Celia Cruz Salsa and Afro Cuban Feminism and Sexuality

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Celia Cruz Salsa and Afro Cuban Feminism and Sexuality

Introduction

Celia Cruz was born in 1925, she became famous in Cuba during 1950s where she sang to guarachas, and leading to her being christened the title “La Guarachera de Cuba" by her fans. In 1962, she moved to the United States where faced opposition from her target audience that felt her music failed to satisfy their contemporary musical and cultural needs. However, during the 1970s, the rise in ethnic pride allowed Cruz to significantly contribute to the growth of “advanced” sound of Latina music, earning the nickname "Queen of Salsa". Celia’s rise to prominence coincided with her development into a top entertainer who used her salsa songs to highlight important social and political issues, including gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and power that faced the Cuban community exiled to the United States as well as other societies.

How Celia Cruz’s Salsa Songs Relate to Race

 Celia’s salsa songs addressed systemic racial prejudice by stressing how difficult it was for immigrants to attain proof of citizenship, limiting chances of rebuilding their lives in exile. Fernandez (2018) determined that on "Se Me Perdió La Cartera," Celia spoke of "Ay, Mira, perdí Los espejuelos, la licensia, el social security!" stressing requirements of staying in the United States.  According to Danesi (2007), Cruz sang about American immigrant experience where the government exposed refugees to a complicated process of acquiring licenses and social security registration. For that reason, Celia salsa songs revealed systemic racial bias that affected immigrants from Cuba in the United States, since they had to undergo a challenging vetting and verification processes to get citizenship.

Celia Cruz used her songs to discuss institutional racism within Cuba that had affected the lives of black Cubans. According to Poey (2014), Cruz came from a lineage of Africans who had been brought from West Africa into her native land to harvest sugarcane as slaves. As a result, in “La Vida Es Un Carnaval,” Cruz sang about the importance of her ancestry and criticized the lack of awareness and education on dangers of systemic discrimination against black Cubans, especially by the government (Quintana, 2018). All of this evidence showed that through her salsa songs, Cruz discussed her ancestry as well as the need for Cuban people to accept each other and eliminate threats of cultural prejudice.

In her songs, Cruz addressed racial stereotypes by detailing her fear of being discriminated by people within her neighborhood in the United States. Cantor-Navas (2018) established that on "Se Me Perdió La Cartera," Cruz sang about how she lost her purse and her fear that people might assume she was deceitful to conceal the fact that she did not have money.  Fernadez (2018) noted that Celia faced structural barriers; for example, local population believed that asylum seekers were a burden and that they were dependent on government and peoples’ support. Therefore, Cruz sang about stereotypes that supported institutional racism since it was among the predominant challenges that affected working-class women who had immigrated to the United States. 

Cruz’s salsa songs highlighted race when she paid homage to her African ancestry, following the enslavement of her forefathers in Cuba to work on sugarcane plantations. According to Gosin (2016), Celia’s catchphrase “Azúcar” — which meant sugar, underlined her way of acknowledging her ancestral background. Despite enduring racism as a result of her heritage, Celia ensured that her audience knew she was proud of her African descent through songs such as “La Negra Tiene Tumba’o” — translated as a young black lady is beautiful (Fernandez, 2018). As a consequence, through her salsa songs, Celia showed that she was proud of her color and familial descent primarily through recognizing the African nature of Cuban culture.

How Celia Cruz’s Salsa Songs Relate to Gender

Celia salsa songs related to gender structure by addressing the perceived role of women within a Cuban family. According to Cantor-Navas (2018), in her song "Yo Vi Vivera," she revealed how Latin American girls faced...