SO! Reads: Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings
I began reading Marisol Negrón’s Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings (Duke University Press, 2024) in earnest this summer, as Bad Bunny’s “NUEVAYol” flooded New York City streets. Whole generations of people had never heard El Gran Combo’s “Un Verano en Nueva York” (1975), perhaps not-coincidentally celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. The song is a staple in this city, particularly in the weeks leading up to the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. Instagram and TikTok were inundated with videos of Bad Bunny fans, many of whom were millennials and Gen Z, dancing with their grandparents to “NUEVAYoL” and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” Bad Bunny had successfully ushered in a resurgence of interest in salsa, a genre that has remained vibrant since its founding. The archipelago’s superstar celebrated the city that was, beginning in the early 1890s, a major site of Puerto Rican migration for decades; in several of the videos for songs from DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), he honored the Nuyorican community and all they had contributed to the culture.
In that vein, Negrón has written a book that is, shockingly to me, one of the very few books that center salsa in general and the role of New York in its creation specifically. In this, she joins Juan Flores, Frances Aparicio, and Christopher Washburne to produce book-length studies that examine this genre. She also depends on the magazine articles of long-gone local publications such as Latin N.Y., which ran from 1973-1985, and journalists such as Aurora Flores, Adela López, and Nayda Román, women who recorded what at times feels like an incredibly-male environment. Here, she is focusing on the record label that is synonymous with salsa, Fania Records, which, at one point had signed such singers and musicians as Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Ray Baretto, and Eddie Palmieri, whose passing this summer marked the end of an era, in many ways. Founded by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci in 1964, Fania reached its heights in the 1970s, securing a distribution center in Panama in 1974, establishing its own recording studio in 1976 – the first “Latin” label to do so – and purchasing a manufacturing plant in 1977. Yet by the end of the decade, many of the original artists had moved on, as had Masucci, who sold the catalog and created several other businesses that continued to do business using the name “Fania” (20). Nevertheless, the music that emerged from that critical historical moment in New York City continues to impact subsequent generations.
Citing Caridad de la Luz, La Bruja, a Nuyorican legend of the spoken word scene who currently serves as the executive director of Nuyorican Poets Café, Negrón defines NuYoRico as “that place somewhere between the Empire State and El Morro” (9), the latter being the fortress originally built in the sixteenth century that is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Made in NuYoRico is divided into two parts featuring three chapters each; the first part, “Anatomy of a Salsa Boom, 1964-1979” marks the cultural history of salsa for those fifteen years, while the second part, “After the Boom Is Gone, 1980s-2000s,” charts a fascinating examination of the salsa boom in various contexts, including a futile attempt by insular government officials to attract foreign investment by citing salsa as an impactful cultural artifact. In doing so, they offended a faction of the archipelago’s elites who distanced themselves due to the genre being created in the diaspora.
Negrón reviews the 1972 documentary classic Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa Latina) in her first chapter. This movie served for many as the introduction to the Fania All-Stars. Featuring footage from a 1971 concert at New York’s Cheetah Lounge, it features Barretto, Larry Harlow, Willie Colón, Ismael Miranda, “Cheo” Feliciano, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, and LaVoe (whose name appears in this way throughout the book recalling his nickname as “La Voz”). In chapter two, “‘Los Malotes de la Salsa’: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood,” Negrón looks at the imagery Colón and LaVoe create in their lyrics and the cover art of their albums, while the following chapter, “Salsa’s Dirty Secret: Liberated Women, Hairy Hippies, and the End of the World,” focuses on their performance, together and individually, of a virile masculinity dependent as much on the portraits of insubordinate women, unruly yearnings, and queerness. It is this chapter that speaks fleetingly of Celia Cruz and La Lupe, the two Afro-Cuban women who were the only women signed to Fania. In a study that examines how very much a masculinist world this was, I was looking for the counterpoint that both Cruz and La Lupe offered, only to be met with two pages of reference to them. A deeper discussion centering these women remains opportune.
The fourth chapter “Puerto Rico’s (Un)Freedom: The Soundscape of Nation Branding,” charts the moment in 1992 when, ahead of the celebrations within the Spanish-speaking world of Columbus’s voyage, Puerto Rican governor Rafael Hernández Colón sought to brand Puerto Rico using salsa as the premier Puerto Rican cultural export, only to be met with opposition from elites on the island. With the last two chapters, “Entre la Letra y la Nota: Becoming ‘El Cantante de los Cantantes,’” and “(Copy)Rights and Wrongs: ‘El Cantante’ and the Legislation of Creative Labor,” Negrón examines the last years of LaVoe, his improvisational contributions to what many consider to be his signature song, “El Cantante,” and the legal struggle between Rubén Blades, the writer of the song, and Masucci, for recognition of Blades as sole author of the song.
Made in NuYoRico is a fascinating book, one that encourages the reader to have their streaming service within reach. With the conversation of every album, one can pause and listen to the songs accompanying the album and the art under discussion. In this she joins countless scholars of music, but I was especially reminded of Mark Anthony Neal’s most recent book, Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU, 2022), which was fundamentally dependent on the reader listen to the songs he was referencing in real time. It is a theoretical book published by an academic press, and so discussions about abjection and subjecthood may not reach the general reader; nevertheless it is a worthwhile addition to the library of any salsa aficionado, who will undoubtedly learn something new while revisiting the past.
On August 23, 1973, only two years after their sets at the Cheetah Lounge, the Fania All-Stars played Yankee Stadium. Having attained a certain level of success with the release of Our Latin Thing, the concert at the celebrated ballpark secured legendary status for these singers as they played before more than 40,000 spectators. Four months later they reprised the concert in San Juan’s newly-built Coliseo Roberto Clemente. In September 1974 they played in the Zaire 74 music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the country’s premier stadium, the Stade du 20 Mai: the Fania All-Stars were global.
Fifty-one years later, in September 2025, the National Football League announced its selection of Bad Bunny as the performer of the Super Bowl LX halftime show, taking place in February 2026. The championship game is set to air exactly a week after the Grammy Awards, where Bad Bunny is nominated in six categories, including Best Record, Best Song, and Best Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. With an expected viewership of more than one hundred million people, he and his repertoire of reggaetón, dembow, Latin trap, boleros, and yes, decidedly Puerto Rican bomba, plena, and salsa, will be at the center of yet another international cultural moment. Debemos tirar más fotos.
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Featured Image” “Jibaros Con Salsa” by Flickr User Lorenzo, Taken on July 27, 2011, CC BY-NC 2.0
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Vanessa K. Valdés is a writer and an independent scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She is the author of three books, Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2014); Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Schomburg (SUNY Press, 2017); and with David Pullins, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (Yale UP, 2024). You can learn more about her at https://drvkv23.com/.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
SO! Reads: Licia Fiol-Matta’s The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music–Iván Ramos
SO! Reads: Danielle Shlomit Sofer’s Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music–Verónica Mota
As Loud As I Want To Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics–Liana Silva
Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes
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Faithful Listening: Notes Toward a Latinx Listening Methodology
**This piece is co-authored by Wanda Alarcón, Dolores Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Cloe Gentile Reyes
For weeks, we have been inundated with executive orders (220 at last count), alarming budget cuts (from science and the arts to our national parks), stupendous tariff hikes, the defunding of DEI-anything, the banning of transgender troops, a Congressional renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, terrifying ICE raids, and sadly, a refreshed MAGA constituency with a reinvigorated anti-immigrant public sentiment. Worse, the handlers for the White House’s social media publish sinister MAGA-directed memes, GIFs across their social channels. These reputed Public Service Announcements (PSAs), under President Trump’s second term, ruthlessly go after immigrants.
It’s difficult to refuse to listen despite our best attempts.
“The ASMR video was true.”
On February 18, 2025, the official White House social media account, @WhiteHouse, shared a 40-second video showing a group of detained immigrants boarding a military aircraft for deportation. The video was captioned: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, features gentle, soothing sounds—such as whispering, tapping, or brushing—which can evoke pleasurable tingling sensations. In this satirical ASMR-style post, however, the sounds include the clinking of metal shackles on concrete floors, the jangle of handcuffs against bodies, and the grating of metal on metal as detainees slowly ascend the aircraft’s steps. By framing these distressing noises within the ASMR genre, the video invites listeners to consume them as aesthetically pleasing; encouraging a visceral embodiment where the sounds of violence toward migrants elicit an uncontrollable physical pleasure that seeps through the body. This effectively turns state violence into an unsettling sonic spectacle. Cruelty towards migrants, according to Cristina Beltrán, is not a failure of democracy but an expression of it. The (sonic) spectacle of migrant cruelty functions as a political practice meant to sustain white democracy as both a racial and political category.
Framed within ASMR, Trump’s official message is unmistakably “saying the quiet part out loud.” But not all that well. A closer listen reveals that the roar of the jet engine drowns out more intimate, human sounds: footsteps on the tarmac, the rustle of police pat-downs, and the deep, rhythmic breaths—proof of life—condemned. Listening to this disturbing post, we become attuned to our own internal pleads; our refusal to believe until the unsettling truth confirms: this isn’t a parody or a hoax—it’s real.
How does a sonic social media trend—built around such sounds as the crinkling of chip bags, the crunches of eating, the tap-tap of acrylic nails, the gentle clinks of typing or espresso-making—become a soundboard for the forced removal of immigrants? Indeed, the video has amassed nearly 105 million views on X alone. Clearly, the post broadcasts a pedagogy of cruelty—a lesson in how to aestheticize suffering—and we are left questioning just how far that message both travels and resonates. For many, the video is neither entertaining nor soothing, but rather shocking, offensive, and deeply disturbing.
Written comments show more revulsion than support, with many users openly challenging the video. In doing so, their protest, contained in the comments, starts to dismantle the ASMR aesthetic, undercutting its intended sense of calm. After all, the video isn’t particularly convincing as ASMR to begin with! These are echoes of dissent, outrage, and refusal, that accompany the in-person collective actions that have taken place across the nation rallying against Trump’s broader white-supremacist and anti-democratic agenda.
“What was louder was the screaming and cursing inside my head.”
History shows us that abolitionist efforts often relied on the sounds and images of chains to evoke empathy for enslaved Africans—making their suffering and humanity visible to a broader public. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection makes clear, such representations can easily devolve into a spectacle of suffering, where the emphasis shifts from the enslaved person to the emotional response of the white witness. Today, that same auditory imagery—clinking metal, mechanical restraints—resurfaces, but in a profoundly different register. No longer stirring empathy, they risk desensitizing listeners to the pain and struggle of Latinx migrants. This ASMR instance, directed at MAGA-listeners, prioritizes a cruel-yet-gleeful response without any compassion whatsoever towards immigrants.
The word “Illegal” in the caption further amplifies the discourse of criminality, evoking a long legacy of racialized policies and media portrayals that cast mexicanos and Chicanos as perpetually deportable. Note the hypocrisy in naming the people as illegal, when their forced removal without legal due process, is itself illegal. U.S. immigration policy—think Operation Wetback and the Bracero Program, have long simultaneously expelled and depended on Mexican labor. The enduring power of these tropes lies not just in law, but in sentiment—in the way migrants are imagined, portrayed, and ultimately policed in the public eye. Just as Hartman argues that the end of slavery did not mean the arrival of true freedom for Black Americans, so too have U.S. immigration policies failed to fully embrace immigrants as residents or neighbors and much less citizens. In both cases, legal status did not equate to genuine belonging or liberation.
What is notable in the current deployment of “illegality” in the @WhiteHouse post is its expanded scope: whereas earlier rhetoric primarily targeted Mexicans and Mexicanness this framing now extends to encompass all Latinx peoples, which always includes Black, Indigenous, Trans and Queer. This further intensifies prior waves of anti-Mexican sentiment while broadening the reach of criminalizing discourse. In doing so, it reinforces a racialized logic of illegality that casts an ever-widening net of suspicion and exclusion.
The MAGA White House’s broader propaganda – from the self-deport ads on Spanish-language media and Kristi Noem’s pinche photo-ops from CECOT (El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison) to SCOTUS attempts to revoke birthright citizenship – raises the stakes of listening, rendering our response—and our work as Latinx sound studies scholars—urgent.
Like it or not, this video reshapes the contours of our field in real time. Using the ASMR video as a point of departure, we offer a mode of listening on the side of resistance—a practice that affirms our solidarity with migrants and their right to move, work, and live with dignity. Drawing on the work of the late María Lugones, we advocate for a practice of faithful witnessing—a listening attuned not only to sound, but to histories, structures, and acts of refusal that resist dehumanization.
Ofrenda
From Lugones’s book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, she teaches that a collaborator witnesses from the side of power; a faithful witness stands with resistance even when it entails risk. And, to witness faithfully is to recognize and honor acts of resistance—even when doing so defies common sense of what we recognize as political acts/sounds. In Decolonizing Diasporas, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez reminds us of the important coalitional sociality Lugones envisions in practicing faithful witnessing. For Figueroa, “the practice of faithful witnessing is one that oppressed and colonized peoples have deployed since time immemorial as a method of bearing witness to each other’s humanity even as they faced myriad forms of violence” (156).
Faithful witnessing entails centering the plight of all MAGA political scapegoats, migrants in precarity, pro-Palestinian student activists, the still separated children, trans youth, women, and who ever is next on the Project 2025 agenda. Faithful witnessing is not about centering our own emotional response, but about coming together to listen, to bear witness, and to protect. In response to these distorted public signals, we present a suite of countersonics, shared in a lo-fi listening mode that enacts faithful witnessing and affirms our roles as co-resisters to sonic oppression. We conclude with a noise-filled, healing artifact: a sonic limpia for deep listening and a playlist to sustain the good fight.
FOR THE FULL PLAYLIST CLICK THIS LINK, OR START BELOW!
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Featured Image: Philly Immigrant May 1st, 2025 march for Justicia. Migrant workers and supporters rallied at 4th & Washington and marched in the streets to the AFL-CIO Mayday rally and march. Image by Joe Piette, cropped by SO! CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Wanda Alarcón is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research takes up sound as a generative site and method for hearing and amplifying resistant grammars in Chicana narratives. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Chicana Soundscapes, which listens closely to sound, noise, language, songs, echoes, and silences, and proposes decolonial feminist ways of hearing Chicana and queer Chicana worlds.
Dolores Inés Casillas (she/her/ella) is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) and Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), co-editor of The Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018).
Esther Díaz Martín (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting, (UT Press, 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening and attends to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.
Sara Veronica Hinojos (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research critically engages popular representations of Chicanxs and Latinxs as racialized, “accented” speakers. Her current book project, The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in Media (1925-2014), intentionally brings together language politics, digital media, humor studies and sound studies.
Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her/ella) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and perreo profa from Miami Beach. She is a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and has a PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing focuses on how Indigenous Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Her pieces have been featured in Sounding Out!, Intervenxions, and the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit.
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Thank you to Daimys Ester García for care in the form of editorial labor.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region–José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness–Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Listening to Digitized “Ratatas” or “No Sabo Kids”–Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body–Cloe Gentile Reyes
Latinx Soundwave Series–Edited by Dolores Inés Casillas
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