[yasr_overall_rating]
Latin boogaloo is New York City. It is a product of the melting pot, a colorful expression of 1960s Latino soul, straight from the streets of El Barrio, the South Bronx and Brooklyn.
I can’t think of many more things that I love more than music, all kinds of music. And documentaries on different musical movements or artists are easily at the top of my watch list. I was not familiar with boogaloo music (other than from Spike Lee’s film “Crooklyn” via Joe Cuba’s El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia)) but as soon as I heard a few clips from “We Like It Like That,” I knew it didn’t matter if I had ever heard of it because I could feel it and totally dug it. While the more traditional genres of Latin music carry boogaloo, the influences from other genres such as soul and R&B give it an undeniable swagger. Mathew Ramirez Warren’s documentary, “We Like It Like That,” tells the history and impact of boogaloo music through the people who were present during its conception, growth, and decline.
Combining its influences from Cuban, Puerto Rican, and African American music, boogaloo was the expression of New York City’s Spanish Harlem youth of the 60’s. Boogaloo could nearly be seen as a craze, lasting only a short while before “dying” a disputed curious death by the early 70s. The impact is still ever-present though as some of the innovators of the movement, such as Joe Bataan, Ricardo Ray, Pete Rodriguez, and Johnny Colon, tell their stories, speak of their influences, and guide us through the landmarks of their neighborhoods where boogaloo found its beginning.
You can feel the fervency and pertinence of everyone’s stories as archival footage of people dancing and bandleaders doing their thing flash across the screen in between the individual interviews. It’s urgent, it’s history, it’s boogaloo. The documentary places much of its story on the predecessors of boogaloo and influences outside Latin music genres. As the narrative progresses it seems boogaloo comes along by happy accident, according some of its innovators while fans of the music, such as journalist Aurora Flores, are quick to say it developed out of an internal need to shed the old and create a new expression, at times a political expression, for the burgeoning Latin American youth.
It’s no surprise that New York City is the birthplace of boogaloo given that it is a hotbed of creative activity finding its sources from all walks of life and combining them just so to give new forms of expression to its youth, their hopes and wants, and their budding politics. From the old, the pure, the traditional comes the new, which is open, inviting, and ecstatic. “We Like It Like That,” is rich with the social, cultural, and political history of Latin boogaloo and its importance within the history of Latin music as both a preserver and deserter of tradition and also acting as an expression of self-love for a generation of Latin Americans. “We Like It Like That,” is a lightweight documentary that any lover of music can appreciate.
Available on VOD March 15th
