The New York-Puerto Rico roots of salsa

The current that finally produced salsa runs decades back, before the genre had a name. The Puerto Rican musicians Rafael Hernández and Pedro Flores formed the Trío Borincano and built their reputations performing in New York in the early twentieth century, and the singer Myrta Silva later joined Hernández's Cuarteto Victoria, part of a long tradition of Puerto Rican performers who found their audience on the mainland rather than the island. That pattern only accelerated at mid-century, when the Nuyorican bandleaders Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez popularized the mambo style in New York through the 1950s and into the early 1960s.

Salsa itself, as a distinct sound, emerged in the late 1960s with a younger generation of Nuyorican musicians, among them Willie Colón, Ray Barretto, and the collective known as the Fania All-Stars. Around the same time, Joe Cuba and other Nuyorican musicians fused mambo and Cuban dance rhythms with African American rhythm and blues to create the "boogaloo" sound of the 1960s, another product of the same New York neighborhoods where Puerto Rican and Black American musical traditions sat side by side.

The island's own Afro–Puerto Rican traditions had a parallel revival in New York. The bomba and plena styles, brought to the city by arrivals of the Great Migration era, enjoyed a revival in New York through the 1980s and 1990s, driven by groups such as Los Pleneros de la 21, led by the Santurce native Juan "Juango" Gutiérrez. That revival mattered because those same rhythms had once been looked down on or dismissed even within Puerto Rican circles, so their return to prominence on New York stages was as much a statement about identity as about music.

Decades later, that same musical community stayed politically engaged well past its recording years. Willie Colón and Ray Barretto publicly supported the Vieques protest movement, tying this era's music scene directly to the closing chapter of this site's history, a straight line running from the mambo halls of the 1950s to a bombing range on a small island four decades later, carried by people who never stopped thinking of themselves as part of both places at once.

Sources: Puertorriqueños en la ciudad de Nueva York. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.