Music of Puerto Rico centers. After the island was taken over by Spain, the music and dance of Puerto Rico consisted of a combination of the harmonious musical styles that are borrowed from Spanish, African, and other European cultures, creating Puerto Rico's signature style of Latin dance. Salsa is a Spanish word that means sauce. It refers to the mixture of different rhythms composed of different Latin, African and Caribbean dances. Salsa is said to be first created around the 1960s and became popular to the non-Latino world drastically. The salsa dance is similar to the mambo dance. Salsa dancing is structured in six
Music of Puerto Rico like Tego Calderón, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar and others, it soon acquired its own distinctive flavor and today might be considered the most popular dance music in the Spanish Caribbean, surpassing even salsa. The bolero originally derived from Cuba, but by the 1920s it was being both enjoyed as well as composed and performed by Puerto Ricans, including such outstanding figures as Rafael Hernández and Pedro Flores. There are no distinctively "Puerto Rican" features—such as singing "lelolai" or playing the cuatro—in their boleros, but it would be pointless to go on regarding the bolero solely as a "Cuban" genre; it