An Exploration of the Salsa Soul Sisters’ Health and Wellness Programming

Secondary Sources:

Scholars have examined the relationship between bodies and the environment through layered analyses informed by gender studies, queer studies, and material and post-structural theoretical frameworks. The literature on embodied histories, particularly the works of Christopher Sellers, Kathleen Canning, and Neil Maher, study how bodies are shaped by cultural experiences and material environments. Traditional environmental histories such as Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll’s edited collection, Sylvia Hood Washington, and Julie Sze detail how race and class shape one’s environmental exposures. Hood Washington’s work exemplifies the layered analytic approach by building on how these Othered groups exist in opposition to the larger social body politic. Through this Othering, the state justifies discriminatory practices that blight these majority non-white, immigrant communities. The scholarship covers the historical processes in which environmental racism plays out while also highlights the grassroots activism of these groups. Notably, Julie Gallagher’s work on Black women’s political organizing historicizes the community-based activism while Judy Norsigian’s summary of the women’s health movement mentions the exclusion of women of color. Black lesbian activists like Anita Cornell document Black lesbian feminist perspectives on racism, sexism, and sexuality as overlapping matrices. Jen Jack Gieseking’s work covers the spatial experience of lesbian communities in New York City providing a Queer geography in which the Salsa women organized and lived. Together, these works illustrate the myriad of approaches to how scholars assessed embodied knowledge, environmental inequalities, and community organizing as a response to living conditions. The literature reviewed in this project serves as a foundation for understanding how race, gender, and sexuality molds experiences of health among communities whose histories have received minimal attention in mainstream scholarship. 

This project builds on the foundation laid by the aforementioned scholars by applying environmental history and theories of embodied knowledge to the programmatic activities of the Salsa Soul Sisters from 1974-1993. Similar to Julie Sze’s Noxious New York, which exp;pres grassroots activism in response to environmental inequality in New York City, this project considers how Black lesbians responded to the conditions shaping their everyday lives. However, rather than focusing on organizing campaigns against specific hazards, I investigate how Salsa’s health workshops, political education, social gathering, and other programs may have addressed the relationship between environmental conditions and Black and Latina lesbian bodies. I draw on Sellers’s and Canning’s approaches to embodied history to analyse how Salsa’s programming reflected their lived experiences of the members while creating alternative forms of knowledge through resistance. While these scholars established genre defining connections between the body, the environment, and community-based activism, their work does not specifically examine how Black and Latina lesbian organizations  negotiated these issues through their programmatic arms. This project addresses this gap by examining how, if at all, Salsa women responded to the ways New York City’s toxic environment disciplined Black lesbian bodies. By centering their programmatic endeavors, I hope to expand environmental history beyond conventional environmental justice campaigns revealing overlooked forms of resistance within Black lesbian social organizing.

1. Canning, Kathleen. “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History”, Gender & History, Vol.11 No.3, November 1999, pp. 499–513.
   • Kathleen Canning conducts a historiographic review of how historians have treated the human body as an obvious, self-evident object lacking rigorous  analysis. The author combines both the material reality of bodies with post-structural imagingings to re-position the body as a historical method and active agent for resistance. Of particular interest for this project is Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of ‘counterstrategic reinscription’ which considers the body as a site of knowledge and resistance. I plan on utilizing this reading as the theoretical lens in which I closely examine the implications of the Salsa’s women’s programming to the larger Black lesbian feminist movement.
2. Glave, Dianne D., and Stoll, Mark, eds. To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
   • To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History edited analyses of centuries of Black American environmental history tracing back to the first enslaved Africans’ arrivals on the eastern shores of North America, through the Civil Rights era, and the nascent environmental justice movement of the 1980s. I closely read chapters six through fourteen as they cover the exact chronology of this project on the Salsa women’s health and wellness programs. Particularly, the chapters on religion, multi-racial and identity-based coalitions, and outdoor recreation directly map onto the programmatic activities of the organization.
3. Maher, Neil M. “Body Counts: Tracking the Human Body Through Environmental History.” In A Companion to American Environmental History, edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman, 163–179. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 
   • Neil Maher wrote the first historiographic review on how environmental historians wrote about bodies starting in the 1970s until the 2000s. The author categorized the literature into five fields acknowledging their fluidity: bodies as disease, bodies at work, inscribed bodies, cultured bodies and balanced bodies. I plan on using Merchant’s concept of social reproduction, close readings of the body as metaphor, gendered bodies, and dual material and cultural theoretical approaches of the body for this project.
4. Washington, Sylvia Hood. Packing Them in : An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954. Lexington Books, 2005.
   • Sylvia Hood’s book historicizes the impact ethnicity, race, and class impact shape which groups are exposed to pollution and the resultant public health inequalities that incur. This book is particularly helpful in this project because of Hood’s theoretical contributions to the field. The author’s discussions of the “Other” in opposition to the larger social body politic informs my analysis of the Salsa women’s activism.
5. Sze, Julie. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. The MIT Press, 2007.
   • Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice details the environmental activism in New York City across four neighborhoods. Julie Sze focuses on non-white, class disadvantaged local movements that advocate for better living conditions as it relates to incinerators, the privatization of garbage disposal, and asthma. This source, particularly chapters one through four, provide examples of grassroots activism of Black women in neighborhoods the Salsa women resided during the 1980s and 1990s.
6. Sellers, Christopher. “Thoreau’s Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History.” Environmental History (CHICAGO) 4, no. 4 (1999): 486–514. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985398.
   • Christopher Sellers argues for a treatment of bodies influenced by both scientists and humanists. The author urges the reader, the field, to reconsider the distinctions between “bodily nature” and “bodily culture” (487). Of particular interest to this project is the author’s application of thoreauvian approaches to knowledge as pushing us to embodied histories. Donna Harraway’s discussion of situated knowledge in reference to feminist epistemology. I want to consider how this project could infer the situated knowledge lived by the Salsa women and what that might reveal about how Black lesbians understood health, wellness, and community. 
7. Norsigian, Judy. “Our Bodies Ourselves and the Women’s Health Movement in the United States: Some Reflections.” American Public Health Association. 2019 Jun; 109(6):844-846. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2019.305059.
   • This reading provides an overview of the women’s health movement in the 1960s. The author covers the evolution and the impact of the Our Bodies, Ourselves publication. Of particular importance for my project are the challenges of the movement, especially their exclusion of women of color populations in their activism. The second-wave women’s health movement’s limited analysis of Black women and other women of color, opens the door for the community efforts of Salsa women to educate themselves on health issues impacting the Black lesbian woman.
8. Gallagher, Julie A. Black Women and Politics in New York City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
   • Julia A Gallager’s book titled Black Women and Politics in New York City (2012) examines how Black women participated politically in the 20th century. This work is particularly helpful for my work because it focuses on the types of political actions Black lesbians were often also involved in before they came to lesbian identity based organizing (Gallagher, 121-156). I closely read chapters three, four, and five to gain further insight on the 1940s-1970s in which the Salsa women were born and the organization was in its necency. 
9. Gieseking, Jen Jack. A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
   • Jen Jack Gieseking’s A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (2020) constructs a spatial history of lesbian communities in New York City (Gieseking, 1-25). I plan on using this work to contextualize the  spatial and embodied reality within a Lesbian organization in New York City.  Additionally, several of the historical actors chosen by Gieseking are Black lesbian women which adds another dimension of embodied behavior analyses. 
10. Cornwell, Anita. Black Lesbian in White America. Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1983.
    • Anita Cornwell’s Black Lesbian in White America (1983) provides an even more direct Black lesbian perspective. Published during the emergence of Black lesbian feminist organizing, the book addresses the intersections of racism, sexism, and lesbian identity (Cornwell 1983). Cornwell is particularly important for this project because she demonstrates that Black lesbian identity was not simply a category later historians imposed upon Black women. Black lesbians themselves were actively theorizing the relationships between racism, sexism, lesbianism, feminism, and liberation (Cornwell 1983). Her work that historicizes Black lesbians negotiating their identities informs my historiography of  Black lesbian New York City from the 1970s through 1990s.