It’s Time Rubén Blades Was Accepted Into the American Canon

On August 16th, fifty-three years after his musical début in New York City, Rubén Blades filled Manhattan’s fourth-largest theatre, the United Palace, in Washington Heights, with a concert that offered a retrospective of his career. What drove him through those fifty-three years is also the matter of his forthcoming autobiography, to be published by Knopf. Its tentative title is “Life Is Full of Surprises,” a line from his song “Pedro Navaja,” which is arguably the most popular salsa song of all time. The title seems appropriate: his life and work are surprisingly eclectic. But the biggest surprise of his long, prolific career is that Blades, a major figure of New York City’s cultural life for more than half a century, who brought a New York-born musical style to the world at large, has still not been accepted into the American canon.

A singer and songwriter, the winner of eleven Grammys and eleven Latin Grammys, Blades transformed salsa, the Afro-Caribbean dance music developed in New York City in the nineteen-sixties, by making it a vehicle for stories with a social-justice and anticolonial slant. Blades “is just as significant as Víctor Jara, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley in terms of writing about social-justice issues and where society needs to be better,” Félix Contreras, the co-creator and host of “Alt.Latino,” NPR’s show on Latin music since 2010, told me. “In fact, he is probably even more powerful, because he is speaking for a whole continent.” “His songs captured the everyday life of New York Latinos and all Latin Americans,” Frances Aparicio, a former director of the Latina and Latino Studies program at Northwestern University and the author of “Listening to Salsa,” told me. Blades is a major Latino cultural figure in New York City, where he has resided most of his life, and also a well-known political figure in his native country of Panama. And yet, Aparicio told me, “Anglo America doesn’t see him.” In that sense, she said, he embodies Latinos’ “struggles to find success in this country.”

The son of a Cuban mother, herself a singer and an actress, and a Colombian father (a detective who worked with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Panama, according to his son), Blades was a student at Universidad Nacional de Panamá when a military coup shut down the school, in 1968. Blades has often told the story of how his mother, fearing that he’d join an opposition movement, sent him to New York as a birthday present. His family didn’t have the money for a ticket, but his brother, who worked for Pan American, got him on a plane at a discounted rate. And a Cuban singer who was a friend of the family provided him with a letter to take to the Edison Hotel, on West Forty-seventh Street, to get a cheap room.

In Panama City, Blades had met Pancho Cristal, a major Latin-music producer from New York, during a recording session. Blades, who began singing with local bands when he was in high school, was filling in for another singer. Impressed, Cristal suggested that Blades should look for him if he was ever in New York to record an album. Blades did, which led to his first album, “From Panama to New York.” Recorded in three weeks of 1969, when he was twenty-one, it was not a big hit. Still, it introduced the element that would make Blades one of the most influential figures in salsa. The first song, “Juan González,” tells of a military patrol in an unnamed country that comes into a town bearing news that they killed a guerrilla fighter during an ambush in a ravine. Salsa typically deals with subjects such as masculinity, poverty, and street crime—sometimes with humor. Songs written as short stories about the political struggles of Latin Americans were unheard of.

Blades went back to Panama, getting a degree in law and political science when the university reopened, but he settled in New York City in 1974, when it seemed headed toward bankruptcy. “It smelled of trash, tobacco, and diesel. It was a dangerous city,” Blades remembered. But it was also a vibrant center of “salsa and jazz, and the punk-rock movement was beginning to make its noise. It was a wonderful place to be. Also, it was cheap.” A Panamanian law degree was of no use, so he got a job in the mailroom at Fania Records, the label at the center of Latin music at the time. He took his guitar to work every day, hoping for a chance to impress somebody. He eventually met Ray Barreto, a leading figure in the early salsa scene, who was looking for a singer. Blades said that Barreto interrogated him “for an hour, trying to understand what a lawyer was doing in the mailroom.” Finally, he agreed to give him an audition, and Blades was hired as a singer. Not long afterward, Blades started a years-long collaboration with the trombonist and bandleader Willie Colón, another salsa pioneer, whose albums sold tens of thousands of copies. Colón’s stardom offered Blades a platform solid enough to boldly break with the conventional. (They fell out in 2007 when Colón sued Blades for breach of contract; a legal battle followed, resulting in decisions in Blades’s favor.)

A voracious reader since an early age, and a poet in high school, Blades had always seen himself as a storyteller. A storyteller is born, he told me, “when you are young and your mother asks you who broke the glass, and you don’t tell the truth, you tell the story.” His characters “are just as vivid and powerful as those of any Latin American novelist,” Contreras told me. The song “Pablo Pueblo” (“Pablo the People”), for example, tells of a poor man who comes home feeling tired and defeated after a long day’s work. The politicians who promised change had proved to be disappointments. “Until when?” will he have to live this way, he asks himself, before falling asleep hungry. “Pedro Navaja” is about a criminal who attacks a sex worker in the street; he stabs her, but she has a gun, and shoots him. They both die, and a drunk passerby takes the gun, the knife, and the “two pesos” they were carrying. The chorus is: “Life is full of surprises.”

Blades has written songs about the materialism of society (“Plástico”), the murder of the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero (“El Padre Antonio y Su Monaguillo Andrés”), a white upper-class woman who falls in love with a Black working-class musician (“Ligia Elena”), the disappeared people of Latin America (“Desapariciones”), and U.S. imperialism (“Tiburón,” or “Shark”). Some of his songs were banned by repressive regimes in Latin America (including in Panama) and by Cuban radio shows in Florida, where “Tiburón” was labelled as pro-Communist.

Blades said that he was aware that he was creating “something that did not exist at the time.” He saw the “incredible opportunity” of having two strangers close to each other on the dance floor (salsa is a contact dance) suddenly “sharing common ground.” So he told them stories that mattered, about their mother or their country, about politics, race, and their daily lives. Several of his songs were too long for the usual commercial requirements of radio: “Pablo Pueblo” is more than six minutes long; “Pedro Navaja,” more than seven. Fania agreed to release “Siembra” (1978), the album that “Pedro Navaja” is on, only because Colón played on it. They feared a flop; they said that it would be “Willie Colón’s commercial death,” Blades said. Instead, it became one of the best-selling salsa albums of all time. For the past forty-five years, Blades has sung the songs from “Siembra” in stadiums and concert halls around the world; when he gets to the chorus of “Pedro Navaja,” the crowds sing, “Life is full of surprises.”

Earlier this year, Lin-Manuel Miranda talked to Rolling Stone about the impact of hearing Blades’s songs for the first time. He realized that “you can write a tasty hook, you can write incredibly complex rhythms, and you can be telling a story all at the same time. I really don’t know of any other Latin writers who staked out so much territory for what can be a song. It’s like if you listen to pop music on the radio your whole life, and then you hear Randy Newman and go, ‘Oh, my God, it can also be that.’ ”