Cuban Women and Salsa

To the Beat of Their Own Drum

D. Poey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137382818
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137382825
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Salsa is both an American and transnational phenomenon, however women in salsa have been neglected. To explore how female singers negotiate issues of gender, race, and nation through their performances, Poey engages with the ways they problematize the idea of the nation and facilitate their musical performances' movement across multiple borders.

CHAPTER 1

FROM THE STREETS TO THE NIGHTCLUB: RUMBERAS AS SALSA PRECURSORS

RUMBA IN CONTEXT

Long before the word salsa came to refer to music, there was son, and alongside son there was rumba. While there is consensus that Cuban son is a major contributor to salsa, setting the underlying rhythm, rumba is left out of the equation or merely referenced lexically in the occasional song title. Connections between son and rumba are only now being acknowledged, as Acosta writes: “I could not decide between the rumba and the son as the most emblematic genre of our popular music: Now I look at them as more or less two sides of the same coin.” He goes on to state,

Son has shown the necessary strength and flexibility to permeate other genres: danzón, bolero, mambo, chachachá, and the whole phenomenon of salsa music. Nevertheless, the elasticity and dynamism of rumba has allowed it to permeate son since the 1920s … and 1930s … as well as its more recent tendencies: mambo, salsa, songo, timba, etc.¹

The exclusion of rumba can also be traced to racial taxonomies as son is seen as a blending of white and black musical forms and traditions while rumba is more closely associated with Afrocuban origins. As a case in point, Alejo Carpentier, in his now classic work on Cuban music La música en Cuba (1946), elevates son as “a metaphor for his vision of a multiracial, multicultural, but unified Cuban nation,” while simultaneously associating “ ‘rumbas’ with idle gaity, licentious dance, female prostitution (mujeres de rumbo), and low-class Afro-Cubans.”² Yet, as salsa is a product of cultural contact in the United States, more specifically New York City, the importance of rumba, particularly as it was appropriated and circulated among Cuba, New York, and other international cultural centers, becomes more apparent.

The use of the word rumba itself is somewhat polemical as it has over time come to have a wide range of meanings, from a boisterous celebration to a highly stylized form of ballroom dancing. This chapter seeks to sift through its history and contextualize it in the musical performances of two women who have, however problematically, been labeled rumberas: Rita Montaner and Celeste Mendoza. Both participated in the appropriation and rearticulation of rumba as both a term and a musical form, a process that took rumba from the streets to the nightclub and beyond Cuba to become an international phenomenon. Moreover, Montaner and Mendoza, as precursors to what would later be termed salsa, are groundbreakers in terms of their stagings of race, gender, and nation, influencing directly and indirectly later performers’ innovations and revisions.

To sort through the loaded usage of the term “Rumba,” we must first start by separating out “traditional rumba”—also referred to as “folkloric” or “authentic” rumba—from its commercial form (or forms).³ Traditional rumba originated in the urban slums in Havana and Matanzas in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴ As Peter Manuel describes, “in the absence of any European melodic and choral instruments, rumba sounds very African, and it appears to derive from secular dances cultivated by the Congolese slaves in Cuba.”⁵ Urfé’s description differs in that it ascribes Bantu origins, but there is consensus that it was, and in its traditional form continues to be, performed “solely by percussion instruments and voices, and thus in an aural sense is distinctly more ‘African sounding.’ ”⁶ It also bears noting that rumba is as quintessentially Cuban as son: “Despite its African character, rumba (like the blues) is not a conservation of another land’s music. There is nowhere in Africa you can go and hear rumba, though you might hear things that remind you of rumba.”⁷ While there are several different types of rumba, guaguancó is by far the most popular and the type most often associated with later commercial recordings and nightclub performances.⁸ It’s no coincidence that all the performers discussed in later chapters—Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Gloria Estefan, and Albita Rodríguez—have songs that have the word “guaguancó” in the title. Furthermore, guaguancó is not only referenced lexically, but musically as well in salsa. Although “all-percussion rumba is rarely heard in the commercial world of salsa, it is rare to find a salsa singer or group that doesn’t at some point in the show drop into an orchestrated version of guaguancó.”⁹

The choreography of the guaguancó is essentially “a chase, discussed in terms of a metaphor in which a rooster stalks a hen … Women dance with grace and seductiveness, but always try to avoid the vacunao,” most commonly the male’s pelvic thrust, but can also be an “elbow jab, a kick, or a swift whip of a scarf.”¹⁰ As Moore summarizes, because of the “overtly sexual nature of its dance choreography, and its close associations with the poorest and most socially marginalized Afrocubans in western urban areas, middle-class and elite Cuban society condemned the genre.”¹¹ Manuel points out that while colonial-era white society’s denigration of rumba was based on its perceived sexual vulgarity, the perspectives of African and Afrocuban contemporaries were overlooked. “Accounts suggest that many contemporary Africans felt the same way about European couple dances, as in traditional African dancing men and women would rarely touch each other.”¹² It is ironic that although guaguancó is the form of rumba most appropriated both lexically and rhythmically by the mainstream, “it was rarely if ever recorded commercially in its traditional form until the 1960’s.”¹³ Ambivalence toward traditional rumba has historically ranged from open and aggressive hostility as in the enactment of laws against drum playing and certain forms of dance in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, to grudging acceptance as a “folkloric” and autochthonous expression with the rise of the Afrocubanist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Even after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, public performances of traditional rumba have either been merely tolerated or appropriated and institutionalized by the state.¹⁴

By mid-nineteenth century and onward to the beginning of the twentieth century, the term rumba appears in various musical compositions “to evoke images of revelry and sexual abandon” with little or no connection to the “musical characteristics of noncommercial rumba”; this, however, is not to say that the term ceased to refer more directly to identifiable musical forms.¹⁵ Rather, “ ‘Rumba’ as a complex linguistic sign is perhaps best understood as comprised of both specific associations with music and dance styles and broad, historically derived associations with Cuba’s black underclass, their lifestyles, attitudes, and culture.”¹⁶ By the 1920s and 1930s, rumba is referenced both lexically and to some extent rhythmically in the Cuban musical theater genres of teatro vernáculo and zarzuela as well as cabaret acts and it is in these decades that the history of rumba becomes intertwined with the career of Rita Montaner.¹⁷

RITA MONTANER: STAGING RACE, GENDER, AND NATION

Born Rita Aurelia Fulcida Montaner y Facenda in 1900, her birth and death (1958) coincide with the period of Cuban history between Independence and the Revolution. A singer, pianist, stage and film actress, she was referred to as “Rita de Cuba” or simply “La Única.” Her father was white, a pharmacist who provided the family middle-class status, and her mother was mixed race or mulata. Although she received a privileged education in religious schools; spoke English, Italian, and French; and received formal musical training in piano and voice at the Conservatory in Havana, Montaner was also exposed to and participated in Afrocuban musical and religious practices such as Santería. She was initiated into the religion months before her death but was a practitioner, in one way or another, her whole life.¹⁸ This is notable in that it demonstrates Montaner’s knowledge of Afrocuban cultural traditions through lived experience. This connection to Afrocuban cultural and religious expression will also be seen in other performers such as La Lupe—discussed in Chapter 3—and Celeste Mendoza who make overt references to Santería and were also initiates, as well as Celia Cruz, who although not a practitioner, recorded sacred music. The other performers discussed in this study, Albita Rodríguez and Gloria Estefan, also make references to Santería religious practices although they are neither initiates nor have they recorded sacred music. The presence of Santería, whether it takes the form of a mere echo or a direct appeal, is an understudied element within salsa music in general as well as Cuban popular music more specifically. That these female performers reference it consistently, as well as how they individually incorporate it, sheds light on the musical traces of Afrocuban spiritual practices, their survival over time, and what they evoke for listeners.

Montaner’s musical career began in 1922 and by 1926 she was performing in New York with the Schubert Follies at the Apollo Theatre. While she certainly achieved fame in Cuba, her international reach would make her a leading figure in the popularization of Cuban music off the island. Between 1927 and 1929, she recorded over 50 songs for Columbia Records and performed in Paris for the first time, appearing in Josephine Baker’s Revue. In 1931 she performed on Broadway under contract with Al Jolson in the musical The Wonder Bar. Her reach also permeated toward Latin America, playing in Mexico City for the first time in 1933. She would also go on to appear in 15 films, most of which can be classified as “cine de rumberas” or “rumbera films.”¹⁹

Montaner’s early career in the 1920s and 1930s was as a singer and actress in Cuban teatro vernáculo, also known as teatro bufo or teatro de variedades.²⁰ In terms of content and form, the genre bears similarities to vaudeville and minstrel shows.²¹ Although “the genre as a distinct entity and the parody of blacks and black street culture with which it is associated have their origin in the mid-nineteenth century,” the genre reached its heyday in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s, typically consisting of musical numbers, short silent films, and comic sketches.²² As with Montaner, other musical performers as well as composers that would go on to become international recording and nightclub stars got their start in these venues.²³ The comic sketches relied on stock, stereotypical race-based characters, most commonly that of the “negrito, or comic black man, the mulata, or light skinned black woman, and the gallego, or Spanish shopkeeper-businessman.”²⁴ The symbolically loaded figure of the mulata is discussed more fully in Chapter 3, but it is worth noting that in teatro vernáculo, the representation of la mulata is garnered from earlier artistic portrayals, including musical portrayals, as “object of sexual desire, the epitome of wanton carnal pleasure.”²⁵ It is also worth noting that Montaner’s breakout role in 1927 in La niña Rita o La Habana en 1830 was not as the stereotypic mulata, but as the “negro calesero” or slave coachman.²⁶ Because, “as in North American minstrel shows, Afrocuban characters in the Cuban theater were played by white actors who darkened their skin by using a combination of burnt cork and glycerine,” Montaner played the calesero in blackface. Her role, then, “combined alteration of gender and racial identification,” which, as Moore points out, “alludes to the semiotic complexity of Cuban theatrical performances and their many possible meanings for audience members.”²⁷

This particular performance was by no means the only role Montaner played in blackface, nor was it her only role cross-dressing as a black, male character. As a light-skinned Afrocuban woman, the only role that she could have played without “darkening up” would have been the hyper-sexualized mulata; yet, the roles she was given were often the negra, or black older woman, or Afrocuban male roles. Thomas notes that

Montaner’s performance of the negro calesero, and the overwhelming popularity with which it was received, further complicates the meaning of blackness as it was represented and reproduced for white consumption. Not only was black skin a mask that actors donned in the performance of the negrito, but in this case so was the character’s very sex.²⁸

It thus foregrounds the performative nature of race and gender and Montaner’s own negotiations within imposed, social parameters. As Arrizón notes,

In theater, the black body and the female role have received similar discriminatory treatment. In the Cuban stage, the entry of the black body—white performing as black—was affected by racism; in the history of theater, the entry of the woman was generally shaped by sexism and patriarchy. For example, in the Shakespearean era, women were not allowed to perform on stage, and, therefore, men had to perform women’s roles.²⁹

It is interesting to note that Montaner’s performance as the “negro calesero” disrupts the usual “masks,” even as it was affected by the very factors Arrizón describes. While it was common to have white bodies perform as black, Montaner as a mulata was neither black nor white while embodying both. Yet, she performs in blackface. In terms of gender performance, the more common masking of the female body is having male bodies perform as female while Montaner’s performance was the reverse.

Montaner’s role as the calesero in the zarzuela La niña Rita is also notable in that it cemented her influence within Cuban music as well as her role in the popularization of rumba in particular. The final number, sung for the first time by Montaner, was Eliseo Grenet’s “Ay Mama Inés,” a song that would become “one of the classics in Cuban repertoire,” and “the theme song for the ‘Rumba Craze’ that swept Europe, the United States, and Cuba itself, earning the title ‘the greatest of all Cuban rumbas.’ ”³⁰ Ironically, the song is not actually a rumba at all, but rather a tango-congo making it emblematic of the appropriation and rearticulation of rumba as it made its way from being an Afrocuban underclass artistic expression to an international phenomenon and commodity. That its first recognizable standard, “Ay Mama Inés,” was written by a white composer and first performed by a mulata playing an Afrocuban male in blackface captures the complexity of the musical genre’s layers of transformation. The fact that Urfé has documented that the song, attributed to Grenet, is actually based on a song originally composed and sung by Afrocuban farm workers in the early twentieth century adds deeper layers of transformation.³¹ The song was further appropriated and transformed by being recorded with English lyrics as “Mama Inez” in 1931. Curiously, it became a hit performed by Maurice Chevalier, singing in his distinctive French-accented English. It is also notable that as the song moved from Spanish to English, the clear racial references that define the song’s lyrics are erased in the English version, further and more definitively “whitening” it.³²

Casting Montaner as the calesero marked a departure from her earlier performances.³³ Classically trained in voice, she had previously performed operettas and Cuban compositions associated with “high” as opposed to “popular” culture. In contrast, “Ay Mamá Inés’ ” lyrics are in caricatured black vernacular or “lenguaje bozal” as in the lines of its repeated chorus “todo lo negro tomamo café” (all us black folk drink coffee). The lines use phonetic spelling of the caricatured vernacular, clipping the “s” from the words. The song epitomizes a style favored by white composers influenced by the growing Afrocubanista movement popular at the time among intellectuals and artists in the visual and literary arts.³⁴ It also participates in the broader trend of mining artistic expressions produced within a black, marginalized underclass for consumption by elites. As such, it offers a case study in the appropriation of black music in Cuba and how it circulates outward to become emblematic of the “national” and is reappropriated and transformed through cultural contact. Given that salsa music is born in the “contact zone” that is New York City,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From the Streets to the Nightclub: Rumberas as Salsa Precursors
• 2. Celia Cruz: From “La guarachera de Cuba” to the “Queen of Salsa”
• 3. La Lupe: The Excessive Performance of Race and Gender
• 4. Crossing Over: Gloria Estefan’s Performance of the/on the Hyphen
• 5. No se parece a nada/Not Like Anything Else: Albita Rodríguez Bends the Rules
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Discography
• Works Cited
• Index