Puerto Rico: A Musical Trip – África López Zabalegui

For my cultural map, I wanted to make a musical trip to the island of Puerto Rico. Among all the artists I decided to focus on the Puerto Rican composer Tite Curet Alonso. Tite Curet is one of the most important figures of salsa. He composed nearly 2000 salsa songs, boleros, and ballads. I chose him as my case study for several reasons. First of all because of the literary quality of his compositions. Not only from a musical perspective Curet’s songs are masterpieces; the songs can also be considered as poems, oral poems. This perspective enables a postcolonial reading. Secondly, salsa can also be a suitable genre for a postcolonial analysis. Salsa was born in the 60s in New York. It was created by the Caribbean immigrants, mainly Puerto Ricans, that were in the diaspora. The genre itself is a syncretism of styles rhythms and influences. Moreover, while many of the salsa songs talk about love stories and broken hearts, there is a whole subgenre that has been denominated as salsa consciente or ‘conscious salsa’, whose lyrics talk about topics such as slavery, blackness, freedom, and claim for a Caribbean identity. 

As my project for the Cultural Map, I wanted to work creatively on Tite Curet’s work, which I aim to work on academically for the final essay. 

I decided to record a song by Tite Curet. During my stay in Spain in the Christmas holidays, I called a couple of friends and asked them if they could help me to record the instrumental part. We decided to do an acoustic cover. Sergio Portales Domínguez did the instrumental arrangement and recorded the Spanish guitar and the backing vocals. Jaime Álvarez Mezquita put the percussion. He played the bongos, the maracas, and the campana or cencerro (cowbell), typical salsa instruments. He also sang the backing vocals. Finally, I sang the main vocals. We first recorded the music in the studio and afterward, we filmed the video. When I had all the material I did all the editing process. The whole project took around a week to be finished. 

The song I decided to record is “Anacaona”, a song of salsa consciente composed by Tite Curet for the also Puerto Rican singer Cheo Feliciano. The song talks about Anacaona, a character from Caribbean mythology. Anacaona was the Taino cacique in La Española when the Spaniards first arrived on the island. The story tells how she and her people received the Spaniards with a great party but they were captured and assassinated.