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
Salsa music in both New York and Puerto Rico. Along with the salsa-pop fusion of salsa romántica, the 1980s saw the combining elements of salsa with soul, R&B, and hip hop music. The dilution of Afro-Cuban rhythmic principles created problems for some. Washburne recounts: "As arrangers struggled to 'fit' these music styles into a salsa format, a variety of 'clave discrepancies,' or clashes, like in 'Cali Pachanguero,' often resulted. As the salsa style became more culturally diverse, Nuyorican and Puerto Rican traditionalists often reacted by emphatically positing clave as a representative of, or essential to, Puerto Rican cultural identity." In the mid-1980s