“Yo soy Boricua/Io sono Italiano”:

Henry Fiol’s Italo-Rican Salsa

 

by George De Stefano

 

Henry Fiol is multiculturalism incarnate. A native of New York City, Fiol, 47, is a half-Italian, half-Puerto Rican singer, songwriter, and bandleader who performs an updated version of the classic Cuban salsa of the 1950s and ’60s. Trained as a painter, he began his career as a professional musician in the late 1960s. After performing with various bands in the 1970s, he went solo in 1980. His most recent al­bums are “Sonero” (Virgin Earthworks, 1990) and “Creativo” (MVM Records, 1991).

    Music critics love Fiol; one recently observed that “in a just world Fiol would sell a thousand copies . . . for every one of the latest from Ruben Blades (not to mention Gloria Estefan’s Miami Sound Machine).” But outside of Latin America, and Latino immigrant com­munities abroad, he’s a cult figure revered by a few discerning cognoscenti. His undeserved obscurity is due mainly to his refusal to follow the formulas for commercial success in contemporary salsa (insipid lyrics, overly brassy and frantic orchestration) and his con­flicts with the cutthroat, exploitative Latin music business.

    Fiol describes himself as a “half-breed who’s always looking for a place to fit in.” Although he composes and sings in Spanish, lives in a Latino neighborhood (the section of New York City’s Lower East Side known as “Loisaida”) and is married to a Puerto Rican woman with whom he has three children, he regards himself as more Italian than Hispanic. His classically Southern Italian looks suggest Robert De Niro with a mustache, his hip-New York-musician speech comes in Italian-American inflections, and he cites his Calabrian grandfather as his primary role model.

    But Fiol says that despite his strong Italian identification, other Italians don’t accept him—“they see me as a spic, I’m sorry to say.” Puerto Ricans, while more tolerant, don’t fully embrace him as a her­mano, either. Unable to feel fully comfortable among either eth­nic group, he praises and damns both, often in contradictory and some­times stereotypical terms. Italians are often intolerant but trustwor­thy and honorable; Latinos are more accepting of difference yet lack­ing in moral probity. At one point Fiol endorses patriarchal control of women’s sexuality by Italian men as preferable to out-of-wedlock pregnancies among Latina teenagers.

    Henry Fiol may embody the sort of multiculturalism only New York City could produce, but his life and work constitute no Dinkinsesque “gorgeous mosaic” but a tapestry of conflict and disillu­sion. However, his sense of being an outsider and the clash of identi­ties he describes have fostered a unique sensibility and a distinctive musical style. And no other salsa artist creates vivid oil paintings for his album covers, as Fiol has done throughout his career.

    On a recent Saturday afternoon we discussed ethnicity and ethnic conflict in New York, as well as the art and business of Latin music, over a long lunch of antipasti, bread, and vino rosso.

 

* * * * *

Q: You were born in New York City, of Italian and Puerto Rican parentage. What are your family backgrounds?

A: My mother’s family name is Alcaro, her mother’s name is Posella. Both my grandparents are from the same town, Borgia, in the moun­tains in Calabria. My father’s family is from Ponce [southern Puerto Rico] but originally from Spain. They’re not an old Puerto Rican fam­ily that’s mixed with Indians and Africans. The name Fiol comes from Majorca. I met a sculptor named Antonio Fiol, and he told me the ori­gin of the name. I knew my great-grandparents were from Spain, but I hadn’t known which part.

    Now, there’s also a lot of people of Italian background in Puerto Rico, and Corsicans and Sardinians. Eddie Palmieri [a preeminent salsa composer and performer] is from Ponce, but that’s obviously an Italian name.

    As far as my artistic ability, that’s all from my mother’s side. My grandmother’s brother was the lead flutist with Warner Brothers. I have uncles who painted and they all played the guitar and man­dolin, whereas on my father’s side they’re all in business.

Q: How did your parents’ respective families feel about their mar­riage?

A: Well, I wasn’t around, so all I know is the stories. My mother’s family wasn’t too thrilled about my father, but on the Puerto Rican side they were more open. Italians tend to be less tolerant than the Latinos, who are more open and tolerant of different colors and races.

Q: What do you think is the source of the ethnic and racial antago­nism we’ve seen in New York between Italians and other groups?

A: I think all that was learned in the United States because every­thing was very ethnic in New York. There were Irish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican gangs, and they were always in conflict. When I was coming up in the ’50s and early ’60s everything was divided into turf and territory. In Italian Harlem, for example, the main Italian gang, the Red Wings, would be fighting the Puerto Rican gangs. There was a constant war.

    In my neighborhood [Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan] you had the Irish gangs. The Irish were very racist against the Italians. In the early decades of this century Italians were treated like the garbage of American society. I saw the remnants of that even in the ’50s. People would say to me, ‘you eat guinea food, you’re a spaghetti bender’, and all that. I remember in grammar school I had a teacher who’d make me sit on my hands when I asked a question be­cause I’d use my hands to express myself. You talk about doing psycho­logical damage to people! What’s wrong with talking with my hands? Everybody in my house did it, that’s the way I was raised, so what’s wrong with it? But no, that was wrong.

    But it’s turf and neighborhood, and protecting yours from other groups is where all this prejudice comes from. When I was in Calabria last October, this black woman came into the restaurant where I was eating. We got into a conversation, and she told me she was from the West Indies, and had come to Italy from England to take a job as sort of a nanny. She loved Italy so much she stayed. ‘I’ve been here for 15 years, and the people are so nice to me’, she told me. And I could see with my own eyes that the Calabrese weren’t faking it—she was ac­cepted like just another person. There was no barrier of any kind. So I definitely think prejudice was learned here in the U.S., where every­one became polarized in the city into their little ethnic groups, fight­ing for their own interests.

Q: Did you visit Italian East Harlem when you were growing up?

A: I remember East Harlem very well. Every summer they had the feast of Mount Carmel, and I would get on the Third Avenue bus to go to it. These memories, man, are indelible. Every year we’d go to this feast. I remember the cobblestone streets—First Avenue up there was all cobblestones. I remember the processions, and as a kid seeing the old Italian ladies dressed in black following the statue of the Madonna, walking barefoot or walking on their knees. I grew up in an Italian household but I didn’t live in an Italian neighborhood. So when we went to the feast of Mt. Carmel we were not a minority, we were all together with our own. I remember all the sights and sounds and smells, and buying the foods on First Avenue that we couldn’t get uptown. Now, all that is gone. There’s only a handful of stores left, but I remember 116th Street, the bakeries, the Italian funeral parlors.

Q: When did you start identifying with your Latino roots?

A: I used to play down my Puerto Rican side all through my child­hood. But when I became a teenager I started to discover Latin music, and started going out with Spanish girls, and I did a flip-flop and identified more with my Hispanic side. At the same time more Latin people were coming into my neighborhood. Washington Heights had been almost all Irish with sprinklings of Greeks and Jews, a few Italians. Then the Cubans came in and they started to take over the whole neighborhood, but that didn’t last too long, they went to Jersey. The Dominicans came in and they’ve stayed ever since.

    Before my teens I didn’t identify [as Puerto Rican] because I didn’t spend a lot of time with my father. He was always working, he was­n’t the kind of family man who stayed around the house. My grandfa­ther was more like my father, and he was from Italy. He was a big in­fluence on me. He was a custom tailor, an apprentice in Italy who learned the trade, and when he came here he used to do ladies’ tai­loring. He was a very elegant man. He’d sit in his apartment, every day wearing a shirt, a tie, a vest and his watch chain. Only on hot summer days would he take off his vest. It’d have to be a real scor­cher to see him in his undershirt. He’d walk in the street and tip his hat to the ladies. His manners were very Old World. A very classy guy. His values and the things he told me when I was a kid really affected me. I spent every day in his house. As soon as I came home from school I’d go straight to my grandparents’ house, change clothes, go out to play, and then eat supper there. I was there all the time.

Q: Did you speak Italian before you spoke Spanish?

A: Oh yeah. I learned Spanish in high school. After then, I started to speak it, but not before that. Whereas Italian, I understood perfectly, and I ate Italian food only. I was an Italian kid.

    Italians were more acceptable than Puerto Ricans to the Irish guys in my neighborhood. I remember when I was in grammar school, they [young Irish toughs] took this Latino kid in my class and put him against a lamppost, and five guys were pulling one arm and five guys on the other. I thought they were going to rip this kid’s arms out of the sockets. The Latinos were moving into the neighborhood, and the Irish were trying to draw the line. So it was like, ‘what are you?’, and I’d say, ‘I’m Italian’. And because I looked Italian, that’s what I was. And I identified with Italian because I lived in my grandpar­ents’ house. I heard Italian, I spoke Calabrese dialect, and that was my reality.

    I went to Puerto Rico for the first time when I was ten years old, and I really liked the island. It’s a very beautiful island. I’ve been to a lot of places in Latin America but Puerto Rico’s landscape is spectacular and I was really impressed because I was an artistic kid. All that beauty, wow! I grew up in gray New York and I’m seeing all this beauty. I didn’t particularly like the food, or the people, or the customs—I didn’t relate to any of it. I just liked the landscape.

    But when I was around 14 I went to Puerto Rico and I was old enough to appreciate it. I think maybe there was even a bit of guilt because I had suppressed my Puerto Rican side for so many years. My father used to play his Latin records in the house but I never really paid attention. I sort of liked it, but not all that much. But when I went to Puerto Rico the second time I saw Rafael Cortijo and Ismael Rivera [two leading Latin musicians of the 1960s] live, when they were in their heyday. So I started getting into Latin music, buying records, going to the Latin clubs, and slowly I did a 180 degree turn be­cause I had suppressed my Latin side for so many years and I was all of a sudden discovering this side of me that I hadn’t acknowledged all my life. So I might have gone overboard to compensate and started identifying more as a ’Rican, a Nuyorican.

Q: When you were in high school you were also singing “doo wop” with the paisans down at the Carmine Street pool [in Greenwich Village].

A: Yeah. When I was in high school there was a group of Italian guys from a Catholic high school in Harlem called Bishop DuBois. It’s not there any more. But it was pretty mixed—you had black, Irish, and Italian kids. So I used to hang around with a group of them and with guys from Carmine who were involved with music. I’d sit in with them and sing doo-wop.

Q: On your album, “Renacimiento” [1988] you recorded the doo-wop classic “So in Love” with a Latin beat. On that tune you brought both sides of your cultural background together—Italian-American street singing and Latin rhythms.

A: Right. You know, doo-wop was a very Italian thing. Doo wop groups were either black or Italian. There were a few Latins in­volved, but the main doo wop groups were either black or Italian guys from East Harlem, the Village, Brooklyn, or Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, like Dion [di Mucci].

Q: Art, especially painting, was your first love, not music.

A: Yeah, I was really into art. That was my thing, from the time I was a child. I was musically inclined, I was in the school plays and used to sing. But I was a prodigy as an artist. In first grade I was doing oil paintings at ten years old and drawings that were very advanced.

    I went to Hunter College [a branch of City University of New York] and studied art. But it was very disappointing for me when I came face to face with the reality of the art scene, which is this elite, WASP-y thing that had nothing to do with me or my background. And they would just dismiss me by the way I’d talk, for example. When I went to college I started mixing with an artsy group, hanging out with artists and going to galleries. I even had a loft in Brooklyn. But I got so turned off because I didn’t relate to these people. And when they found out I was Puerto Rican they’d just dismiss me as some quaint ethnic person. I was very disappointed, and that’s when I moved more into music.

Q: You have said that you brought an Italian aesthetic to the cre­ation of your Latin music.

A: Well, I was trained as a painter, and the idea is to be creative and original every time. A true artist is always growing, doing something different, always on that cutting edge of creativity. So when I switched over into music my attitude, perspective and frame of refer­ence, the way I went about my business as a salsa musician was as a fine artist. Whereas the other guys didn’t think along those terms, more like what’s going to make me popular, what’s going to make me a quick buck.

    I take a lot of time to compose. First of all, I’m writing in a lan­guage that’s not my first language. There’s a lot of thought and effort that goes into one of my productions, from the album covers, the choice of the material, the lyrics.

    There’s a difference between a watercolorist and an oil painter. In watercolors, there’s a spontaneity of using the brush, the water, there are ‘accidents’ that occur because of the medium. But my stuff is defi­nitely not spontaneous. My approach is like that of an oil painter. I do sketches, I plan it out totally. And if something doesn’t work I cross it out, I do it again.

    That’s a very Italian thing. One of the reasons the Italians have excelled in art was that they were able to sustain their concentration on a project, whether it be a piece of sculpture or a painting. They were able to concentrate and just polish and polish it and refine it to a point where it was as perfect as possible. Before they’d put their brushes or chisel down, they’d given every drop of themselves. And that’s my approach. Even though I’m not doing it in art, I’m doing it in music.

Q: Do you ever feel some dissonance between what you see as your Italian sensibility and your profession as a salsa musician?

A: The problem I have and will continue to have is that even though I’ve studied Latin music and have developed my own form of it, in my heart and in my mind I’m a stone guinea! That’s square biz, man. And the older I get the more aware I am of this. Because your personality is formed in the early years of your life. And I wasn’t around Spanish people at all, I was around Italians, and they molded my personality, my value system. My behavior patterns are all Italian.

    For Italian people—I’m generalizing, but in my family anyway—a man is a man if he keeps his word. You give your word—I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna be here at such and such a time—and you’re there, you do exactly what you say you’re gonna do because if you don’t then you’re not a man, you’re worthless, you have no respect, no dignity. The most dishonorable thing a man could do is not keep his word.

    In the Puerto Rican culture, that is not such a big thing, and that’s the single most frustrating thing about the Latin music business—dealing with people who’ll tell you one thing today, and tomorrow, if the wind blows from a different direction, or if it is not convenient for them to keep their word, they’ll just not show up for a gig or not pay you. When I’m dealing with people like this I’m coming from an Italian bag, and they’re coming from a Latino bag, and there’s a real culture clash, they don’t understand why I get so upset—‘what are you getting so bent out of shape for’? ‘why? because you told me you were gonna do this, now you’re coming back with something else, now you don’t wanna pay me, and you’re coming with some story—what kind of garbage is this’? And I’d get really upset. I closed a lot of doors with a lot of people because to me that’s the biggest insult you could give.

    Now, you [indicating the interviewer] you’re an Italian guy, I’m an Italian guy—I’m half-Italian but in my mind I’m even more than half—you told me you’d be here for the interview at two o’clock and you were here at two o’clock. You weren’t here at three o’clock or three-thirty, or it’s not like you didn’t show up at all and called me the next day with some stupid excuse—‘Oh, I couldn’t make it because I had to help my mother,’ some ridiculous shit. That insults me. So I’ve had problems across the board with people in the Latin music business because of this issue. I like to give respect and receive respect.

Q: On your song “El Secreto” you sing, “el secreto de la vida es re­specto,” and when I heard it I thought, ‘that’s so Italian’, and a Puerto Rican friend told me, that’s also Latino.

A: I don’t think so, I’m sorry to say. I’ll give you an example. Why are there so many young unmarried Puerto Rican girls who wind up preg­nant at 15, and their mothers have to raise the kids? That’s very common. That’s not common among Italians. For an Italian man, to have someone put their hands on your daughter and to disrespect your daughter, you, and your family, that’s like life and death. That’s something that people will take real crazy action about, ’cause it’s the ultimate insult.

    Let me tell you something, man, respect and honor and stuff like that, you see that in Puerto Rican culture in the mountains with the country people. The jibaros are really into that, they’re into hospi­tality, keeping their word, treating people with respect. Beautiful people. My wife’s family are country people, from deep in the moun­tains. But they’re a dying breed.

Q: You’ve said that the old stereotype of Calabrians being testa dura (hardheaded) applies to you, and that it has affected your relations within the Latin music scene.

A: It’s true. You know, I believe in sayings and proverbs. They don’t survive for centuries if there’s no basis in fact. There’s got to be a lot of wisdom in those sayings for them to survive. So when they say a Calabrese is testa dura, it’s often very true. You see, the Calabrese are famous for two things—for being stubborn and for being like ele­phants—they’ll never forget anything. If you did something to them twenty years ago they’ll remember every little detail about it. And they’re stubborn, they refuse to bend. And I’m like that.

    When I first meet somebody I’m very trusting and honest. I like to be generous with myself with people, I don’t put up barriers. And then when someone disrespects me. . . . Look, I was in Calabria and I got to see how the people are. They’re so open and so honest with you, so nice, very similar to the jibaros in Puerto Rico. Then when you come disrespect them after they’ve opened up to you, it’s like a wound, it hurts. Now if you’ve been showing only half of your cards and you’re playing it slick, then if somebody disrespects you it doesn’t hurt as much because you’re not vulnerable.

    But when you’re really open and honest, and somebody comes and hurts you, you don’t forget. So that’s been a problem with me, in deal­ing with the club owners, the agents, the managers, and the musi­cians, too, even the members of my band. You see, they don’t under­stand nice because nice to them means either you’re weak or you’re stupid, but they don’t know that nice is only nice. It means that you were trained with gentile, but they don’t understand gentile. To be a gentleman, to go out of your way to help somebody. This is the way Southern Italian people are, that’s the way they act.

Q: Besides your painterly way of working, how else does your Italian-ness influence your Latin music?

A: One of the things that sets me apart from the other Latin artists is this Italian-ness that’s constantly coming through that people don’t understand. They can’t pinpoint why is his singing different, why is his phrasing different. Okay, I listened to the Cuban singers and they were a big influence, but I don’t know what came first—was I at­tracted to this music because it reminded me of something Italian? Because it sounded very similar to some Southern Italian music—you have the high guitar parts that sound almost like a mandolin, and singing that is way behind the beat—rubato.

    One of the key elements in the Italian style of singing is the use of rubato. That’s very different from most of the Latin singers, espe­cially the Puerto Rican ones who tend to sing right on the beat. Colombian singers, too. And I tend to be very laid back in my singing style, and that comes from an Italian approach, an Italian feel that you can’t squash. It’s just there. And also my approach to the lyrics and message, and my value system, the things that are important to me and worthy of putting into song are things that to other Latins might not be. Because I’m a hybrid I’m out in left field somewhere. It’s like, Henry Fiol is an acquired taste. He’s a nectarine—not really a peach, not really a plum, it’s like somewhere in limbo land.

    The problem with being a half-breed is that nobody really accepts you. Italian people see me as a spic.

Q: Is that true?

A: Yes, definitely. That’s one of the problems I have. They don’t want to understand that I’m Italian, in my heart, in my mind, in my soul. I was raised Italian. Don’t get fooled if I’m singing in Spanish or play­ing a conga drum. But they see me as a spic and won’t give me that Italian-to-Italian respect. Club owners and Italians in general. Once they find out that I’m half-Puerto Rican it’s like you’re not really Italian. But Latin people are more tolerant. Maybe that’s why I’ve gravitated toward the Latin music. A half-breed is always looking for a place to belong, a place to fit in, an identity. And Latin people accepted me more than Italians, but not 100 percent, not even 75. It’s like, ‘oh yeah, he’s singing in Spanish and he’s playing Latin music but there’s something different about him’. And I find it especially so among the Puerto Ricans, which is ironic. I guess I look a little differ­ent from most of them.

Q: That faccia of yours . . .

A: [Laughs] Yes, I do have an Italian look.