Cultural Struggles for Hegemony

Abstract

Salsa emerged basically from Hispanic Caribbean migrants to New York City but underwent a broad process of globalization not as a U.S. cultural production but as an Afro-Caribbean art form. The inability to incorporate salsa into U.S. culture within either the “melting pot” paradigm or multiculturalism illustrates the particular “structure of feeling” that salsa shares with important epochal processes such as the current crisis of U.S. hegemony.