Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures.

• Author: Holston, Mark

Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, by Frances R. Aparicio. Hanover: University of Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

A strong feminist perspective pervades this intellectual yet highly readable discussion of the urbanized style of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican tropical dance music known as salsa. The author's central themes--that although female artists are becoming more visible in the music, the salsa "industry" continues to be male dominated, and that lyrics to salsa songs have historically denigrated women and reinforced outmoded stereotypes--are born out in uncompromising terms. "I am still convinced," she writes in the preface, "that neither salsa, the merengue, nor the bolero has yet transcended any of the masculinist tendencies I have identified here."

Elsewhere, she examines...