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The
ity
o
usical
emory
Salsa
Record Grooves
and Popular Culture
n
Cali Colombia
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown
Connecticut
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Published by Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, CT 064 59
©
Copyright by Lise A Waxer, 2002
All rights reserved
ISBN
0 8I95 64 4 1 9
cloth
ISBN
0 8I95 64 4 2 7 paper
Printed in the United States of America
Design and composition by Chris Crochetiere,
B. Williams Associates
4 3
2 I
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dat a
Waxer, Lise.
The city of musical memory : Salsa, record grooves, and popular culture
in Cali, Colombia by LiseA 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 Satizábal,
el
poet de
l s
noches
c leñ s
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The Viejoteca Revival
The first viejotecas appeared
in
1993, during the height
of
the live scene.
They were created initially as a recreational activity for senior citizens and
were gradually adopted by a few venues in Cali s working-class neighbor
hoods as a special sort of dance
not
only for senior citizens, but for anyone
over
forty.
The key draws
of
the viejotecas were cheap liquor prices a flask
of
aguardiente cost mIly one or two doilars aboye grocery store prices, a
chance to be among people
of
one s own generation (and
not
feel
overrun
by youth), and, most important, the opportunity
to
dance
all
afternoon
long to the music one had grown up with.
The turning point for the viejoteca phenomenon carne in July-August
1995, shortly after the leaders
of
the Cali cocaine cartel were captured and
many of those associated with their illicit trade left town
or
went under
ground. (Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the supposed leader of the carrel,
was arrested on 9 Tune
1995).
For luxury nightclubs, this meant a signifi
cant
10ss
of dientele. Looking for new
ways
to salvage plummeting busi
ness, they adopted the viejoteca idea, with unprecedented success. A huge
and long-negleeted market had been tapped, one that had feh alienated by
modern salsa, high prices, and the threat
of
violence that pervaded the
nightclub scene by the eady
1990S.
Viejotecas mushroomed thro ughout the
city. Many
places
abandoned the age restriction, and teenagers and young
adults who had grown up listening to their parents play this music at home
also attended en masse. Sorne oIder customers told me they resented the
presence
of
younger folle, seeing the viejotecas
as
their special territory,56
but most seemed to enjoy the convivial family atrnosphere that emerged in
these places-recuperating the
feel of
the I940S and
I950S
neighborhood
dance scene.
Notably, the viejoteca scene witnessed a revival of he unique local dance
style associated with the agüelulos and salsa nightclubs
of
the 1960s and
1970S. While the dance style
of t is
earlier scene did
not
die completely
during the
I980s-it
was maintained in small bars and casetas in Juanchito
by the rnid-1980s most Caleños had adopted the standard shorr-short
long step of international salsa dancing. 7 With the emergence of the
viejotecas, many older dancers unpacked their old dance shoes, ruffied satin
shirts, fringed dresses, and other garb associated with the golden era of
local salsa dancing. Professional troupes suchas Evelio Carabalí s Ballet Fol
dor de Urbano presented tightly choreographed routines in the viejotecas.
Some dancers made a junket, going around to viejotecas on weekends and
performing impromptu nUlllbers for dubgoers in return for a few pesos or
106 Chapter
a round of drinks. remember one feilow, outfitted in a ruffied shirt and
baggy pants, who performed an outrageously funny aet with a life-size rag
doil attached
to
his shoes; he never failed
to
bring down the house.
Many peopIe with
whom
1 spoke talked about the viejotecas as a return
to the good old d a y s ~ when Cali was pure festivity and dance. My subse
quent return trips to Cali in 1997 and 2000 confirmed mat the viejotecas
were still going s trong. They had even spreadto other Colombian cities, in
duding Medellín and Cartagena.
58
t is dear tha t me viejoteca revival repre
sents a symbolic victory over the perceived evils wrought by the Cali co
caine cartel
on
the local salsa scene. The economic bonanza associated with
the cartel certainly fostered an extraordinary and rapid growth of the local
scene, providing resources for the presentation of international salsa bands,
the rise of local orquestas, and the promoti on of salsa in local media. This
expansion, however, caused a significant rupture with the older dance
scene, displacing a large sector of salsa fans who did
not
identify with the
new style of salsa being promoted.
How in the DCPiI
Do We
ituate
the Viejotecas
Among most Caleños animosity toward the cocaine cartel and its domina
tion over city life ran deep,
but
public críticism
of
this intrusion could not
be openly voiced without incurring certain reprisal. A tale that began to
circulate widely in the early
I990S
about the appearance of the devil in a
salsa
nightdub reveals these prevalent but necessarily muted sentiments.
Tales of Faustian encounters with the devil are found throughout Latin
America and the Caribbean, as Michael Taussig (1980), José Limón (1994),
and others have discussed. The Cali devil story concerns a diabolically good
salsa dancer (wh at else?) who seduces local women with his charms. 1 know
four versions of the Cali devil story, but, given the Colombian penchant for
spinning a yarn, 1 arn sure that more existo Notably,
all
of the variants are
located in Juanchito, the Caleños preferred after-hours party spot.
1 will not recount
all
the versions 1 know of this tale, in which the devil
ish dancer s racial identity
is
portrayed variously as black
or
white. n the
rendition that concerns me here, a handsome, weil-dressed white man pulls
up at Agapito (the most popular salsa nightdub in Juanchito) in a brand
new red Jeep. Red Jeeps are a status symbol that by the eady 1990S were
associated with the upwardIy mobile ranks
of
cocaine mafiosos in the city.
t
s
not
enough that he pulls
up
in a flashy car, however-he also cornmits
the
bLatant
sacrilege of pulling up to
this
club to dance salsa during Holy
Week, a time of solemn religious observance in this very Catholic countty.
His expensive dothes and elegantly pomaded hair catch the
eye
of Other
The Record Centered Dance Scene 101
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nonbelievers who have also gone to dance, and people crowd around his
charismatic and seductive figure before realizing that he is the devil in dis
guise. While this fellow is dancing with an attractive young woman, he be
gins to levitate, before disappearing in a billowing, sulfuric cloudof smoke.
This sighting supposedly occurred in
1991 or 1992
and was reported in all
the newspapers the next day.
This story resonates with a similar tale shared among black campesinos
of the rural area south of Cali, who have encapsulated their losing battle
with the powerful sugarcane industry as an encounter with the green
devil (Taussig 1980). The Cali devil narrative parallels this. It is clearly a
metaphor for the encroachment
of
the cocaine mafiosos
on
the local
scene an allegory about their unholy traffic and its conspicuous intrusion
into the
lives
of
decent folk?' The identity
of
Juanchito
as
a poor Mro
Colombian settlement further underscores this similarity. Most of Juan
chito's actual inhabitants do
not
own the nightdubs built there and profit
only indirectly from this trade (the main subsistence activity of the village
is
dredging sand from the Cauca River for sale 1 contractors in Cali's con
struction industry).
s
in the case of the black peasants, the devil is cast
as
a white male whose evil stems from wealth (white, in this case, also indexes
the color of cocaine powder). The presumably working-dass female dancer
and onlookers of both sexes are inferred
to
be the innocent and guileless
victims (perhaps of darker skin1) taken in by his power. According to vari
ous informants, this metaphor was dearly understood by Caleños, espe
cially because of the red Jeep, associated with the mafiosos. In this version
of
the Juanchito devillegend, there
is
also an implicit pairing of racial and
gender terms, where blackness and femaleness - represented in the figureof
a women dancer from the working-dass barrios are constructed as cate
gories of weakness and vulnerability in a way that mirrored the actual rela
tionship between the cocaine barons and the citizens of Cali.
Viejotecas and Collective Memory
Recent scholarship in psychology suggests that the emotional intensity of
a memory resides
less
in its meaning at the time an event took place than
in its significance at the time
of
its recall (Singer and Salovey
1993:
SI-52).
Understanding the mechanics of collective memory therefore involves
looking at the ways recollected moments are selectively chosen and sus
tained by a group in the present as a tool for maintaining a cohesive so
cial identity during times of flux and upheaval. The reenactment of those
moments in Cali's case, through dancing to dassic salsa
records is
recre-
hapter
ational not only as a leisure pastime, but also as a constant reconstitution of
the social body. Cali has undergone successive
waves of
rapid urbanization
and instability since the middle
of
the twentieth century. Working-class
Caleños, however, have chosen to remember the 1960s and 1970S
not
as
a time of struggle and precarious existence at the
city s
margins, but as a
time of innocent fun, when new friendships and cornmunity bonds were
forged through dancing together to records. The semantic and affective ties
linking memory, dance, and recordings have cemented a collective identity
that continued to anchor the city's working
classes
through the new and
unsettling changes wrought by the cocaine economy during the 198 s and
1990S.
A 1995 poster advertising the viejoteca at a nightclub called Changó in
vokes these links.
59
Framing the central image
of
two dancers, nostalgic
images of Hollywood and Mexican movie stars are interspersed with those
of phonographs, palm trees, and famed singers and instrumentalists
of
the
194 S and 1950S At the top of the poster appears a poetic manifesto of
viejoteca philosophy:
Disfrutar recordando
tiempos
de
ayer
al compás de
música
aprendida
a
uerz de
bailarla
Rcrivir la emoción de aquellos
momentos
inolvidables
y sentir que
somos
los mismos
Enjoy yourself remembering
the times
of
yesterday
to the beat
of
music learned
by the power of dancing to it.
Relive the emotion of those
unforgettable moments
and feel that we are the same.
In
this epigraph, memory, music, dance, and emotion are tightly linked.
Music
is
literally incorporated into one's body and feelings by the power
of dancing
to
it;' and listening to and moving to these rhythms in tum un
locks powerful and pleasurable memories. The finalline, sentir que somos
los mismos:' is particularly evocative and points to the mythic image of a
kinder, gent ler Cali before the advent of the dr ug cartel.
The viejoteca revival can be seen as a grassroots response
to
the up
heavals caused by the Cali cartel. Significantly, in contrast to the tendency
of
cultural revivals
to
be romantidzed, middle-dass appropriations
of
working-dass expressions (Livingston 1999), the viejotecas are primarily
working-dass venues, established by and for the populace, who developed
the record-centered dance culture in the first place. The economic boom
associated with the cartel
not
only changed the local
salsa
scene, it also
galvanized a huge wave of migration from other, non-salsero regions of
Colombia. This development, in conjunction with other cornmercial styles
The
Record Centered
Dance Scene
10
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that were being promoted by the national media and record industry,
opened the
ity to
new cultural flows, further threatening
to
displace the
established image of Cali
s
a
s ls
capital. The viejotecas hence mark a seiz-
ing back of
oc l
popular culture at the moment the cartel s hold on the city
w s
broken, before other factions that had entered
s
a result
of
the canel s
influence were able to dislodge salsa s primacy. n shon the viejoteca
re-
viv l
constitutes a symbolic victory dance for the forces
of
musical memory
that created and continue to fashion Caleño popular culture.
11 hapter
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