“I just like to sing”: Exploring La Lupe’s unique performance style as a nexus of her cultural identity, spiritual journey, and uninhibited love for Salsa

Abstract

Guadalupe Yoli Raymond, more commonly known by her stage name, La Lupe, was a Cuban salsa artist whose eccentric and unique performance style was marked by wild movements, verbal quirks, and generally unexpected behavior. Other scholars have suggested that La Lupe carefully crafted her onstage behavior in an effort to bypass and actively reject the sexually driven, fetishistic barriers imposed upon her and other Afrocubana salsa artists of her time. While I agree to an extent, that this was a fortunate result of her stage presence, in this essay, I will argue that the unique and artistically eccentric behavior La Lupe demonstrated onstage was less an active attempt to shake off sexist and racist boxes placed around her but rather an organic embodiment of her self-expression. Through closely reading her abovementioned performance style and mapping the evolving environments in which La Lupe found herself singing over the course of her spiritual journey—earlier in life at cabaret shows in Puerto Rico and after converting to Christian Protestantism in the 80s, at churches in the Bronx—I present the theory that her singing style was not solely an intentional auto-hypersexualization to subvert the gratification of the white male gaze but rather the physical manifestation of the artist’s internal passion for salsa music, which she used to navigate various spaces marked as either sacred, secular, or a crossing of the two.