The word salsa, Spanish for sauce, was popularised in New York in the 1960s and 1970s by Johnny Pacheco, Fania Records and the Fania All-Stars as a label for Afro-Caribbean dance music. The dance itself grew from older Afro-Cuban and Caribbean social dances such as son, danzón, mambo, cha-cha-chá and rumba. Its movements mix African-derived traits like polyrhythmic hip and body action and call-and-response play with European partner-dance structures inherited through Cuban danzón. In the United States, Palladium-era mambo and jazz, swing and tap shaped it further. Later, New York and Los Angeles styles and local forms like salsa caleña in Cali, Colombia, spread it worldwide.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.