The rhythm they couldn’t stamp out By Melissa Trovato I grew up with salsa playing on the way to the beach or on cleaning Sundays. My parents would put it on early in the morning to set the tone of the day, and it never once occurred to me as a kid that I was listening to anything other than music made for dancing. It took years to understand that the songs riding along with us were also carrying something else: centuries of people rebelling against oppression through music. Eddie Palmieri understood that better than almost anyone. In 1971, he and his brother, Charlie, put Latin percussionists, soul singers, and free jazz musicians in the same room and called the result Harlem River Drive. It was named for the road running along the border between Black Harlem and Spanish Harlem—two neighborhoods with a common struggle. But Palmieri’s career is really just one chapter in a much longer pattern, one that runs through Afro-Caribbean music for three centuries. Every generation invents a new sound out of hardship. And in every generation, someone in power decides that sound is dangerous. |
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Johnny Giraldo of the Salsa y Control dance troupe leads dancers at the Embrace Massó ¡Con Salsa! International Music Festival in 2025. (Photo: Embrace) |
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Bomba is Puerto Rico's oldest musical tradition, created on 17th-century sugar plantations by enslaved Africans who didn't share a language but shared a drum. In bomba, the dancer leads, and the drummer follows—a conversation built on freedom inside a system built to deny it. Enslaved communities used it to release grief, plan uprisings, and simply survive under bondage. Plena grew out of bomba in early-20th-century Ponce and became known as "the newspaper of the people"—a genre built for telling the news nobody else would print, laced with satire and protest, meant to be sung by people who had no other outlet to say it. Salsa picked up that same instinct a few decades later, once Puerto Rican migrants in New York folded Afro-Cuban son together with bomba and plena. It landed squarely inside the Civil Rights movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the Cuban Revolution's aftershocks, and it said so directly. Nuyorican salseros sang about poverty in Spanish Harlem and the unfinished fight for independence, while Rubén Blades used the genre to channel Simón Bolívar's anti-imperialist resistance to U.S. intervention in the region. Palmieri's Harlem River Drive was a literal alliance between Black and Puerto Rican Harlem. By the 1990s, the pattern repeated with a genre nobody in power wanted to claim. The reggae sounds brought by Jamaican immigrants to Panama and Puerto Rico mixed with the Spanish language to create Reggaetón, and the government's response was to raid record stores and homes, seizing tapes it called “pornographic” under the "Mano Dura" anti-crime policy. Artists like Tego Calderón and Ivy Queen kept pushing on the government's own racism and classism through the genre even as it was being criminalized. Across the water, the Dominican Republic ran the same play against dembow, a genre born in Santo Domingo's poorest barrios, dismissed by officials as “obscene.” Music has never been just entertainment. For communities pushed to the margins, it has been a way to claim space and survive the constant pressure of othering. The rhythms born on plantations, in barrios, and in public housing projects carried stories that governments tried to erase but could never silence. Today, those same sounds fill some of the world's biggest stages. Genres that were once persecuted, criminalized, and dismissed now headline events like the Super Bowl thanks to acts like Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar. What was once treated as a threat has become part of the cultural mainstream because generations of artists and communities refused to let their music disappear. That history is why this year’s Embrace Massó ¡Con Salsa!: Ritmo y Sonido Block Party brings El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico to the heart of Boston. It continues a long tradition of using music to gather, to celebrate, and to take up space together. Every drumbeat, every brass line, and every chorus carries forward a legacy of resilience. In a time when othering continues to divide our communities, filling downtown Boston with salsa is its own declaration that our stories and our joy belong in the center of public life. |
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