively, the musical emblem of a city and a province, Cali
and El Valle."49 That Caleos were prodaiming their city the world capital
of salsa by the late 1970S stems less from whether Cali was actually a
bonafide salsa capital than from the conviction that Caleos believed they
were more passionate about salsa than anyone clse on the planct. The emotional investment Caleos had in defining themselves as world-class salsa
fans hence constituted for them a move to stake their position on the international popular cultural map.

Salsa Radio
During the second half of the 1960s and the 1970S, salsa programs began
to appear on local radio airwaves, reinforcing the dance-oriented euphoria generated by the griles and agelulos. According to Lismaco Paz,
Radio Reloj was the first local station to put salsa on the air locally, playing
individual pachanga and bugal numbers. 50 The first show dedicated to
salsa, however, was Festival en el aire) launched in 1965 on La Voz del Valle.
In 1969 the enormously popular Ritmo) salsa) y sabor began its nineteen-year
run on Radio El Sol. This show was produced by Paz, who supplied material for the program from his contacts with sailors in Buenaventura. These
early programs were key in diffusing the new salsa sound to local audiences,
since recordings were still very difficult to obtain. Salsa radio permeated the
local soundscape, played not only in people's homes but also in shops and
on public buses.
Through the early and mid-1970s, several more salsa programs appeared.
Radio announcers such as Edgar Reman Arce and El Diablo Cajiao became media personalities who helped boost the excitement surrounding
salsa in local popular life. Both these men were working-class Caleos of
mestizo background. As Ulloa describes, a distinct dialect developed that
was associated with salsa announcers, whose colorful and animated speech
peppered their programs and heightened the rumbero (party) ambience of
the local scene (1992: 4-83-97). Typical phrases that announcers would interject over the music included "Ms salsa que pescao" (More salsa [or
1!JZ

Chapter :1

sauce1than fish) and "Salsaludando" ("Salsalutations"). Arce recalls that he

and other announcers had great fun coining new phrases. 5! Since announcers tended move around between different stations, their argot became a
common vemacular for local salsa broadcasting. Notably, Cali's radio announcers were the ones who first started promoting the slogan of "world
salsa capital;' which print media had picked up on the late 1970S. 52
The peak years for salsa radio in Cali during the record-centered dance
scene were 1975-76. By this time sorne of the local stations had gone to an
all-salsa format and were broadcasting salsa twenty-four hours a day. These
induded Radio El Sol and La Voz del Valle, stations that had pioneered
local salsa prograrnming in the 1960s. The national radio chain Caracol also
launched a local all-salsa station called Radio Tigre in 1973 and decided to
schedule the station's debut during Roly Week. Prior to this time, Roly
Week had been a time of solemn observance in Cali, when only religious
music was played on the radio and people put aside the rumba. The nonstop broadcasting of salsa dura by Radio Tigre caused a huge scandal and
earned the station tremendous publicity. The fact that one of the station's
key announcers was nicknamed El Diablo Cajiao (The Devil Cajiao) further scandalized the church. Reman Arce was involved in the launch and
explained the commercial strategy behind this move.
Ir involved a big push for publicity. We laid a trap for Father Alfonso
Hurtado Galvis, who is the one who rules in Cali during Roly Week.
We wanted to do something that would make a big impact and that
would affect city life. And that's how we prograrnmed only salsa, on
Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Father Hurtado
Galvis, who was broadcasting his mass, realized this because sorne
people called to tell him that there was a radio station playing party
music, and so he began to denounce us, how this was a lack of respect,
that the Ministry of Communications should be called to suspend uso
And so many people who were listening to him, they began to look
for Radio Tigre and stayed listening to it because only salsa music was
played, without commercials or announcements. Effectively, Father
Hurtado fell into the trap, and without realizing it he gave us a lot
of publicity, just as we had foreseen. (Quoted in Ulloa 1992: 4-72)

Radio Tigre's audacious stunt dramatized the fervent atmosphere that

Cali's record-centered dance scene had begun to generate by the first half
of the 1970S. Notably, the incident reveals continued tensions bctween elite
and working-class sectors of Caleo society over msica antillana and salsa,
and the ways in which control over public space, airwaves, and musical
The Record-Centered Dance Scene

1!J~

tastes was considered important for the constitution of local subjectivity.

The Catholic Church, whose hold on Colombian society and politics had
steadily waned since the nineteenth century, cleady wanted to retain power
over what they felt was the last area upon which they could exert authorityHoly Week. Knowing this, however, local salseros devised a tactic to assist their expansion into city radio waves, by encroaching on the Catholic
Church's dominance of Holy Week and tuming church denunciations into free
publicity.
In contrast to a similar scenario twenty years eadier, when the archbishop of Antioquia denounced the mambo and msica tropical in the
1950S, local working-class salseros did not merely ignore elitist indictrnents
against their culture but actually subverted them to their own ends. Interestingly, neither El Pas nor El Occidente) the two local daily newspapers, reported a single line about this incident, indieating that the church still had
sorne degree of control over local media. 53
Radio Tigre, one of Cali's first all-salsa radio stations, mirrored the
boom in all-salsa programming that dominated local soundscapes during
the eady 1970S. By the end of the decade the excitement had declined, and
radio stations reverted to mixed-format prograrnming. It was not until the
late 1980s, at the apex of Cali's live scene, that Caleos had all-salsa radio
stations again.

The Decline of the Dance Scene

A number of factors led to the decline of the local record-centered dance
scene in the 1980s. The teen agiielulos had ended in the early 1970S, owing
to the logistical complications and gang violence associated with the increasingly large gatherings (1 was told that the last agiielulo drew nearly
two thousand people).54 The nightdub scene also shifted toward a wealthier clientele, as money poured into the city with the rise of the Cali cocaine
cartel. This period coincided with a new era of rapid urbanization in Cali,
since the influx of wealth also spurred the construction of luxury condominiums, shopping centers, and residential villages.
The tendency toward material display and high spending in the new
salsa nightclubs led to economic inflation throughout the local scene. By
the eady 1990S clubs were charging as much as 40,000 pesos (US$50) for
a borde oflocal mm or aguardiente (which cost only $2-3 in the store); imported whiskey could easily run over $100 a borde. The city also became
much more violent: cocaine mafiosos began to atrend nightclubs armed

104-

Chapter 2

with pistols and submachine guns, and people risked getting shot in gangland-style shoot-outs. The sharp rise in muggings and hold-ups further discouraged individuals from going out to dance. 55 Given the combination of
high nightclub priees and urban violence, most Caleos simply chose to
stay at home.
As a result, local popular culture developed two distinct branches. One
was the flourishing of the live salsa scene in the I980s, associated with the
rise of the cocaine cartel. Importandy, the style of salsa associated with
the live scene was not I960s and I970S salsa dura, but rather salsa romntica. Following international cornmercial trends, local radio stations and
luxury nightdubs also played salsa romntica instead of the classie sounds.
People continued to dance in these venues, but the creative fervor of the
earlier scene diminished considerably. Salsa dance contests and floor shows
disappeared altogether. By the time 1 arrived in Cali in 1994, it was very
difficult to see good salsa dancing in such clubs-indeed, 1 did not witness
the famous Caleo style of dancing until the resurgence of the viejotecas
in 1996.
Die-hard fans of classie 1960S-70S salsa, on the other hand, established
spaces of their own in the salsotecas and tabernas, discussed in the next
chapter. Through the 1980s and 1990S, the salsotecas and luxury nightclubs
emerged as parallel salsa rones in Cali. With few exceptions, their physical location and the style of musie they played mapped onto the socioeconornic stratification of Cali's neighborhoods (see Appendices 1 and 2).
Luxury nightclubs featuring salsa romntica prevailed along the Avenida
Roosevelt, Avenida Sexta, and Calle Quinta near Imbanaco (Carrera 39)all major roads in rniddle- and upper-rniddle-class neighborhoods. The
salsotecas and tabernas, on the other hand, which featured classie salsa dura
and Cuban musie, were concentrated along or near Calle 44 (dubbed la
calle de las salsotecas [the salsoteca street]), a three-mile-Iong artery running
through the heart of several working-dass barrios.
Thls dual salsa culture is unique in Latin America. By the early 1990S
luxur)' nightclubs and salsa romntica had largely replaced earlier establishments in major salsa cities such as New York, San Juan, Miarni, and Caracas. Whlle Cali was not immune to thls trend, local aficionados of 1960s
and 1970S salsa maintained public spaces in which to gather and collectively
reaffirm their love of thls style. The very recordings that were the focus of
Cali's earlier dance scene were easily transferred to the new spaces of the
salsotecas and tabernas, which maintained an active role for recorded musc
in local popular culture.

The Record-Centered Dance Scene

1(1)