Creativity Quote by Ruben Blades

There is a whole era of cultural gatekeeping packed into Blades' offhand phrasing. "In those days" lands like a sigh: not nostalgia, more like a reminder that the industry’s blind spots were policy, not accident. By saying the big U.S. labels "didn't have any particular interest", he chooses understatement over outrage, which is its own kind of indictment. It suggests indifference was so normalized that it didn’t even require a villain; the system simply didn’t look, didn’t listen, didn’t imagine a market unless it resembled the one already on their spreadsheets.

The subtext is about power and translation. "Latin market" is industry language - a neat box that reduces dozens of countries, styles, dialects, and racial histories into a single category you can ignore until it becomes profitable. Blades, a Panamanian musician who helped push salsa into global consciousness, is quietly pointing at the cost of that simplification: artists forced to build parallel infrastructures, to tour relentlessly, to depend on local networks and immigrant audiences while U.S. tastemakers treated the music as niche.

Context matters: long before "Latin" became a streaming-era growth segment or a Grammy-night talking point, the U.S. record business tended to treat Spanish-language music as an import rather than a domestic reality. Blades’ line captures the pre-boom moment when cultural influence ran ahead of corporate recognition. It works because it’s both personal testimony and a small, sharp critique of how American industries often discover communities the minute they can monetize them.