Mambo On My Mind

Mambo is a blend: Afro-Cuban, jazz and classical. It took me from calm to excitement, like the jump from black and white into Technicolor. Mambo's hard-swinging minimalism gave me access to a style that challenged me to my very essence. Moving to the East Coast, I spent as much time as I could at the Palladium at Broadway and 53rd Street, epicenter of New York mambo.

Mambo in New York made you realize that one of the luckiest things that happened to American popular culture was the Jones Act, which bestowed U.S. citizenship on all Puerto Ricans. Two of the major New York mambo kings, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, were Puerto Rican. Songs like "La Familia" documented lives in transition from the island to New York. When Tito Rodriguez sang "En un sillón de bejuco solito me acomodé" ["In an armchair of rattan I made myself comfortable"] he brought back an aspect of Caribbean living, reassuringly cozy and Creole. The same impulse led Puerto Ricans in New York to build casitas, small, brightly painted island-style houses, in vacant lots in the Bronx or Spanish Harlem to offset the surrounding slablike tenement buildings.

I would go on to discover that mambo was dancing us all toward genuine being, becoming ourselves through caring about others. To proclaim this rich cross-cultural achievement became the goal of my teaching at Yale from the moment I started in 1964. In the '70s, mambo morphed into salsa. In 2008, it's called Latin jazz. I thank God for the Cubans, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, Dominicans, Mexicans and other Latinos who keep it all going.

Mambo distills their cross-cultural insights, leading us, for example, to a Puerto Rican man who learned to live among the Anglos, Jews, Italians and Irish. In a wonderful book on his life, "Benjy Lopez: A Picaresque Tale of Emigration and Return," by Barry B. Levine, he shared this insight: "Imagine if you were twenty years old and didn't feel inferior to anybody or better than anybody. When you treat everybody the same, people open up to you." Those are words I have tried to live by.

Thompson lives in New Haven, Conn.

© 2008