Boogaloo, what is it and where did it come from? Spoiler alert, after researching it for an afternoon I am still far away from the answer. I could probably have a polite dinner conversation about it with someone who isn’t an expert, so that’s a positive I guess.

Here’s what I got:

First mention I came across is in a book about Australian peoples with the very interesting title of, “The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia, and the Routes by which it Spread Itself Over that Continent, Volume 2“. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue? Apparently, for one group of Australian people located near Tolarno Station, “boogaloo” meant “death”. “Boogaloo” also appears to be the name of “a happy-go-lucky Negro” in vol. 34, page 6 of Time magazine.

There is a Chicago Tribune article from 1967 that states “The Boogaloo came from Florida. It first started in New York’s Puerto Rican districts. It came from Harlem, from Rush Street from Chicago’s south side, from Philadelphia… No one can agree on where or how it happened, but no one really cares. It’s here now!”.

Lots of other references to it on billboard charts in the ’60’s, but not many published mentions of it before the ’60’s. No references to it before it was popular and nobody cared where it came from. It is usually referred to as having a Latin flavor, it also appears alongside African American references. The Library of Congress was of no help to me in my search.  I had no choice, time to Google/Wiki it.

In my Googling a few sites threw out speculations that “Boogaloo” came from “boogie” or “boogie-woogie”.

There is a common thread among a lot of pop culture/ slang terms that their roots are difficult to uncover. Sometimes pop culture terms come about just because they sound cool, or sounded cool at the time, I’m looking at you “boogie-woogie”. Take the modern term “fleek”, are people in 100 years going to try and research it’s origins only to be frustrated by the fact that pop-culture terms don’t always make sense?

I am not sure how much the Latin culture aspect played into it being relatively unknown until suddenly it was popular. Or is it because of the different modes that pop-culture terms traveled around in the ’60’s? Pop culture terms now can travel around the world in 60 seconds. In the ’60’s the fastest way for pop-culture to spread was TV or radio. It would take awhile for a popular craze in New York to make it’s to Chicago. If a new popular form of dance was invented tomorrow it would be tweeted about on Twitter, a How-to  video would be posted on Youtube, viral videos of people doing it would be on Vine, SnapChat and Facebook and people on the street would get selfies with the creator to put on Instagram, all within a few days.

I wonder how much I miss out on popular culture because I am not Latino or African American? How much goes over my head because I don’t understand the culture? Would I understand more about the Boogaloo if I were Hispanic? Would it’s lack of an origin story make more sense?