The Salsa & Merengue Website (Part 2): Adding Voices

In the years its been available, the site has seen hundreds of thousands of visitors; a small proportion of whom had made the effort to express their thanks, offer suggestions, and rare criticism. All of these little treasures sat patiently in a mail folder, preserved for posterity. The fact that each of these people who drank from the well of Latin America had cared enough to write, left me always with the feeling that I should be more generous than a personal response (which they each received), by finding light for their words in public.

If anything, it would be a nod to the curious as a glimpse behind-the-scenes of one of the world's most relevant internet resources on salsa and merengue.

Stories to be told..

I decided that their place would be as quotes on relevant pages, as other voices to the website's main narrative. It is a risk to take: a balance needing to be struck between narrative cohesion and diversity of prose; in relaying stories by people without teetering into the realm of commercial-style endorsements. I admonished myself for my control-freakery and forged ahead.

The first flurry of quotes are now up (the second tranche will be garnered from web references), and some trimming of position and weight is expected.

Yes, it's true that a number of the words featured come from prestigious sources; and the subtext of their place on the pages could be read superficially as commercialism. That's a peril I'm happy to face, since a more-than-cursory inspection of the site will show no attempt at 'monetising'. I think that readers would like to know that the material they've chosen to look at is highly regarded by independent authorities.

But there's a more intimate side to the story, and one that is, I feel, infinitely more valuable.

The quotes tell of how important salsa is as a personal cultural marker to the Latin American; of how the tutorials have helped people learn to dance in privacy, at their own pace, successfully, ...and that it's okay to do so; that learning to dance can be a family activity that builds strong bonds; that involving oneself in salsa can instill a strong sense of purpose and responsibility, even if the torchbearer wasn't born into the arms of Latin America.

Ultimately, the risk of losing the focus of a single voice was far outweighed by the potential of a stronger, more humane, narrative wrought by the expressions of those who'd experienced it first-hand.

Loo Yeo