Celia Cruz: The Voice Of Experience
By the time I saw Celia Cruz in concert, she had already released more than 40 albums over the course of a career that spanned nearly half a century and had long established herself as the reigning Queen of Salsa. It was the spring of 1995 at the Aragon Ballroom in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and the city was just beginning its muddy thaw.
She was 69; I was 24. One of us managed to sing and dance until the early morning hours without a break.
I was joined that night by a handful of other 20-something-year-old friends, fellow graduate students who hailed from far-flung points on the diasporic map. Some of us had grown up listening to our parents play Cruz records, while others of us had only recently come to recognize her voice as we sang along to her iconic version of "Guantanamera" (first recorded in 1968) on the 1991 Mambo Kings soundtrack.
During our time in Chicago, we'd all forged a bond through the rituals of intellectual debate, frequent huddling on blustery elevated train platforms and, above all, regular salsa dancing. One of us was a Puerto Rican raised in California and shaped by years of Jesuit education who'd traveled to Cuba to cut cane during the Special Period; another was a Chilean whose family was forced to leave Santiago after Pinochet's coup in 1973 and who grew up in Indiana. One of us was a Hampton-educatedlong before I'd ever learned to catch the Caribbean clave beat.
