Salsa in Cali

A history of slavery, Cuban music, Mexican movies, foreign radio broadcasts, a disciplined collecting of vinyl records, and sounds from New York City all were key in the history of salsa in Cali and how Colombia’s third city became the world capital of the tropical music style.

Cali is the is the closest capital to the Colombian Pacific coast, almost 2,000 miles away from the cradle of salsa that was originally born in New York after crucial cultural developments in Cuba, Puerto Rico and even Mexico.

However, what really sealed the incursion of Cuban music in Cali was both regions’ cultural

and physical similarity; after the conquest of the Americas.

Cali, like Cuba, had been a rural slave area in which most of the slaves were working on sugar plantations.

Cali, Colombia, 2016.