Book Review: Who Owns Salsa? The Story They Keep Getting Wrong

A firsthand account from inside the salsa movement challenges decades of misinformation, reclaiming the story from those who got it wrong

Here was an obviously avid fan, a DJ from as far from New York as Venezuela, who had spent barely a year in New York, arriving after the salsa movement was already established, attempting to define, frame, and ultimately control the narrative of a music built in communities he barely knew, let alone understood. Worse, doing so while distorting, minimizing, and in many cases erasing the early Puerto Rican presence at the very center of that story that popularized and transformed Afro-Caribbean music: the Boricuas in El Barrio of NuYol.

At the time, we recognized this book for what it was. Outsider commentary dressed up as authority. Venezuela had only begun welcoming salsa bands after the release of the 1972 film “Our Latin Thing.” Their salsa industry developed after New York City laid the groundwork. Their own Dimensión Latina opened for the Fania All Stars at DL’s 1975 Madison Square Garden debut. And it was the Boricua sonero Andy Montañez, whom Caracas’ TH Records poached from Puerto Rico’s El Gran Combo to front DL. They were building their industry on an already established movement.

Here in Nueva Yol, we were busy. But history has a way of elevating what should have been questioned. Quite frankly, there haven’t been many, if any, books that authentically and comprehensively trace the music’s historical path from its African diaspora through the Caribbean to its spotlight in New York.

Most books in this genre are either academic ethnomusicological analyses by people writing university books or essays, who were never there, or, in some cases, are not even members of or familiar with the communities they write about. Sometimes they focus on a single artist or a specific era. Many times, they are self-published fan tributes, making distribution harder and less accessible to the general Latino public. The Book of Salsa was one of those. Until 2008. When it was translated into English, rebranded—and weaponized—against Boricuas with false claims of cultural ownership over salsa music, diminishing the East Harlem El Barrio community that gave rise to the fusion of Latin music commercially labeled “salsa.”

This is where the argument falls apart. The outdated debate between Cuba vs. Puerto Rico is already missing the point. You can’t pin borders on a music genre that’s born in Africa and continuously reshaped and reborn across the diaspora. Salsa isn’t a trophy to be claimed; it’s a living continuum of migration, exchange, survival, and innovation. The real question isn’t about ownership but about who is included in its history, and who is left out.

Since its translation, this book has been cited by some as a significant work on the genre. It’s not. It’s not even close. Instead, it offers a deeply flawed, often inaccurate, and ultimately biased ethnocentric perspective with no methodology.

The book consistently presents Cuba as the sole origin of salsa, overlooking crucial historical context that challenges the idea that music and creativity stem solely from one island. While Rondón claims that the music is rooted in Cuba and linked to African traditions, he fails to acknowledge the significant influence of the African diaspora across Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Lesser Antilles—regions settled by enslaved Africans during the same diaspora. Additionally, he overlooks the fact that congas were not present or invented in Cuba or other Caribbean territories before enslaved Africans brought their percussion skills. Recognizing these broader influences is essential to understanding the true origins of salsa.

On The Islands, Music Was Survival

The formative role of Spanish marching bands in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where Black musicians found safe opportunities while making vital contributions to the development and fusion of African-derived rhythms with Spanish military and popular music is missing. In key provinces of Borinquen and Cuba, these bands fostered discipline, organization, and community among musicians who trained rigorously, performed, and composed together, strengthening cultural bonds. They played and composed each other’s music in a rich tapestry, inspiring the saying that Cuba and Puerto Rico are (or were anyway) two wings of the same bird resisting oppression with one heart.

Our identical flags, with only inverted colors, symbolized this shared identity, until the music industry, parallel to our growth, became the cutthroat, competitive us versus them empire that began in New York. Yet, this book erases this music history and its significance to its journey, influences and transformation of an already hybrid sound.

The Omissions: Before Salsa, There Was Migration

Throughout the text, Rondón minimizes or ignores key historical factors that shaped Puerto Rican migration and the cultural growth of Latino New York. These include the Spanish-American War, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the rise of New York’s East Harlem, El Barrio, as a vibrant cultural and musical hub that attracted musicians, writers, poets, and actors from across the city. At the turn of the last century, El Barrio became the main destination for Latino artists and creatives seeking work.

The writer overlooks crucial institutions such as Afro-Boricua Rafael Hernández Marín’s music store on 114th Street, which served as the vital epicenter for emerging and newly arrived musicians. It also neglects the powerful forces of the Harlem Renaissance Uptown and Tin Pan Alley Downtown that laid the essential groundwork for a vibrant Spanish Harlem Barrio turn-key music scene, uniting diverse communities.

Moreover, it omits significant historical contributions like those of the Harlem Hellfighters, a groundbreaking all-Black military army band that toured Europe during World War I, with a third of its members hailing from Puerto Rico. Recognizing these elements is essential to fully appreciate the rich cultural tapestry and historical roots of this vibrant musical landscape.

The Harlem Hellfighters played a crucial role in early musical exchanges, as many Boricua musicians stayed in the U.S. including soon to become internationally known composer and maestro Rafael Hernandez Marin with his brother Jesus and sister Victoria who opened the record store, gave piano lessons and served as agent pairing musicians looking for work with producers. Also overlooked is Duke Ellington’s discovery of Boricua Juan Tizol, whom he heard playing trombone in Washington D.C. Ellington immediately hired Tizol, whose 1936 compositions “Caravan” and “Perdido” (1941) became some of the earliest Latin jazz recordings of the last century, now standards. Tizol spent most of his career playing with two prominent bandleaders, Duke Ellington and Harry James, from 1929 to 1960. So much for Rondón’s claim that Puerto Ricans did not play jazz! At the turn of the last century, these Boricuas not only played jazz from New York to Washington, D.C., they were classically trained, played diverse international music genres and it was said if a fly fell on the manuscript music, they’d play it as a note!

There Was El Barrio.

The book’s dark portrayal of early clubs like El Barrio’s Park Plaza, belies the place where Machito met his Boricua wife, Hilda Torres at the tip of 110 and five. Historian Max Salazar writes about a truce between Boricuas and Cubans stemming from this marriage, prominently celebrated in La Prensa newspapers and radio programs. Over time, due to misinformation, even basic biographical details around Machito’s circle have been muddled, with widely repeated claims about family ties between Mario Bauzá and Machito’s wife, Hilda, not consistently supported by primary sources, another example of how easily salsa history gets distorted when repeated without verification.

The Park Palace, for example, was an elegant former Jewish catering hall with a ballroom upstairs, the place where Tito Puente learned to dance with his sister as children at various upscale community galas given by politicians and Latino social clubs, and organizations. In this book, these places are described as merely modest and seedy clubs (Kindle 212) sharply contrasting with contemporary accounts that frequently describe this former Jewish uptown catering spot as a favorite among downtown whites, beatniks, flappers, and others who religiously traveled to the corner of 110 and Fifth every Sunday night to dance alongside many Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Harlemites in the downstairs spot they called the Park Plaza.

New York Changed Everything

At Kindle Location 656, Rondón asserts that American media paid little attention, journalists rejected salsa, and the American public ignored salsa. Nothing could be further from the truth. The American music industry was actually among the first to record this music—indeed, any Latin music—right here in New York when the Edison company began recording local bands and producing cylinders and piano rolls sold at Hernandez and other local record stores as early as the 1920s. A thorough archival research dive through Spanish language newspapers and magazines reveals numerous Latin music and club advertisements in New York from the 1900s onward.

By the 1950s and ’60s, the Daily News’ Harvest Moon Ball was no longer just an English-language media event; it was amplified across New York’s Spanish-language press and radio, including La Prensa and El Diario, as well as on Spanish-language radio programs on WEVD the Jewish socialist station that “speaks your language.” The Jewish community DJs who programmed Latin music since the ‘40s played a key role in publicizing the fiestas, helping bring Puerto Rican dancers and audiences into the heart of the city’s most prominent dance stages.

Further, Rondón overlooks the significance of the Sunday Central Park rumbas, where Boricua and Cuban master drummers performed alongside Black, Latino and white musicians. This tradition, which began in the 1950s and expanded in the 1960s with the arrival of tunable congas crafted by Boricua artesanos in NYC record shops, served as a vibrant space for diversity, connection, and cultural exchange among New York Boricuas, African Americans, Jews, Italians, and all who cherish this music.

The Artists, Misrepresented, Missing, & Maligned

Rondón’s narrative is a gross falsehood that dismisses the profound cultural legacy that gave rise to the community’s vibrant musical scene. Notably lacking in detail, this book omits the Latin jazz scene in Spanish Harlem cultivated by Augusto Coén; the contributions of Davilita, Myrta Silva, and Daniel Santos; the 1950s merengue boom at the Palladium led by Angel Viloria; the lively Latin bands that performed during summer residencies in the Catskills’ Borscht Belt with a Spanish heart; or the battle of the bands between be-bop and mambo in San Juan Hill. His treatment of artists is equally problematic.

Tito Rodríguez, considered Puerto Rico’s pride, is wrongly identified as Cuban (L 201). Born and raised in Puerto Rico to Dominican /Cuban parents, he passionately protected his Boricua identity throughout his life. Yet in this book, his career and bandleading skills are evaluated, criticized and compared to Tito Puente’s, blasting Rodríguez’s lack of musical leadership into the ‘70s (L 813), negligently overlooking Rodríguez’s sudden 1973 death publicized over worldwide music and mainstream news. But I guess Rondón didn’t get that memo.
Rafael Cortijo, one of the most significant figures in Afro-Caribbean music, and the first all-black orchestra on Puerto Rican television from 1954 until 1962, to break the hotel color lines, is dismissed in overly simplistic and perjorative terms including the claim that he “never played mambo” (listen to “Gulliver”), along with comparisons that outright claim Machito is better than Cortijo suggesting cultural inferiority to Machito. After stating that Machito and Cortijo’s music had nothing in common, he then contrasts the two, emphasizing:

“Machito uses richer and more interesting arrangements, because he uses some jazz and Cortijo does not, and because Machito is, to be blunt, less of a hick.” (L548)

Rafael Cortijo was lionized throughout the Caribbean black Islands in the ‘50s as a breakthrough representative of black musical stardom, ( see Otra Banda) especially on television, a phenomenon never seen in Cuba’s minstrel blackface broadcasts. Cortijo’s bongocero, dancer, and later bandleader, Roberto Roena, is described as mediocre (L1009), along with nearly every Boricua musician he mentions as he trashes El Barrio, and Willie Colon (L558). These are not just subjective opinions; they are biased conjecture presented without meaningful musical analysis, academic methodology, or historical context.

From Mambo to Boogaloo to Salsa

Rondón’s historical framing is further undermined by huge omissions that farther disqualify his thesis. His timeline of Brazilian music in New York fails to acknowledge the 1940s samba wave of FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy” that brought artists like Carmen Miranda into the American mainstream by the ‘50s. The movie Black Orpheus followed, bringing an avalanche of bossa nova partnerships into New York’s jazz and Latin music radio and club scene of the 50s & 60s.

The influence of the 1940s and ‘50s public school music education in shaping young Boricua and Dominican musicians is also overlooked. Many of these youngbloods performed in bands through school and church, influenced by doo-wop, rock, soul, and R&B, which led to the boogaloo movement. None of this is noted or discussed. In fact, the chapter on the 1950s isn’t even set in New York. Instead, Rondón focuses on Cuba, never mentioning its racially segregated entertainment scene there, where mostly white musicians played for tourists while black musicians played in their own barrios. Cubacan operated as a former slave-based economy where, by the 1840s, enslaved Africans made up roughly 45% of the population, free blacks were 25% and whites were the minority at 30%. People of African descent—enslaved and free—comprised the overwhelming majority, while a much smaller white minority held political and economic power dominating the country. He spends this chapter lamenting how Americanos traveled freely to and from the island in the 50s, with no papers at that time where what happened in Cuba stayed in Cuba. Americanos may have called it the “Paris of the Caribbean,” but insiders knew that was just a euphemism for the “whorehouse of the Caribbean.” 1950s Cuba was a hotbed of racism, societal control and segregation, and dictatorial corruption. All the while producing sugar for the U.S.

Rondón’s brief New York stay arrived after salsa’s culture, infrastructure, and sound had already been firmly rooted. Data from that era directly contradicts his claim that New York’s Latino population was split among Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Panamanians, such a division did not exist.

According to the 1960 Census, Boricuas numbered one million, while Cubans factored fewer than 50,000 before the embargo. The other Latino ethnic groups were too small to be officially recorded. During the second wave of postwar migration, Hollywood even made a movie about us: West Side Story! This pattern of broad claims unsupported by the historical record is soaked in ethnocentric bias and speculation throughout the book.

Even at the translation level, the text falters. Cultural nuances are either flattened or distorted, for example, translating Arsenio Rodríguez’s moniker, “El Ciego Maravilloso,” as the clunky “the marvelous blindman.” This strips away the original’s meaning of “the blind marvel,” because being blind isn’t truly a marvel in itself.

He dismisses Alegre Records producer Al Santiago, one of the few figures actively recording emerging New York Latino musicians in the early ‘60s, when radio was dominated by tríos románticos like Los Panchos, without offering examples or substantive analysis.

This pattern is also evident in his depiction of Eddie Palmieri. At location 535 of the Kindle edition, Rondón describes Palmieri’s “paltry trombones from South Bronx back alleys,” despite previously acknowledging Palmieri’s innovations. Such contradictions expose a fundamental inconsistency in his argument. He was an outsider with minimal knowledge of English and even less familiarity with music theory or the intricacies and communities of New York’s metropolis, its diversity, its evolving industry, or its vibrant music scene.

What Salsa Actually Is

Equally absent is any discussion of the social spaces that sustained this culture. Rondón makes no mention of the soul and SalSoul dance scenes, nor of the Jewish, Black, and Latino DJs who circulated this music across communities. His critique of the Village Gate’s “Salsa Meets Jazz” series echoes divisive comparisons between Cubans and Boricuas rather than engaging with the innovation of these collaborations, performances enthusiastically reviewed, covered, and extolled by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and DownBeat. All easily available to academic rigor and research, not found in this so-called “Book of Salsa.”
Rondón’s inaccuracies stretch even further. He claims Willie Colón was discovered by Johnny Pacheco, overlooking that Colón had already been recorded by Al Santiago. He also misrepresents the concept of the Fania All-Stars, suggesting Oreste Vilató was chosen because he was Cuban (L 1018), when in fact he was picked by Ray Barretto as his sideman alongside Boricua singer, Adalberto Santiago. The writer doesn’t seem to understand that the Fania All-Stars consisted of the label’s bandleaders alongside their top musicians and vocalist. Nationality or color had nothing to do with it.
The book also misrepresents salsa’s political and cultural context. Rondón links salsa’s emergence to the 1969 Young Lords suggesting they drove a shift toward violence in the music. In reality, salsa was already well established in the City, charting on the American hit parade and blending Afro-Caribbean rhythms with jazz, soul, rock, and R&B as early as 1928 (see Los Jibaros flyer where it says: We invite all the “jibaros” to show us they love their Danza and Seis chorreao more than they love jazz) to the 1960s. Its lyrics addressed social justice, anti-war sentiment, identity, and unity, as heard in the work of Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto. Palmieri’s recordings passionately advocate for “Justicia,” while Ray Barretto’s 1968 live performance in the Summer of Soul documentary featured him singing in English, asserting his Black, Brown, and Red identities while calling for harmony. In contrast to many 1950s Cuban songs celebrating domestic violence and the benefits of slavery, salsa’s message aligned with the civil rights era: oppose the Vietnam War, challenge segregation, and stand in solidarity.

What Wasn’t Seen

Perhaps most glaring is the lack of engagement with African American musical influence or the summer-long ‘40s and ‘50s residencies in the Catskills (as in the Dirty Dancing film), where the Borscht Belt revealed its Spanish heart. Salsa did not develop in isolation. It emerged from shared spaces—San Juan Hill, Central Park, the Village Gate, the Catskills—where Black, Latino, Jewish, and other musicians collaborated, experimented, and created something together. Just as we mix various spices for flavor as we cook, the fusion of these communities and cultures is what created this New York Salsa sauce.

Taken together, these errors and distortions amount to more than mere factual inconsistencies. They represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the formation and manifestations of New York’s salsa communities. At its core, it attempts to define a distinctly New York-born, fused musical movement; however, it does so without sufficient knowledge, research, interviews, or genuine engagement with the community responsible for its creation.

We Called It Salsa

The narrative laughably attributes the coining of the term “salsa” to Venezuela via a radio show, despite historical evidence that the term was already circulating informally in the Caribbean as early as the 1930s, when Cubano Ignacio Piñero wrote a son montuno, Echale Salsita, recorded with his sextet. The term was popular on both islands and used to energize audiences. In N.Y., Boricua DJ Paco Navarro coined “mas salsa que pescao” on his early 1960s radio program. It was during the initial 1970s Madison Square Garden concerts that Latin New York publisher Izzy Sanabria galvanized the crowd with chants of “Salsa” before, during, and after performances, from New York to Japan. Following the 1971 release of the film “Our Latin Thing,” which elevated local musicians to international stardom, Sanabria took this rallying cry on the road.
Larry Harlow’s 1973 album titled “Salsa” further cemented the term’s significance as Sanabria traveled with the Fania All-Stars to Europe, Japan, and beyond, consistently chanting “Salsa” to enthusiastic, sold-out audiences. Moreover, by the mid-70s, Latin New York Magazine had a national audience from Chicago to L.A. and was ABC-audited, a verifiable circulation of over 50,000 copies a month strong, similar to any mainstream publication. Therefore, claiming that a Venezuelan radio program originated, or even coined, this widely used phrase is historically unfounded.

Salsa was forged in El Barrio and the South Bronx through the lived experiences of Puerto Ricans, alongside Cubans, Dominicans, African Americans, Jews, Italians, and other Caribbean influences. In 1975, Boricuas marched, protested, and staged a sold-out Beacon Theater awards concert to convince NARAS that Salsa is an American genre deserving of a separate Grammy Award. It remains a New York sound.

El Libro de la Salsa lacks any methodology to substantiate its uninformed, biased, and ethnocentric claims. It is misleading, with no substantive references to the music, the culture, the community, or its interpreters. Most notably, it is dismissive, insulting, and a complete disrespect of the Boricuas who built this musical fusion and carried it around the world.
The book has also resurrected and emboldened the divisive Cuba vs. Boricua ethnocentric discussion, with some academics hanging their pavas on this supremacist view. I read with great disdain the academic gobbledegook hyperbole of Peter Manuel in his essay: Puerto Rican Music and Cultural Identity: Creative Appropriation of Cuban Sources from Danza to Salsa.
To summarize Manuel, he basically writes that Boricuas have no culture. According to him, we are a hybrid society, the reason for our success he quips. He points to the mellifluous arpeggios of a Cuban danzón—a form also claimed in Veracruz, Mexico—without acknowledging the deeper, shared lineage beneath it. Danzón itself, that elegant, almost waltz-like classical dance, mirrors Puerto Rico’s danza, both tracing back to the Haitian French contradanse—a mispronounced borrowing of the English “country dance”—all the rage through France and Spain before taking root in the Caribbean.

And that’s only the surface. Beneath this fusion runs the full continuum across the islands: our Spanish/French-rooted danza and danzón, the African pulse of rumba and bomba, the Spanish poetics of son and décima, the echoes of Christmas villancicos, the streetwise African drive of plena and merengue. Cuban soneros trading improvised lines with the same virtuosity as Boricua trovadores, masters of pie forzado, riffing and rapping before it all had a name. All of it moving—always—over a twentieth-century paso doble sensibility, grounded, refined, and ultimately cemented in the City that never sleeps. So much for Manuel’s myopic “hybrid hypothesis.”

This isn’t about staking claims. Just as jazz moved from ragtime to swing to bebop, Afro-Caribbean music in New York evolved, grew and grooved in parallel to the community, reshaped by migration, culture, and the fast-paced pressures of city life.

From the moment Boricuas opened New York’s doors to Cuban and Dominican families a century ago to today’s embrace of Mexican and Central American communities, the music has never stood still—it has been built collectively, shaped in motion.

That process is messy, it’s migratory, and it is shared. That is salsa.

When a bad book writes its creators, its players, its places, and its scene-makers out of the record, it jumps the grove of these grove-makers.

As Celia Cruz once replied to a Miami reporter trying to goad her into insulting Boricuas,

“If it weren’t for Puerto Ricans, our Cuban music would be left behind—atrás—isolated as folklore on the Island.”

I leave you with Celia’s Soy Antillana recorded with Borinquen’s Sonora Ponceña. To all the “Anas,” —my Cubanas, Borincanas, Dominicanas y Haitianas…. ¡esta pa’ ti!