Salsa City: Mapping Latinx New York
Marcos Echeverría Ortiz recalls the places where we were safe.
Having grown up in Ecuador for most of his life, when Marcos Echeverría Ortiz moved to New York City almost 5 years ago, he began the process of discovering what it means to be Latinx.
For Echeverría Ortiz, a journalist and graduate student at The New School, this process of discovery was entangled with the rhythms of the congas and the timbales. Salsa became a vehicle for understanding not only who Latinxs are, but where Latinxs gathered in community.
In his upcoming publication, “The Lost Places of Salsa Music in New York City,” Marcos maps out four years of research surrounding the record stores, ballrooms, and places where the city became a safe havan for Latinxs against racist urban policy. Echeverría Ortiz reminds us that in the ‘90s, Guliani outlawed dancing in public without a permit, making the revitalization of these sites all the more significant.
For Marcos, there is an uneven weight between salsa history and the places where it lived. “Salsa history is really well recorded. There are tons of documents and books that talk about Tito Puente, the Three Kings, the music, the bands, but there was no evidence about the places. If the places had disappeared, or were displaced due to gentrification…” the history would be lost.
In the introduction of his publication he writes, “It is fundamental to create physical evidence of Latinx history in the United States.” This evidence, based on the cultural memory of the participants in his oral history project, the blog sites of dedicated salseros, and Echeverría Ortiz’s own archival research transforms the thing of memory into artifact. Proof pure and simple that the spaces where community gathered, though they may be lost to gentrification or displacement, live on.
And live on they do, when you look at black and white photographs in, “The Lost Places of Salsa Music” you can almost hear the beating of the conga. The photos, though two dimensional, are imbued with sound and color. Combined with the gripping testimony that accompanies the images, Escheverría Ortiz helps you navigate dizzying dance scenes.
Salsa feels ubiquitous in New York City, it’s a “salsa city.” When I asked Marcos to describe salsa, what it meant, he talked about its ability to hug the Latinx community, “It has this element that if you could identify with it, it has the power to hold your hand so that you are not lost in the roughness of the city.”
In the words of Nhora Alejandra Tovar, a dance teacher of salsa in Colombia, “Salsa is a refresher of human dignity. It overshadows inequality and discontent with sharp rhythms and the madness of love. It closes social distances because it requires people to embrace each other in a moment of eye contact, the feel of the skin, helping them to know each other and see the best in each other.”
His oral history archive, appropriately named “Where We Were Safe,” is a reminder of the protection we can afford ourselves when we make or take the space to be in community with one another.
Limited editions of “The Lost Places of Salsa Music” will be available at the Printed Matter Art Books Fair this weekend in New York on October 13-16th.
About
Marcos Escheverría Ortiz is an award winning multimedia journalist, photographer, and filmmaker. He currently works in NY1 as a news writer and video reporter covering street food and urban culture.