Mambomania! Perez Prado, the Rise of Afro-Latin Music and the Negotiation of Race in Afro-Latin Exchange in the Fifties

Abstract

Damaso Perez Prado, who would later be internationally dubbed the “King of the Mambo” after the success of his music in the US market, was both diminutive and dark, an unlikely symbol for sex and sensuality in the postwar US culture that created the very blonde Doris Day and very tall Rock Hudson (6’5”) as cultural icons. When he shot to stardom in 1955 with his version of the song “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” occupying the number one spot on the music charts for ten straight weeks—it seemed unprecedented. However, the transnational dance and music craze that would be called “Mambomania” was the culmination of years of African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural exchange, which drew on the groups’ shared Africanity but was also fraught with racial politics. Charles Mingus’s expulsion from the Duke Ellington band after a physical altercation with Ellington’s longtime arranger, Juan Tizol, for example, is the stuff of jazz legend. And also of much conflicting opinion as to the accuracy of Mingus’s account. In his autobiography Beneath the Underdog: His World Composed By Mingus, Mingus writes: