The salsa explosion: African-Americans find roots and rhythm in Salsa Dancing

Some of Ayesha Karim's friends in Chicago scoffed when she suggested going out salsa dancing for a night of fun. As African-Americans, they did not identify with the music, whose lyrics were in Spanish. And they knew few people who looked like them who danced to it.

But Karim grew up listening and dancing freestyle to salsa and to its predecessor, mambo, which her mother called Afro-Cuban music. She also knew the music's connection to Africa and that it moved her like no other. "I find that there is just something in the music with the congas and other drums and piano that just drives you crazy and makes you want to dance," says Karim, a marketing executive at U.S. Cellular. She began dancing salsa as a partner dance about eight years ago at one of the clubs her parents had frequented many years earlier when it was known under a different name.

"I thought about salsa every night. I thought about it at the bus stop. I practiced my steps there. I practiced with anybody I could find who was willing and with a broom if there was no one," Karim says. "I wanted to be part of the group, those people who were so emotionally connected with the music and the artists. It was obsessive, compulsive, intoxicating."

During the last decade, an increasing number of African-Americans also have found this steamy, high-energy dance with fancy footwork, rapid spins and gyrating hips intoxicating and now figure prominently among salsa dancers and instructors at clubs and dance studios throughout Chicago and other major cities. Fully a quarter of the patrons at several top salsa dance venues in the city are African-American.

In Washington, about 99 percent of the patrons at Bar Nun, a popular U Street salsa club, are African-American. In Los Angeles and New York, where Latinos have given the word salsa the same cultural importance African-Americans have attached to the word soul, the number of African-Americans on salsa dance floors has increased substantially.

Despite a majority Black population, African-Americans were few in number at Atlanta salsa clubs just seven years ago, but now there are few salsa clubs in the metropolitan area that do not have a significant number of African-American patrons. Atlanta also is home of Afri-Salsa, an organization and marketing brand whose mission includes promoting cross-cultural exchanges and educating people about the Diaspora lineage and cultural link African-Americans have with salsa music and dancing. "We are more than just descendants of slaves inquiring about a dance ... We are Louisianians, Georgians, New Yorkers etc., who are as much a part of the salsa 'scene' as anyone else," says Anana Harris Parris, the organization's founder.

Parris saw salsa dancing for the first time at a club in Washington and immediately was struck by the cultural diversity of participants. "There were all these different shades of people from different countries doing salsa--Dominicans, people from the Caribbean and South America," she says. "What spoke to me was the similarity of the music's rhythm to that I was familiar with from west African dance training.

She continues: "Salsa also presented a safe space to explore and interact with another person without putting yourself at risk."

When she moved to Atlanta seven years ago, Harris Parris found Atlanta's trendy Buckhead section, where several salsa clubs were located, lacking the racial diversity of Washington's Adams Morgan area, home of the popular salsa venue Havana Village, or the waterfront area near Zanzibar, another popular salsa club with an African name. Moreover, not many African-Americans in Atlanta embraced salsa as part of their ancestral past. Afri-Salsa wants to fix that.

Polemics over the development of salsa dancing aside, it is generally agreed that the dance form emerged in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s as a derivative of highly popular Afro-Cuban music and dance, themselves an amalgam of indigenous music and dance and forms from west Africa, which were brought to the Americas through the slave trade.

In the 1960s, New York's Fania Records began using the term salsa as a marketing tool and exercised great control over the "sound" and its development through decision about who would perform under its label. Musical updates directly from Cuba were impeded by politics after Fidel Castro rose to power, and travel restrictions imposed by the U.S. and Cuba prevented Cuban musicians from freely traveling the 90 miles between the two nations.

There has long been a rift between musical purists who viewed salsa as akin to a copyright infringement on Afro-Cuban music and dance and those who just wanted to dance to its rhythms, regardless of origin and development. During the last decade, salsa has regained popularity because of inclusion in television dance specials and movies such as Dance With Me, The Buena Vista Social Club and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and the proliferation of salsa congresses in the U.S. and Europe.