When Bad Bunny played the SuperBowl last year, his hit NuevaYol (New York in Spanish using the classic Puerto Rican pronunciation) brought me back to my time in my early 20s in the late 1990s living in New York City. It was 30 years ago this year when I moved to New York in 1996 for two years for grad school. The sounds wafting through the streets where I lived was right in the heart of Washington Heights. The music that blared from windows was bachata and merengue. When my friends and I would go to Coogan’s, the local bar, we’d dance to a mix of merengue, salsa, hip hop, and house music. I fell in love with salsa music and dancing. I listened for hours to local radio stations and the Spanish /English station La Mega played the best mix of old school Salsa dura, modern merengue, bachata and reggaeton, with some house and freestyle thrown in. So here are the songs that introduced me to the sound that would get me on the dance floor in 1996 and 1997.