Salsa music and dancing have a number of influences, including African drum rhythms, Spanish guitar music, and dances from Cuba and Puerto Rico. The dance originated in Africa, where it would migrate to Cuba via slavery. Africans would sell their own people to Cuba and Spain and those slaves would create their form of music. From Cuba it would go on to the United States. The dancing and music came together in the 1970s, when Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants combined the dancing and music of their homelands. When it came out, it was referred to as “ghetto music”. The dance moves were proactive and only the lowest class would dance to it. No one knows for sure where the term "salsa," came from, though many speculate that it refers to the dance's
