Salsa music legend Willie Colon has passed away, so here’s an awesome documentary by a young(ish) Leon Gast (who later won an Oscar for When We Were Kings about the Rumble in the Jungle) about the salsa scene & Latino culture in New York, with footage from multiple concerts interspersed with life on the streets. A real slice of NYC in the early 70s!

(Mostly music & spoken word in English; some Spanish with hard subs in English.)

The Yankee Stadium concert scene, in particular, is insane! (Mongo Santamaria & Ray Barretto drive the crowd so wild with their conga battle, it literally starts a riot!)

For many years, it was only available on a few deteriorating VHS tapes. I finally managed to see it ~2009 using Ares Galaxy (before it became just another BitTorrent client, it was its own P2P filesharing network popular in the Spanish-speaking world), but in 2019 Fania Records (the company behind the film & the salsa music boom of the 60s & 70s) remastered it & uploaded it to YouTube.

Youtube description:

Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) is a musical documentary revealing the exciting lifestyle of New York Latinos during the decade of the 1970s. The film captures the New York '70s salsa explosion in all its power and adrenaline. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Leon Gast, highlights include performance by Cheo Feliciano at the top his game with an orchestra of superstars whose backup vocalists alone includes Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Adalberto Santiago and Pete ‘El Conde’ Rodríguez. Gast takes also to the streets of the Spanish Harlem where the salsa phenomenon was born, as well as into the recording studio for a peek into the creative process, featuring producer/keyboardist Larry Harlow. Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) is remastered from original tapes.

2011 interview with Leon Gast about making Our Latin Thing:

We speak to New Jersey-born director Leon Gast about Our Latin Thing, a film documenting a Fania All-Stars concert and Latino life in Manhattan (New York) in 1971. The film was reissued earlier this year and is fast becoming known as THE definitive salsa documentary. In our opinion it is one of the finest music documentaries ever made, never mind just salsa.