The radicals, Chicanos and Nuyoricans

Some paths:
Puerto Rican folklore
Afro-Cuban traditional music
African-American soul and funk
African-American experimental jazz


Eddie Palmieri

The innovative Palmieri never signed with Fania and never stopped experimenting or making msuic outside the box. After introducing the two-trombone sound that fueled salsa, he made political music like "Justicia"and Live at Sing-Sing prison, ("VP Blues" here). He did fusion projects with soul music, like "Harlem River Drive." He was experimented with jazz music, pushing the musical theory (4th voicings and pentatonics) of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner toward Latin music and even doing way-out Cecil Taylor type free jazz.

"Vamonos pa'l monte" (with Charlie Palmieri, live in Central Park)

Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Neoyorkino

It started as a listening club in René López's basement, and opened out into one of the great experimental projects, that spawned multiple bands, and much of the Latin jazz movement. They played Cuban trad guajira, plena, Puerto Rican mazurka, and Santería batá, as well as some really swinging salsa.

Latin Jazz
Like Jerry and Andy González's projects, such as Ft. Apache Band, and many others.
 

Salsa was, among the things, a nationalist movement, as illustrated in the Fania film, Our Latin Thing (Cosa nuestra)

People have been, and still are playing rumba in the parks of New York.

Salsa poetry

Here Afro-Nuyorican Last Poet and Young Lords co-founder Felipe Luciano reading his poem "Jíbaro/My Pretty Nigger" opening for Eddie Palmieri at Sing-Sing Prison, 1972.

Luciano opening for Palmieri again, here.

Pedro Pietri, founder of the Nuyorican Poet's Café, reading "Puerto Rican Obituary" (1969)

The Young Lords

The Young Lords, whose 13 Point Plan included rights for US Puerto Ricans, the independence of the island of Puerto Rico, women's liberation, and solidarity with the Vietnamese people, began in Chicago in 1967, spread to New York (and beyond) in 1969, and was influential until the mid 1970s.

 Meanwhile, in LA...

The Chicano movement was a confluence of related struggles: an assimilationist Mexican-American movement that sought equal rights of citizenship and political representation; a labor movement organized around Mexican-American (and to some extent, Asian-American) farmworkers; a student movement that organized against the Vietnam War, police discrimination and brutality, equality of education, and negative stereotypes of Latinos in the popular media; and a nationalist movement organized around the idea of creating an independent and territorially defined nation.

The Chicano movement had political, artistic, and of course musical ramifications.  Those musical ramifications were varied, but in general they can be described as passing from a very ambiguous acknowledgement of their ethnicity to a much more straightforward racial pride.

Texas artists like Little Joe Hernández and Sonny Ozuña, who started off as younger exponents of the orquesta sound, were shut out of the mainstream music industry, much more than their East LA peers like the Premiers and Cannibal & the Headhunters, and were closer to rural Mexican culture. Little Joe Hernández, for example, had grown up picking cotton and hearing conjunto and orquesta in Central Texas. But bby the late 1960's, musicians like Little Joe were influenced by the hippie counterculture and the Chicano movement to move even more strongly toward conjunto music, with a heavy whiff of hippie-ness. His song "Las Nubes" became the unofficial anthem of the farmworker's union, and featured a hybrid aesthetic, with  a traditional conjunto feel and rhythm and Spanish lyrics, but also a drum kit and electric guitar and some almost progressive rock-sounding interludes.

Another important stream was the rock and Afro-Cuban fusion pioneered by Santana. The path is more circuitous than it might seem. Carlos Santana was born in Mexico and grew up playing mariachi music. But he hated that music and was much more inspired by blues and rock in the multi-racial band he led when he moved to San Francisco. Afro-Cuban slowly began to come in with Mike Carabelo, a high school friend of Santana's who had picked up congas in drum circles, and especially from San Francisco club owner and rock impresario Phil Graham, a transpalnted New Yorker (Born Jewish in Germany and escaping right before World War II) who had grown up dancing in the Palladium. Santana played at the legendary Woodstock festival, to tremendous acclaim, especially when the Woodstock film came out.

This model, of Chicanos playing Afro-Cuban-tinged rock was influential for many bands, such as El Chicano, which, despite largely ignoring actual Mexican music, was quite political and up-front about being Chicanos.

Later, Los Lobos, of L.A., started experimenting with traditional Mexican music, and even put it into their cover of Valens' "La Bamba" for the movie of the same name - note the trad jarocho breakdown at the end of the song (2:20). Country-rocker Linda Ronstadt, a multi-platinum-selling artist who was the best known and best paid woman in the msuic industry during her heyday in the 1970s, and who had never highlighted being an Arizona Chicana, did an all-mariachi album called "Canciones para mi padre/Songs for My Father" in 1987, and two more albums of Mexican music in the early 1990s.