Our Latin Thing: Salsa's Nuyorican Histories

Chapter 1 takes as its point of departure the film Our Latin Thing, a musical documentary of the legendary Fania-All Stars 1971 concert at New York’s Cheetah Lounge. With a vision that extended beyond salsa to “the culture that was behind the music,” first-time director Leon Gast intermingled scenes filmed primarily on New York’s Lower East Side with the performance at the Cheetah. Linking salsa’s aesthetic contours to the city’s poor and working-class Puerto Rican communities, the film illuminates an ambivalent relationship between Fania Records and Latin New York, one in which New York Puerto Ricans participated in the commodification of salsa while resisting their reduction to objects of consumption.