Inventing salsa

The Juilliard School, New York’s prestigious music and performing arts conservatory, recognized Pacheco’s talents and efforts with a scholarship to study composition and theory. During his education and afterward, Pacheco played percussion and other instruments in New York City’s Latin dance orchestras, eventually forming one of his own. He found his greatest early success as a flutist—a success he advertised on the cover of the 1961 album “Spotlight on Pacheco,” which sold more than 100,000 copies.

“Spotlight on Pacheco” reflects its particular moment on the Latin music and dance scene in New York, then dominated by Cuban-derived musical styles. Pacheco nearly perfected this African and Western mix of melodies, rhythms, and instruments that recalled the heritage of the Caribbean’s diverse populations.  

In the decades around World War II, as more and more people from the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico, had moved to New York City, they had brought this distinctive musicality with them. One of Pacheco's contemporaries and collaborators remembered of East Harlem in the 1960s that men and boys could be found all over, “keeping time and pounding out rhythms on whatever was in sight”—evidence of “a special kind of inheritance that’s in our blood.”  

Many of Fania’s artists came from this neighborhood and sang of the challenges and rewards of life there. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the migration of Spanish-speaking people to New York increased, ensuring a ready supply of musicians and audience members for Latin dance music like Pacheco’s.

There were still other factors leading to Pacheco’s success as a musician and later record producer. The decline of big band music in the 1960s opened a space for smaller ensembles and novel approaches. By reducing the number of musicians and concentrating them in a tight frontline of two flutists, a trumpeter, and a trombonist, Pacheco arrived at a sound that was inexpensive to produce yet distinctive to the ear. New York audiences loved the results: a recognizably Cuban sound, bright and loud. Meanwhile, the embargo on trade with Cuba of the early 1960s protected record producers like Pacheco from competition with that country’s labels.

The sound emanating from these venues, reproduced and publicized by Pacheco’s label, contributed to the formation of Fania’s distinctive brand. The next step was for Pacheco and Masucci to protect it. On July 5, 1968, they filed a trademark application for the name “Fania” and obtained registration the following year (U.S. Trademark No. 873,009).

Next, Fania signed Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Héctor Lavoe, whose albums “El Malo” (“The Bad Guy,” 1969), “The Hustler” (1969), and “Cosa Nuestra” (a collaboration with Willie Colón and marketed in English as “Our Latin Thing,” 1971) traded on the Fania sound and became instant classics.

Meanwhile, Pacheco added still more artists to Fania’s roster, including Rubén Blades, Celia Cruz, and Eddie Palmieri. Pacheco oversaw the marketing for these performers, especially the vocalists, whose inspired renditions attracted ever larger audiences.

Pacheco next formed a troupe of gifted Latin bandleaders and performers and called it the Fania All Stars (U.S. Trademark No. 3,614,324). In August 1971, the All Stars performed to a crowd of 4,000 at New York’s Cheetah Club. In the fall of 1973, they sold out Yankee Stadium. 

As it gained in popularity, salsa took on new meanings and new associations—a life of its own. It connoted a certain urban lifestyle and migrant experience, yet eluded a fixed definition. It encompassed cultures of race, class, and gender particular to Spanish-speaking peoples all over the world, even as it retained close associations with the Nuyorican experience in particular (“Nuyorican” is a blend of “New Yorker” and “Puerto Rican”). 

In their branding of the genre, Pacheco and Fania resorted to documentary filmmaking. The 1971 concert at the Cheetah Club resulted in “Our Latin Thing,” which opens to rooftop and street scenes in New York City. Afro-Caribbean beats increase in volume as Nuyorican children play. Then the opening credits roll, the performers’ names splashed as graffiti across the crumbling walls of tenement houses. Salsa, in this iteration, has its place: the “barrios,” neighborhoods like East Harlem, the gritty but also grand epicenter of Nuyorican culture.

As Fania continued its bid for mass appeal through the later 1970s, however, its filmmakers and marketers worked to obscure the East Harlem connection, trying as they were to make salsa a genre with universal appeal.

Pacheco balanced this push for national and international appeal with an emphasis on the “Fania family,” which embraced the label’s musicians and audiences as well as Latin communities all over the world. In this way, Pacheco and his artists capitalized on the growth of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States and Latinos’ increasing prominence in mainstream American culture.

By the middle of the 1970s, Fania was producing nearly 80% of the salsa records for sale in the United States, and mainstream media took notice. Articles in popular magazines acquainted non-Latinos with Fania’s sound and roster, and network television began to feature performances by members of the Fania All Stars. Throughout, Pacheco emphasized the Latin element: “The Whites had their music, the Blacks had Motown, and here we come with Fania. But it was Latino.”  

For many Latinos in the United States, especially Puerto Ricans, salsa formed a pillar of Latin identity. Héctor Lavoe’s “Mi gente” (“My people”) indeed became a kind of “Nuyorican national anthem,” according to fans, and inspired feelings of connectedness to a larger community. For years, music had been a binding agent among the mix of ethnicities represented by New York’s Spanish speakers. Now, thanks to Fania, the music had a name and an appeal among national and even international audiences.

In 1974, the Fania All Stars performed for the first time in Venezuela, an untapped market for salsa music. The concert was a success, pulling together an audience for future acts and creating a market for American and Venezuelan salsa records. Pacheco made Caracas a regular stop on All Stars tours and performed there himself at sold-out venues. The pattern repeated itself in Colombia, too, establishing a large market there for salsa—and Fania—by the end of the 1970s.