UMass Boston

Latin@ Literary and Cultural Studies; Popular Culture and Commodification

PhD, Stanford University

• "Our Latin Thing: Fania Records, Nuyorican Subjectivities, and the 1970s New York Salsa Boom" (2015). Journal of Popular Music Studies, 27(3): 274-303.
• “A Tale of Two Singers: Representation, Copyright, and ‘El Cantante’.” Latino Studies Journal 13, no. 1 (2015): 44-68. doi: 10.1057/lst.2014.74.
• Lazú, Jacqueline and Marisol Negrón. “Languages in Dialogue: Reflections on the 4th International Congress of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.” Centro Journal XII.1 (Fall 2000): 117-123.
• Book Review: Rondón, César Miguel. The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music From the Caribbean to New York City. Trans. Frances A. Aparicio and Jackie White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Centro Journal XII.1 (Fall 2000): 117-123.
• Reference entry: “Harlow, Larry.” The New Grove Dictionary on American Music. New York: Grove Dictionaries of Music, 50
• Reference entry: “Fania All-Stars." The New Grove Dictionary on American Music. New York: Grove Dictionaries of Music, 238.
• Reference entry: “Fania Records.” The New Grove Dictionary on American Music. New York: Grove Dictionaries of Music, 238.
• Reference entry: “Mercado, Ralph.” The New Grove Dictionary on American Music. New York: Grove Dictionaries of Music, 454.

Marisol Negrón is an assistant professor of American studies and Latino studies, and one of the core faculty members of the Latino Studies Program. She is affiliated faculty of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the graduate program in Critical Ethnic and Community Studies. Professor Negrón is a founding member of the New England Consortium of Latin@ Studies.  

Research Interests:

Marisol Negrón's research examines how cultural products transmit collective memories and social identities across generations of Latin@s. She is particularly interested in the complex and contradictory ways that cultural products reanimate, circulate, and transform meanings of Latinidad vis a vis questions of space, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, language, immigration status, sound, medium, or other symbolic and material factors. Her research extend to Language and Linguistics, where she explores the role of language how individuals, groups, and communities deploy language in relation to Latinidad.

Work in Progress:

Negrón, Marisol. Made in NuYoRico: Salsa as Commodity and Cultural Sign Since the Mid-1960s

This book project, tentatively titled “Made in NuYoRico: Salsa as Commodity and Cultural Sign Since the Mid-1960s,” recovers the aesthetic practices and material conditions within New York’s Puerto Rican communities that informed the music’s development as a cultural product. The project traces how salsa reflected and was informed by an emerging Nuyorican subjectivity that privileged New York, the city’s Puerto Rican communities, and their collective experiences as racialized and colonial subjects as well as cultural agents.

“Made in NuYoRico” illuminates how Nuyorican subjectivities embedded within salsa impacted the music’s trajectory in both New York and Puerto Rico, constructing alternative meanings of “Puerto Ricanness” in each of these spaces. Professor Negron begins the book by returning to the mid-1960s when salsa’s sounds began to fill the streets, parks, basements and rooftops of “Latin” New York. Exploring the aesthetic properties of salsa alongside the material world in which the music’s meanings were constituted, she demonstrates that the music’s development as a cultural product during the next decade depended on identification with New York’s Puerto Rican communities. She pays particular attention to how East Harlem’s El Barrio became the imagined home of the Puerto Rican diaspora even as the music looked to Puerto Rico as a site of cultural recuperation. As part of this process she examines the public spaces where the music emerged and continued to circulate long after the 1970s salsa boom. She also shows how salsa’s normative deployments of masculinity defined an ideal Nuyorican subject and facilitated the music’s transnational flows to Puerto Rico.

Forthcoming Publication

“Our Latin Thing: Salsa as Commodity and Sign During the 1970s Salsa ‘Boom’” (Under review)

Public Presentations (Selected)

2013
Tributo a “El Cantante”: The Making and Unmaking of Héctor LaVoe’s Abjection.   Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association. Panel organizer and panelist.

2012      
Panelist.  “When Fania Was King: Salsa and Its Legal Discontents.” Biannual Meeting of the Puerto Rican Studies Association. 

2011                     
Panelist. “From Mambo to Hip Hop: (Re)Imagining NuYoRico with Héctor Lavoe and La Bruja.” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association. October 20 – 23, 2010.

2010                     
Panel Organizer and Panelist. “Si tú creías que yo no venía: 1970s Salsa, Diaspora, and Puerto Rican ‘National’ Culture.” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association. November 18 – 21, 2010.

2008                     
Guest Speaker. “Salsa, Commodities, and Community.” Social Welfare Analysis Colloquium, Boston University.

2007                     
Panelist. “A Tale of Two Authors: Negotiating Cultural Authority and Intellectual Property Rights in El Cantante.” Latin American Studies Association XXVII International Congress. September 5-8, 2007.

2007                     
Panelist. “Geographies of Sound: New York, Gendered Spaces, and the 1970s Salsa ‘Boom’.” Experience Music Project 2007 Pop Conference.  Seattle, Washington. April 19-22, 2007.

Courses Taught:

AMST100  American Identities
AMST 201 Latinos/as in the US
AMST 353 Latino/a Border Cultures
AMST 350L Race, Class, and Gender: Issues in Diversity
AMST 405: The Immigrant Experience
AMST 605 Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality