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Salsa world: A global dance in local contexts
Abstract
Since its emergence in the 1960s, salsa has transformed from a symbol of Nuyorican pride into an emblem of pan-Latinism and finally a form of global popular culture. While Latinos all over the world have developed and even exported their own “dance accents,” local dance scenes have arisen in increasingly far-flung locations, each with their own flavor and unique features. Salsa World examines the ways in which bodies relate to culture in specific places. The contributors, a notable group of scholars and practitioners, analyze dance practices in the U.S., Japan, Spain, France, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Writing from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, and performance studies, the contributors explore salsa’s kinetopias - places defined by movement, or vice versa- as they have arisen through the dance’s interaction with local histories, identities, and musical forms. Taken together, the essays in this book examine contemporary salsa dancing in all its complexity, taking special note of how it is localized and how issues of geography, race and ethnicity, and identity interact with the global salsa industry.
... Subsequently, the aesthetic conventions and authenticity regimes of Cuban dance are constantly renegotiated on local and international salsa scenes. My analysis is informed by two frameworks in recent scholarship: the connection of mobilities and imaginaries to emotions and aspirations [Simoni, 2016a;Fernandez, 2018] and the emergence of dance-centered, transnational "social spaces » [Waxer, 2002;Hutchinson, 2014]. The central role of emotional and affective ties in experiences of mobility and migration regimes was framed by Christian Groes and Nadine Fernandez as "intimate mobilities », which encompass « any kind of mobility motivated by emotions, desires, or pleasures » [2018: 1]. ...
Sois Cubain, sois populaire : trajectoires professionnelles et personnelles de danseurs cubains dans une perspective transnationale
This article explores dance as a cultural resource that ensures mobility and allows Cubans involved in the dance scene to pursue personal and professional goals. It examines how mobilities contribute to reshaping attitudes about work, dance, and dance-as-work on the island, as embodied practices become inscribed in widely circulating imaginaries. Hopes about (successful) international dance careers emerge at the intersection of different types of mobilities, as Cubans perform multiple roles in their encounters with dancing tourists. As a result, dancers’ possibilities of adaptation become further resources of professionalization either in Cuba or abroad, reconfiguring local salsa scenes in the process.
The research for this article has been conducted as part of two research projects funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, number 2017/25/N/HS3/00315 and number 2019/32/T/HS3/00379, and during a research stay at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin from November 2019 to April 2020.
... Salsa music's commodification is well documented, with much attention paid to the rise and fall of Fania Records (Negrón 2015;Washburne 2008;Aparicio 2002;Manuel 1991). Regarding dance, interdisciplinary work has framed salsa as a site for affirming Latinx identity (Renta 2004;McMains 2001;Flores 2000;Aparicio 1998), reifying white supremacy (McMains 2001;Bosse 2007;Ehrenreich 2000;Boggs 1992), negotiating gender roles (Aparicio 2002;Borland 2009;Aparicio 2003), and embodying or textualizing culture (Sanmiguel 2014;Pietrobruno 2006). ...
This article explores the world of the “on2” salsa dance scene in New York today. Building on long-term participant observation and interviews, I argue that Latinx salsa dancers contest and reconfigure the racialized commodification of salsa dance as a marketable product. They do this by foregrounding Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean cultural identity and by strategically claiming grassroots urbanity in the hyper-gentrified city. In doing so, dancers step into a nuanced but counter-hegemonic role in power struggles around the right to urban space. In this way, the salsa scene retains its social and political role as a space for Latinx cultural affirmation, community-building, and resistance to cultural erasure in the neoliberal city. The study of salsa dance in late neoliberal New York deepens our understanding of how Latinx creative communities interact with the environment—shaping and being shaped by the changing city while negotiating cultural meaning through on2 salsa as both practice and product.
... Another important aspect was the hygienization of the dance (cf. Hutchinson 2014). In the case of logic of movements regarded as overly sexual from the point of view of middle-class consumers, these had to be transformed to be acceptable and marketable. ...
The main objective of this article involves describing how African nightclubs of Lisbon have become spaces for cultural resistance against certain representations of African-ness, taking Madrid as a contrasting case. Since the 1970s, the so-called African nightclubs of Lisbon have constituted spaces for gathering and nurturing a sense of community for immigrants from Portuguese-speaking Africa. Commonly regarded suspiciously by most Portuguese citizens, commodification of the couple dance labelled kizomba during the 1990s helped changed their status. However, most African research participants do not recognise their beloved dance in the commodified version of kizomba . In this context, I analyse the commodification process as a form of symbolic violence that disguises postcolonial structural inequalities and unsolved conflicts through a discourse of neutral “approaching of cultures” on the dance floor. Moreover, from the point of view of a meritocratic symbolism, this discourse portrays the performances displayed at African discos as “basic” and unworthy. After exploring several ways of resistance to commodified kizomba displayed by African discos clientele, I conclude reflecting on the increasing symbolic power of global industries for naming social groups, structuring practices and exercising symbolic violence in late modernity.
... My frustration with not being able to find scholarship specifically addressing salsa dance inspired me to begin researching its history, culminating in a recently published salsa history book (McMains 2015). Since I began my own research, many other scholars have published rich and varied literature on salsa dance, so instructors have a wide range of texts to choose from when assigning readings to their students, several of which are listed in the bibliography (Pietrobruno 2006;Borland 2009;García 2008García , 2013McMains 2013;Hutchinson 2014). We use a combination of lecture, discussion, and video viewing to examine each topic included in the course, which is divided into eight units: the mambo era, the salsa revolution, salsa dance commercialization, regional styles (focus on New York and Los Angeles), ethnic identity and stereotype (includes comparison to ballroom Latin), gender in salsa, Cuban timba and casino, and competitive and stage salsa. ...
Drawing upon Rancière's argument that aesthetics instigates politics, Latour's rethinking of agency as relational, and Ortiz's work on Afro-Cuban music aesthetics, this article explores how the experience of aesthetic pleasure in Cuban timba grooves makes politics audible and affective in novel ways. Through a combination of ethnographic and musical analyses of Havana D'Primera's performance of ‘Pasaporte’ live at Casa de la Música in 2010, it unpacks the political affordances of call-and-response singing and polyrhythmic timba grooves among participating listeners in Havana. In contrast to the recurrent tendency to exclude musical details from research into the politics of music, this article suggests that engaging grooves and catchy melodies do important political work as musical actants by creating affective communities and new expressions of political critique. The concept of musical actants serves as a lens through which to view these pregnant interactions between rhythmic, melodic, social, and political meanings in time.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cotonou, Benin, the essay explores historical and contemporary dynamics pertaining to the different ways in which salsa is creatively appropriated in Benin. The analysis of the specificities of Beninese salsa dialogues with the ever-growing body of literature interrogating the ability of the Black Atlantic heuristic to grasp South-South transatlantic cultural circulations. I thereby redefine the transatlantic affiliations that are perceptible through the beninisation of salsa as emanating instead from what I call the Creole Atlantic.
The partner dance kizomba became fashionable in the eighties in Portuguese-speaking Africa and its European diasporas. Its commodification in Portugal in the late nineties turned it into a global craze, supported by a linear story: Angola is the source of kizomba, and Lisbon, its international capital. This essay moves beyond the methodological nationalism and the post-imperial geographical concept, lusofonia, that supports this narrative. Examining instead the circulation of people and practices through sites conceptualized as “hubs,” I present kizomba as a transnational field of practices deriving from deep histories of transoceanic, inter-African connections. Presenting Lisbon as the main hub for kizomba during the eighties and nineties, I develop the idea of the transnational dance floor, webbed across cities and connected through transnational ties that challenge post-imperial and linguistic geographies. Thus, despite the essay's ostensible Lisbon-centrism, I propose building collaborative geographies whereby transnational phenomena such as kizomba may best be examined.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mali and Benin, the article looks at the economy of music video making and watching and their interaction with social dance practices. On the one hand, the article addresses the creation of new dance aesthetics in Mali through the development of music videos, while interrogating the creation of dance routines and their mediation on TV and via the Internet. On the other hand, it explores issues of remediation and intermediality in dance in light of the use of videos by Beninese salsa dancers. The article thus examines the interactions between dancing bodies and screens in dance venues in Cotonou. The notion of videochoreomorphosis is proposed as an analytical tool to appreciate how dance and dancing bodies are transformed by their interaction with the video format and with audio-visual techniques. This notion encompasses aesthetic and technical transformations as well as changes in the transmission, practice and consumption of dance through its video mediation. It also confronts assumed oppositions such as virtual/incarnate, screen/live, representation/embodiment, global/local. This study aims therefore at a theorization of the role of intermediality and remediation in social dance practices in Africa today.
The embrace of interdisciplinarity has increased in recent years to the point where it is now a staple of studies focused on contemporary popular culture across numerous genres. This chapter describes major theoretical insights and approaches in core works in the field of popular culture studies that draw from this wide, interdisciplinary background grounded particularly in ethnography and folklore. It also provides a focused discussion of the literature drawing on many of the subfields that define and strengthen the folkloristic and ethnographic approaches to popular culture studies. From the beginnings of popular culture studies as a field, there has been a connection to folklore scholarship. The chapter then focuses on process as much as content, since the methodologies are themselves a significant component of the inquiry. Fan studies have become a field in popular culture studies with ethnographic techniques.
Whether it is for competition, coaching, or costume fittings, dancers' lives are shaped and lived not in any given
location but in translocal circulation, as dancers move not only around the ballroom floor but also quite deliberately navigate the translocal ballroom world. As such, being a ballroom competitor involves the development of notions of belonging and norms and practices that are implicated in broad circulations of aesthetics, cultural values, and prestige, as well as systems of social, economic, and political statuses and contestations. Wide-ranging travel is a means of making and marking membership for judges, students, clothiers, and spectators alike.
La llegada de población procedente de Latinoamérica y la internacionalización de la salsa han propiciado la transformación del espacio sonoro, cultural y social de Barcelona en la última década, así como el desarrollo de ciertos procesos de reafirmación e hibridación cultural, que se evidencian al observar determinadas prácticas de consumo, producción y recepción musical, entre las que figuran ir a bailar en discotecas, oír la radio y participar en congresos de baile; cuestiones que aquí son analizadas
Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia, and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's musica tropical are now enjoying international success. How did this music - which has its roots in a black, marginal region of the country - manage, from the 1940s onward, to become so popular in a nation that had prided itself on its white heritage? Peter Wade explores the history of música tropical, analyzing its rise in the context of the development of the broadcast media, rapid urbanization, and regional struggles for power. Using archival sources and oral histories, Wade shows how big band renditions of cumbia and porro in the 1940s and 1950s suggested both old traditions and new liberties, especially for women, speaking to a deeply rooted image of black music as sensuous. Recently, nostalgic, "whitened" versions of musica tropical have gained popularity as part of government-sponsored multiculturalism. Wade's fresh look at the way music transforms and is transformed by ideologies of race, nation, sexuality, tradition, and modernity is the first book-length study of Colombian popular music.
Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Recent media attention is helping other Caribbean music styles like bachata to attain a similar status. Yet popular Mexican American dances remain unknown and invisible to most non-Latinos. Quebradita, meaning “little break,” is a modern Mexican American dance style that became hugely popular in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States during the early to mid 1990s. Over the decade of its popularity, this dance craze offered insights into the social and cultural experience of Mexican American youth. Accompanied by banda, an energetic brass band music style, quebradita is recognizable by its western clothing, hat tricks, and daring flips. The dance’s combination of Mexican, Anglo, and African American influences represented a new sensibility that appealed to thousands of young people. Hutchinson argues that, though short-lived, the dance filled political and sociocultural functions, emerging as it did in response to the anti-immigrant and English-only legislation that was then being enacted in California. Her fieldwork and interviews yield rich personal testimony as to the inner workings of the quebradita’s aesthetic development and social significance. The emergence of pasito duranguense, a related yet distinct style originating in Chicago, marks the evolution of the Mexican American youth dance scene. Like the quebradita before it, pasito duranguense has picked up the task of demonstrating the relevance of regional Mexican music and dance within the U.S. context.
This book brings different ideas to bear on the classical problem of the self. Self-perception, both ecological and social, is the earliest and most fundamental form of self-knowledge. In his introduction, Ulric Neisser describes the 'ecological self' as based on direct and realistic perception of one's situation in the environment; the 'interpersonal self' as established by social interaction with other people. He argues that both of these 'selves' appear in early infancy, long before anything like a self-concept or a self-narrative is possible. In subsequent chapters, fifteen contributors - psychologists, philosophers and others - elaborate on these notions and introduce related ideas of their own. Their topics range from the perceptual and social development of infants to autism and blindness; from mechanisms of motor control to dance and non-verbal communication. The combined contributions of these leading individuals creates an unusual synthesis of perceptual, social and developmental theory.
L'A. explique comment les Porto-Ricains et les Nuyoricains se sont appropries les formes musicales cubaines comme symboles de leur propre identite culturelle. La « danza » est une adaptation de la « contradanza ». La musique paysanne « jibaro », la « plena » et la « bomba », les trios et la salsa sont aussi consideres comme musique nationale porto-ricaine. Les arguments affirmant la nature pan-latine et porto-ricaine de la salsa sont les suivants : un melange de musiques caribeennes (bomba, plena, seis, merengue, cumbia, etc.), une musique presente depuis 1900, distincte de la musique cubaine des annees 1950, un produit de la communaute latino-new-yorkaise
Acknowledgments Introduction Claims to Global Culture: America Abroad Du Bois's Color and Democracy and the "Red" Color Line The Public face of the "Third-World" Writer States of Theory and the Absence of States The Contradictions of Binary Thinking: Cosmopolitanism and Method Nizan Fights the Watchdogs: The Obvious Must Be Explained Cultural Studies and Colonial Progress Anna Deveare Smith, or Authenticity without Apologoes The Culture of the Transnational Corporation If the Nation Is Dead, Why Doesn't Henry Kissinger Know It? George Orwell as Julia Kristeva: The 1950s in the 1990s Mangerial Training Manuals: What Is National in the Transnational Gatt Poetics and the Traveling Critic: Cosmopolitanism and the Explorer's Eye The Sublimation of Poverty: New York's Lower East Side "Marcos" and Cortazar: Two Alternatives to Contemporary Travel Narrative The Literary in the Light of the Nobel Prize: Morrison and Walcott A Few Thoughts on What the Postcolonial Leaves Out Cosmopolitanism's American Base: C. L. R. James in New York, 1950 Socialist Desire: Ernst Bloch in America Cosmopolitanism, America, and the Cold War The Struggle for Happiness-Winning in Desperate Times by Loving What Is James's Art Exceptional Americanism and the U.S. Mass Culture Debate The World Cuban: Alejo Carpentier and Cuban Popular Music From Paris to Havana Ethnographic Surrealism: The Red and the Black Salsa and the Cuban Image Reading Mass Culture through Youth The Indigenous and the In-Between Conclusion Notes Index
This article theorizes pan-latinidad in action and the classed, racialized codes of femininity that emerge in Los Angeles salsa clubs. Through choreography-based ethnographic analyses, the author reflects on the conditions and possibilities of salsera homosociality–not on the dance floor, but in decentralized spaces such as the bar, the bathroom and cyberspace.
This article discusses key dynamics in the globalization of popular music, more specifically the interplay between technology, social and commercial structure, and meaningful sound forms. It analyses Orquesta de la Luz, an all-Japanese salsa band, as an example of the transgression of ethnic, geographical, linguistic and national boundaries of Latin American music. The band demonstrated the intertwined nature of the global and the local, in addition to the historical formation of modern Japanese culture. Their worldwide fame derived from their musicianship, their synchronicity with the world music boom, and finally the diffusion of digital technology in popular music production and consumption. This article argues that economic and technological conditions are as much constitutive of the band's unique practices as are aesthetic ones. It then goes on to question the dichotomies, 'universalism vs. particularism' and 'creativity vs. copy'. This discussion builds towards an examination of the relationship between purist aesthetics (hyperrealism) and the Japanese concept/method of learning; it also explores the notion of cultural authenticity that located the activities of the band. Paradoxically, Orquesta de la Luz demonstrated that Japanization does not necessarily imply synthesis with vernacular elements for purist musicians. Theoretically, this 'becoming Other' reveals a parallel capacity for self-exoticization and self-orientalization with respect to Japanese identities. Orquesta de la Luz's musical search for the roots of otherness is closely tied with the feeling among many Japanese youth for the loss of Japan's 'genuine' cultural identity. Another focus of this study, then, is to shed light on the relevance of exoticism in the band's foreign reception and to assess their Latino image in the Japanese context.
Art works can be conceived as the product of the cooperative activity of many people. Some of these people are customarily defined as artists, others as support personnel. The artist's dependence on support personnel constrains the range of artistic possibilities available to him. Cooperation is mediated by the use of artistic conventions, whose existence both makes the production of work easier and innovation more difficult. Artistic innovations occur when artists discover alternate means of assembling the resources necessary. This conception of an art world made up of personnel cooperating via conventions has implications for the sociological analysis of social organization.
Over the last century perennial surges in the popularity of Latin American couple dance genres such as tango and rumba in the United States have served as lightning rods for debate on issues of morality, performance, and identity. These “crazes” have fueled the collective American imagination, reinforcing a type of Latin American exotica that prevailed throughout the twentieth century and into the next. Consequently, they have also fostered an entirely new style of performance as white Americans borrowed—or perhaps better stated, appropriated—these genres for their own. For instance, the two styles of tango performed by ballroom dancers today, some one hundred years after its introduction to American audiences in theaters and exhibition performances, is sufficiently distant from its Argentine roots to be considered an entirely different dance employing different movements, rhythms, and musical accompaniment.
This article explores this particular brand of cross-cultural borrowing through an ethnographic accounting of a salsa dance formation team in central Illinois. Salsa is the latest of the Latin dance crazes, and since the earl. 1990. the genre has experienced increased attention from mainstream American audiences who have invested significant resources in order to learn to dance salsa. Formation teams are presentational performance ensembles, in this case combining salsa; ballroom; and staged, theatrical dance, and generally draw their enthusiasts from ballroom dance circles.
Studio-based salsa dance in Northern New Jersey has succeeded in creating an ethnically diverse social space in which Latin style represents both a specific ethnicity and an alternative pan-ethnic identity that encompasses and embraces difference. The wide appeal of the dance, however, rests in its dramatic and provocative display of gendered interactions. Attention to dancers' subjective understandings of their own practice provides a female-centered perspective on the emerging cultural scene. Copyright
Discusses the cultural identity and experiences of Puerto Ricans residing in New York City. Explores, through excerpts of poetry by "Nuyoricans," the themes of assimilation, attachment to the island of Puerto Rico, relations with Black and White New Yorkers, and bilingualism. (GC)
Austin, Texas, has long been recognized for its racial and ethnic segregation. Policies created in 1927 officially segregated the city, and the public landscape has remained divided. How does a cosmopolitan community of difference constitute itself against the dominant Anglo culture of this Texan city? Analyzing the speech genre of “trash talk” in salsa-club culture, I demonstrate how affect is created in language and how this speech genre co-occurs with other aesthetic practices to produce a sense of belonging across boundaries of race and class. The tension between “home” and “anti-home” creates affective and discursive engagement, mitigating paradox in spaces of alterity.
Este libro trata sobre la mezcla de culturas y los mestizajes resultantes, un fenómeno que crece día a día en todo el mundo. Gruzinski, en este libro fascinante, empienza analizando el México español - que le proporciona numerosas pistas para su investigación, define lo que él llama el pensamiento mestizo" y en, fin, propone una magistral exploración tanto de los "mestizajes de la imagen" como de la "creación mestiza" demostranto que las artes y las culturas no han cesado de mezclarse entre sí a lo largo de los tiempos, más allá de cualquier frontera.
1st ed. Obsahuje rejstřík
México ¿Cómo interpretar los actuales conflictos latinoamericanos entre las tradiciones que aún no se han ido y la modernidad que no acaba de llegar? En este libro el autor confronta los debates teóricos acerca de lo moderno y lo posmoderno con estudios sobre los usos populares del arte culto y de los medios masivos. Se analizan comparativamente la forma en que los museos, los políticos y el mercado ritualizan las tradiciones, los comportamientos de Octavio Paz y Jorge Luis Borges ante la televisión, el humor con que las historietas y los graffiti registran los cruces interculturales generados por las migraciones masivas y las nuevas tecnologías. Para entender estas culturas híbridas, el autor propone la utilización combinada de las disciplinas que las analizan por separado: la antropología con la sociología, la historia del arte y los estudios comunicacionales.
As Nuyorican musicians were laboring to develop the unique sounds of New York mambo and salsa, Nuyorican dancers were working just as hard to create a new form of dance. This dance, now known as “on 2” mambo, or salsa, for its relationship to the clave, is the first uniquely North American form of vernacular Latino dance on the East Coast. This paper traces the New York mambo’s development from its beginnings at the Palladium Ballroom through the salsa and hustle years and up to the present time. The current period is characterized by increasing growth, commercialization, codification, and a blending with other modern, urban dance genres such as hip-hop.
This article highlights the role of the Puerto Rican community in New York as the social base for the creation of Latin music of the 1960s and 1970s known as salsa, as well as its relation to the island. As implied in the subtitle, the argument is advanced that Caribbean diaspora communities need to be seen as sources of creative cultural innovation rather than as mere repositories or extensions of expressive traditions in the geographical homelands, and furthermore as a potential challenge to the assumptions of cultural authenticity typical of traditional conceptions of national culture. It is further contended that a transnational and pan- Caribbean framework is needed for a full understanding of these complex new conditions of musical migration and interaction.
Salsa Spins Beyond Its Roots
- Julie Bloom
Bloom, Julie. 2007. "Salsa Spins Beyond Its Roots." New York Times, July 29. Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/arts/dance/29bloo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
Interview by Sydney Hutchinson
- Shaka Brown
Brown, Shaka. 2003. Interview by Sydney Hutchinson. July 30.
The Ballroom Panorama: Mambo-Today
- Albert Butler
Butler, Albert and Josephine. 1953. "The Ballroom Panorama: Mambo-Today." Dance
Magazine 27 (12): 52-53.
Personal communications with Sydney Hutchinson
- Barbara Craddock
- Pedro Aguilar
Craddock, Barbara, and Pedro Aguilar. 2003. Personal communications with Sydney
Hutchinson.
Nuestras raices/Our roots
- Luis A Delgado
Delgado, Luis A., ed. 2003. "Nuestras raices/Our roots." In Salsa Today. 3rd ed. San Juan,
Puerto Rico: Congreso Mundial de la Salsa.
Club Owners and Promoters: What Dancers Look for in a Club
- Edie N Espinoza
Espinoza, Edie. n.d. "Club Owners and Promoters: What Dancers Look for in a Club." Edie
the Salsa Freak. Previously available at http://www.dancefreak.com/stories/clubown
.htm (accessed March 17, 2003).
For Latin Dancing, Follow the Beat and the Crowd
- Marc Ferris
Ferris, Marc. 2001. "For Latin Dancing, Follow the Beat and the Crowd." New York Times,
November 11. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/nyregion/for-latin
-dancing-follow-the-beat-and-the-crowd.html.