The Salsa/Jazz/Blues Idiom and Creolization in the Atlantic World

Abstract

This chapter seeks to investigate the salsa/jazz/blues idiom as a means of discerning the nature of creolization in the Atlantic World as a feature of modernity. This term—salsa/jazz/blues—is definitely not stated in historical order but indicates the fact that by the time salsa received its label there was a mutual and reciprocal interrelationship between it and jazz and blues that continues to this day. I place salsa first in this term because had I started with the blues or jazz I would have been force to privilege the North American experience of creolization and then had to endeavor to include the Caribbean and other areas of the Atlantic World. To start with salsa brings us immediately into a discussion of migrations of Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans from the Caribbean to New York and other cities in Europe. The meaning of the term creolization will be elaborated on later. Suffice it to say at this point that its importance has to do with understanding the nature of modernity whose temporal structure I am situating in the Atlantic World. That world did not come into being until the extreme western end of Asia called Europe made contact and entered into a series of sustained and nonreciprocal exchanges with Africa and the Americas. Creolization was the biological and cultural product of this temporality.

I am not african. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not tiano. Tiano is in me, but there is no way back. I am not european. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.

—Aurora Levins Morales, Getting Home Alive

The oppressed have faced the hardness of life. The world has often appeared as a stone … Hegel spoke of a form of consciousness as the lithic imagination, that mode of consciousness which in confronting reality in this mode formed a will in opposition… This hardness of life or of reality was the experience of the meaning of the oppressed’s own identity as opaque. Reality itself was opaque and seemed opposed to them … The matter of God is what is being experienced. This may be an old god (but all old gods are new gods). The expression of this god cannot be in the older theological languages. This god has evoked a new beat, a new rhythm, a new movement. (Charles H. Long, Significations, p. 197)