Book Review

Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin American Popular Music. By Lise Waxer. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0-8153-4019-2 (cloth); 0-8153-4020-6 (pbk.). Pp. xiii, 335. $85.00 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.)

Perhaps the most globally significant development in American music in the last thirty years is the formation, stylization, and globalization of salsa. The genre developed in the 1960s and 1970s out of the Latino barrios in New York City from mostly American-born Puerto Rican musicians, who included the Cuban son and other pre-Castro dance types as the foundation of their repertoire. Salsa, which initially served as an emblem of identity among bicultural Latinos in New York, eventually spread beyond the local markets to what is now a transnational phenomenon that has ardent practitioners and aficionados in not only the Americas, but in Africa, Asia, and Australia.