Reclaiming salsa

Recent scholarship on representational politics in popular music tends to d well on the macropolitical entailments of contradictory desires acted out t hrough the consumerization of culture within the globalized circuitry of su pranational capitalism. This article takes a micropolitical look at what sa lsa means for working-class Puerto Ricans ia the colonial diaspora, positin g salsa as a musical culture that fuels, and is fuelled by, the organic int elligence of its practitioners. Comparatively analysing the performative co ntent and contexts of two albums produced at the symbolic juncture of the Q uincentennial (1992)- Willie Colon's Hecho in Puerto Rico and Ruben Blades' Amor y Control - and sharing an auto-ethnographical account of experiences with salsa music in the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, this article explo res the cultural politics obtained between mainstream appropriations of Lat in musical cultures and salsa within the working-class communities who crea ted it. Thus shifting the critical lens from above: to below, the most sali ent concerns become the ethical dimensions of subaltern (kin)aesthetics and knowledges, which can be charted alongside the overt rejection of consumer ist assimilation, the conscious racialization of cultural agency and other articulations of liberatory desire.