Latin

In Cuba the son came down from the eastern hills into Havana in the early 1920s and became the island's pop music: guitar, tres, bongo, maracas, claves, a bass, and a singer trading lines with a chorus. Victor was recording Havana's sextets by the middle of the decade. The Trio Matamoros formed in Santiago in 1925 and recorded "Son de la loma" for Victor in New York in 1928. Rita Montaner recorded "El Manisero," the peanut vendor's street cry, for Columbia around 1927. Two years after this chapter ends, Don Azpiazu's band would play it on Broadway and set off the rumba craze. The seed is here.

In Buenos Aires the tango had been a dance. Carlos Gardel made it a song. From "Mi Noche Triste" in 1917 he turned the tango-cancion into a form for a solo singer with a story, recorded hundreds of them for Odeon, and in September 1928 conquered Paris. He is the first Latin American recording star with a global audience, and the model for every singer-idol who followed.

On April 26, 1930, Don Azpiazú's Havana Casino Orchestra opened at the Palace Theater on Broadway. The singer pushed a peanut cart onto the stage and threw bags of peanuts into the crowd while the band played "El Manisero," a Cuban son about a street vendor. The Victor recording made that May was the first American hit built on real Afro-Cuban rhythm and instruments: maracas, claves, bongos, timbales. The industry called it a rumba, misspelled it rhumba, and sold more than a million copies of the sheet music.

Xavier Cugat, a Catalan violinist raised in Havana, turned the craze into an institution when he moved his band into the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 and stayed for sixteen years. His rumbas were smoothed for ballroom feet, but the drums stayed, and the arrangers and players who passed through his band, Mario Bauzá among them, would build the mambo and Afro-Cuban jazz of the next decade.

Latin music in the United States was never only Cuban. In 1930 Canario y su Grupo recorded Rafael Hernández's "Lamento Borincano," a song about a Puerto Rican farmer ruined by the Depression, and it became an anthem across the Spanish-speaking Americas. In Texas a seventeen-year-old Lydia Mendoza cut "Mal Hombre" in 1934 with a twelve-string guitar and became the singer of the poor along the migrant routes. And in 1939 Carmen Miranda arrived from Brazil for a Broadway revue and stayed for Hollywood. The decade ends with Latin rhythm in every American city that had a ballroom.

In December 1940 a Cuban singer named Frank Grillo, called Machito, held the first rehearsal of his Afro-Cubans in a Harlem ballroom. His brother-in-law Mario Bauzá, a trumpeter who had played with Chick Webb and Cab Calloway and had introduced Dizzy Gillespie to Calloway's band, took over as musical director a month later. Bauzá's idea was simple and nobody had done it: put a real Cuban rhythm section, congas, bongos and timbales, under a jazz big band's horns. His "Tanga" in 1943 is the first Afro-Cuban jazz composition.

Gillespie had been listening. In 1947 Bauzá introduced him to Chano Pozo, a conga drummer and dancer just arrived from Havana who had learned his rhythms in Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies and carnival street bands. On 29 September 1947 Pozo walked onto the Carnegie Hall stage with Gillespie's big band. That December they recorded "Manteca", Pozo's bass riff and Gillespie's screaming trumpet on top of it, the record that made "Cubop" a word. Pozo was shot dead in a Harlem bar fourteen months later. He was thirty-three.

The dance floor had its own revolution. In 1948 the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway at 53rd Street switched to an all-Latin policy, and Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez turned it into the home of the mambo, a faster, hornier development of the Cuban danzón. In Mexico City, a year later, a Cuban pianist and bandleader named Dámaso Pérez Prado was arranging mambos with grunts and stabbing brass; his "Mambo No. 5", recorded for RCA Victor's Mexican branch in 1949, would make him the King of Mambo across the Americas in the decade to come. Salsa, boogaloo and Latin rock all descend from these two rooms, the Palladium and Carnegie Hall.

On Broadway at 53rd Street in Manhattan, the Palladium Ballroom ran the biggest dance in America. Machito’s Afro-Cubans, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez, the "Big Three," played mambo to mixed crowds of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Italians, Jews and Black New Yorkers who came to see the dancers as much as the bands. Puente’s "Dance Mania" (1958) is the sound of that room: timbales up front, a brass section that punches, a beat that will not let you stand still.

Mambo went mainstream through Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado, who worked out of Mexico City and had a number one American hit for ten weeks in 1955 with "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," a trumpet instrumental with his trademark grunt. Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney sang about mambo; the cha-cha-chá, a slower step invented in Havana by violinist Enrique Jorrín, followed it into the dance schools. In Havana itself, Celia Cruz joined the Sonora Matancera in 1950 and became the voice of the island, while bassist Cachao’s late-night descargas of 1957 turned Cuban dance music into a jam session.

Two things at the decade’s end changed the map. Ritchie Valens, a Mexican-American teenager from Pacoima, rocked up a Veracruz wedding song called "La Bamba" in 1958 and put Spanish on the rock and roll charts. And on New Year’s Day 1959 the Cuban revolution took Havana. Within a few years the traffic of musicians between Cuba and New York would close, and the New York Puerto Ricans who inherited mambo would build salsa from what was left.

New York Latin music in the early 1960s was the mambo generation getting older. Then the kids who had grown up on both Tito Puente and Motown made boogaloo: Cuban rhythm, English lyrics, a soul backbeat and handclaps. Joe Cuba's "Bang! Bang!" in 1966 and Pete Rodríguez's "I Like It Like That" in 1967 were the hits. It ran for a few years, and most of the established bandleaders ended up cutting boogaloo records themselves to keep up. It proved there was a Latin audience that also bought R&B.

In 1964 a Dominican flautist named Johnny Pacheco and a lawyer named Jerry Masucci started a label and called it Fania, after an old Cuban song. They sold records from the trunk of a car in Spanish Harlem. By 1967 they had signed a teenage trombonist from the Bronx called Willie Colón, and by 1968 they had a house orchestra, the Fania All-Stars. Eddie Palmieri, working across town with two trombones and a rougher sound, cut "Azúcar Pa' Ti" in 1965. Nobody was calling it salsa yet. They would.

Brazil had bossa nova, which went global through Getz and Gilberto, and then Sérgio Mendes made it pop with "Mas Que Nada" in 1966. Under the military dictatorship that took power in 1964, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé and Os Mutantes made Tropicália: Brazilian song swallowing the Beatles, Hendrix and the avant-garde whole. The collective album "Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis" came out in 1968. By the end of that year Veloso and Gil were in jail, and then in exile in London. And at Woodstock in August 1969, a young Mexican-American guitarist from San Francisco named Carlos Santana played "Soul Sacrifice" with a conga player and a timbalero and told rock what it had been missing.

Salsa was a New York word for a Cuban and Puerto Rican thing: son, mambo, guaracha and plena, played hard by kids from the Bronx and East Harlem. The Fania label, founded by Dominican bandleader Johnny Pacheco and lawyer Jerry Masucci in 1964, owned the decade. Its house supergroup, the Fania All-Stars, filled Yankee Stadium on 24 August 1973 with more than forty thousand people and the show ended early when the crowd poured onto the field during "Congo Bongo". Puerto Rican New York had a stadium-sized proof that it existed.

The label's stars were the decade's. Willie Colón, a trombonist from the Bronx who put gangster imagery on his sleeves, and Héctor Lavoe, the singer from Ponce with the most beloved voice in the music, made a run of albums together and then apart; Lavoe's "El Cantante" (1978) is a song about being the singer everybody loves and nobody knows. Celia Cruz, the Cuban queen who had left after the revolution, joined Fania and "Celia & Johnny" (1974) with Pacheco made her the face of salsa for the rest of her life. Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow and Cheo Feliciano filled out a scene that could sell out the Cheetah club every weekend.

Then Rubén Blades, a Panamanian law graduate, changed what salsa could say. On "Siembra" (1978), with Willie Colón, he sang "Pedro Navaja", a seven-minute street story built on Brecht's "Mack the Knife", and "Plástico", a satire of the middle class. It became the best-selling salsa album ever. Meanwhile, Carlos Santana, a Mexican kid from San Francisco, had opened the decade with "Abraxas" (1970) and Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va" as a rock hit, and Latin rock was a thing. In Brazil, Milton Nascimento and the Clube da Esquina collective made "Clube da Esquina" (1972), a record as ambitious as anything in rock, and Jorge Ben's "África Brasil" (1976) put samba on a funk footing. In Chile and Argentina, Nueva canción's protest folk, Violeta Parra's heirs, was silenced by the coups of 1973 and 1976 and went into exile with Inti-Illimani and Mercedes Sosa.

Latin pop in the 1980s found the American Top 40 through Miami. Gloria Estefan, born in Havana in 1957 and raised in exile, fronted the Miami Sound Machine; "Conga" (1985), a bilingual party record with a Cuban horn section over a pop drum machine, went top ten and made Emilio Estefan's studio the Latin hit factory of the next twenty years. Julio Iglesias, singing with Willie Nelson and Diana Ross, sold the ballad version to the same audience.

In East Los Angeles, Los Lobos had been playing weddings and punk clubs for a decade when "How Will the Wolf Survive?" (1984) made them a college-radio band. In 1987 their recording of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba", for the film of the same name, went to number one: a Mexican folk song, sung in Spanish, at the top of the American chart. The same year the Tejano Music Awards named a teenage singer from Corpus Christi, Selena, female vocalist of the year, the first of nine in a row, and Tejano began its rise.

Salsa grew up. Rubén Blades, a Panamanian who had written "Pedro Navaja" for Fania, made "Buscando América" (1984) with his band Seis del Solar for Elektra: salsa with synthesizers, no horns, and lyrics about disappearances and dictatorships. He then went to Harvard for a law degree. In Argentina and Chile, Soda Stereo and Los Prisioneros wrote the first great rock en español records under and after dictatorships, and Juan Luis Guerra took Dominican merengue and bachata toward the international stage. Menudo, five rotating Puerto Rican teenagers, was the boy band that taught the industry how a boy band could work.

Selena Quintanilla was the Queen of Tejano, the accordion-and-synth border music of South Texas, and she was about to be much more. "Amor Prohibido" in 1994 sold like a pop record and won her a Grammy. On 31 March 1995 the president of her fan club shot her dead in a Corpus Christi motel. She was twenty-three. "Dreaming of You", the English-language crossover she was recording, came out that July and entered the Billboard 200 at number one, the first mostly Spanish-language album to do it. Jennifer Lopez played her in the 1997 film and then made her own record.

The crossover Selena did not live to lead arrived four years later. Ricky Martin, a former member of Menudo, sang "The Cup of Life" at the Grammys on 24 February 1999 and got a standing ovation; "Livin' la Vida Loca" was number one within three months. Enrique Iglesias, Marc Anthony, who had already made salsa romántica records that sold in the millions, and Shakira, whose "Pies Descalzos" and "Dónde Están los Ladrones?" were rock records from Barranquilla, all followed. Carlos Santana's "Supernatural", his comeback with Clive Davis, won eight Grammys in one night. Luis Miguel had spent the decade selling boleros to the whole Spanish-speaking world. The industry called it the Latin explosion. It was a market noticing itself.

Under and around all of it, other Latin musics were doing their own work. Café Tacvba's "Re" (1994), Maná, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and Soda Stereo made rock en español a continent-wide scene with its own MTV. Los Tigres del Norte's "Jefe de Jefes" was the corrido, the border ballad, grown up and dangerous. Banda and technobanda, brass bands from Sinaloa, filled Los Angeles dance halls and made a Spanish-language station the city's number one. In Puerto Rico, DJ Playero's underground cassettes put Spanish rap over dancehall riddims; a teenager named Daddy Yankee first appeared on "Playero 37" in 1992. Celia Cruz kept touring at seventy. Buena Vista Social Club brought Cuba's old men to Carnegie Hall. Latin music in the 1990s was not one thing. It was a dozen, and each was about to get louder.

Reggaeton came out of Panama's Spanish reggae and San Juan's marquesinas, the carport parties where DJ Playero's mixtapes played in the nineties, and in 2004 it went global. Daddy Yankee's Gasolina, the lead single from Barrio Fino, took the dembow rhythm, a boom-ch-boom-chick borrowed from Shabba Ranks' Dem Bow, and put it on radio stations that switched formats to keep up. Tego Calderón's El Abayarde in 2002 had made the genre credible; Luny Tunes' productions made it hit; Don Omar, Wisin y Yandel and Ivy Queen, the queen in a genre of kings, made it a scene. Calle 13's debut in 2005 made it smart. The Library of Congress named Gasolina to the National Recording Registry in 2023, the first reggaeton record there.

Pop crossed over too. Shakira learned English well enough to write Laundry Service in 2001, and Hips Don't Lie with Wyclef Jean in 2006 was a number one in a dozen countries. Juanes' Un Día Normal and A Dios le Pido made Colombian rock an export. Enrique Iglesias' Escape, Ricky Martin's Sound Loaded, Paulina Rubio and Jennifer Lopez kept the late-nineties Latin boom going; the Latin Grammys, first held in September 2000, gave it an awards show. Aventura's Obsesión, in 2002, took bachata, the Dominican guitar music that used to be too poor for the radio, from the Bronx to Europe, and Romeo Santos became the biggest Latin star of the next decade because of it.

Regional Mexican music was the genre's quiet giant: Los Tigres del Norte's corridos, Vicente Fernández, and Jenni Rivera, whose banda records made her the most important woman in the music. Rock en español had Café Tacvba's Cuatro Caminos, Zoé, Babasónicos, Molotov, Kinky, Julieta Venegas and Aterciopelados. Brazil sent Bebel Gilberto's Tanto Tempo and Seu Jorge, whose voice carried City of God in 2002. Gotan Project and Bajofondo made tango electronic. Marc Anthony kept salsa on the charts. And on 16 July 2003 Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, died in New Jersey, and her funeral procession stopped traffic in Miami and Manhattan.

The single most important fact about Latin music in the 2010s is that it crossed over without translating itself. Despacito, released in January 2017 by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee and remixed with Justin Bieber that April, spent sixteen weeks at number one on the American Hot 100 and became the most-watched video on YouTube. It is almost entirely in Spanish. The old rule, that a Latin hit needed an English version to travel, simply stopped applying.

Reggaeton had been building in Puerto Rico since the nineties. In the 2010s it fused with trap and went global. J Balvin brought Medellín to the world and made Vibras in 2018, a record that sounds like sunlight. Bad Bunny released X 100PRE on Christmas Eve 2018, a debut that mixed reggaeton, trap, pop-punk and bolero and refused every expectation of what a Latin trap star was supposed to be. Ozuna, Karol G, Anuel AA and Farruko filled the charts.

Spain sent something else entirely. Rosalía's El Mal Querer in 2018 built a concept album out of flamenco, hand claps, Auto-Tune and a thirteenth-century Occitan novel, and Con Altura the next year put her in the reggaeton mainstream on her own terms. Cardi B's I Like It in 2018, with Bad Bunny and J Balvin over a boogaloo sample, went to number one in the United States, which meant a Bronx rapper, a Puerto Rican trap singer and a Colombian reggaetonero had a joint American chart-topper in Spanish and English.

For a hundred years the American chart treated Spanish-language music as a curiosity that occasionally crossed over. That ended in this decade, and one person did most of it. Bad Bunny's "El Último Tour del Mundo" went to number one on the Billboard 200 in December 2020, the first all-Spanish album ever to do it in the chart's sixty-four year history. He did not sing a word in English to get there. "Un Verano Sin Ti" was then the most consumed album in the United States across all of 2022.

Reggaeton was only half the story. The other half came out of Sinaloa and Jalisco: corridos tumbados, old Mexican ballad forms about outlaws and heartbreak, played on requinto guitar and tuba by kids raised on trap. Natanael Cano started it, Peso Pluma made it enormous, and Fuerza Regida, Junior H, Grupo Frontera and Eslabon Armado filled in the rest. "Ella Baila Sola" put regional Mexican music in the American top ten for the first time. Luminate measured regional Mexican streams growing 56% in a single year.

Around them, the women took the biggest rooms. Karol G's "Mañana Será Bonito" was the first all-Spanish album by a woman to top the Billboard 200. Shakira turned a divorce into a Bizarrap session that half the Spanish-speaking world learned by heart in a week. Rosalía made "Motomami", a flamenco-trained singer breaking her own record into pieces, and then in 2025 made "Lux", an eighteen-track album recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.

The institutions followed the money. The Latin Grammys left the United States for the first time and were held in Seville in November 2023. And in February 2026, Bad Bunny's "Debí Tirar Más Fotos", an album about Puerto Rico losing itself, won Album of the Year at the Grammys, the first primarily Spanish-language record ever to do so, a week before he played the Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish.