ME SABE A PERÚ: A HISTORY OF SALSA IN THE MANY LIMAS

Abstract

This thesis analyses the history of salsa music’s reception and mediation in Lima, Peru from the 1960s to the 1990s. Considering local political, social, and economic changes, the multivalent understandings in its reception throughout the decades, adds nuance to notions of transnational cultural flows, Latin American identity, and the shift of mass media consumption from the public to the private sphere. Even in its most globally appealing form of the 1970s, salsa’s reception by a Limeño public was still informed by the national political situation and local class-based affinities. Amidst an ongoing intense urbanization in the late 1960s, salsa became a voice and the local musical identity of the working class yet cosmopolitan port of Callao in Lima. After its political turn in the late seventies, salsa gained the middle and upper classes' attention and was increasingly present in the national mass media. Finally, in the mid-eighties, this attention reached its peak during salsa’s most depoliticized form, a romantic iteration enjoyed across classes and groups in neo-liberal Lima.