This chapter analyses the heterogeneous, contradictory and shifting social meanings that salsa music has articulated since its inception in the late 1960s. Shifting from the Nuyorican-grounded urban masculinity and anticolonial politics in its early years to the current globalised and neoliberal spaces of dance studios, this chapter explores how the sounds of salsa, as popular music, become sites for power struggles over cultural, racial, ethnic and gender identities.

Labels – names – are at the heart of social identities. Identity categories like race, ethnicity, nationality, and even gender do not have sharp boundaries given by biology or history or cultural affiliations. Social identity groups are less like biological species than like sports teams or their fans, largely created and sustained by labeling and other linguistic and social processes. They are not unreal, but they are always changing. Identities can be created by labeling from above that obliterates the identity distinctions drawn by those labeled (e.g., Indians in the Americas) and helps disempower them. Identities can be created by strategic labeling to create alliances to help improve the positions of those so labeled (.e.g., Asian Americans). Labeling with a noun (e.g., a vegan or vegans) suggests that those labeled are a kind, sharing not just the properties that prompted attaching a label but a cluster of other relatively stable properties as well. In contrast, describing by using some kind of verb phrase (eats only plant-based food) carries fewer suggestions about persistence of that property or about other properties that those to whom the description applies might have.