“Los Malotes de la Salsa”: Salsa Dons and the Performance of Subjecthood

Chapter 2 maps how the musical collaborations between Willie Colón and Héctor LaVoe helped constitute salsa as a site for the production of heteronormative pleasure and possibility. The chapter traces how songs, album covers, publicity posters, and performances on- and offstage exploited rather than recoiled from representations of Puerto Rican excess that helped forge a Nuyorican cultural aesthetic through which diasporic Puerto Rican abjection became the site for the performance of racialized, masculinist subjecthood. Rather than recoiling from narratives of Puerto Ricans as racially, culturally, and linguistically corrupt, Colón and LaVoe’s personas as salsa’s “bad boys” embraced their abjection as a criminal waste population.