The Routledge Dance Studies Reader by Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutian Wong

Author:Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutian Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

I am drawn to Maricruz’s first hesitant analysis associating cumbia with the lower class. She articulates a dominant club pattern of ascribing a low-class status to “happy, cumbia-dancing Latinas/os” and opposing it to “passionate, salsa-dancing Latinas/os.” I notice how quickly Maricruz attributes differences in aesthetic taste to the particularities of culture and to personal taste. She thus dismisses her own very accurate (in my opinion) assessment of classism.

I consider the implications of camouflaging hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, and nation with language that highlights differences in “style.” In addition to Maricruz, a few other practitioners with whom I have spoken and danced have explained away tensions of class, race, and nation in salsa clubs in terms of personal style preferences and dance terminology. Assessments such as who dances with more sophistication or more elegance denote and tangle together imaginations of whiteness, American-ness, and upward mobility with US latinidad. Someone who dances “too ballroom” or with too much stiffness is considered too white, and lacks enough of the quality many practitioners call “street.” To move up the salsa hierarchy, salseras/os undergo the process of “street training”—a combination of the refinement, or whitening, of selected techniques and the reification of exotic latinidad.

Maricruz acknowledges the difficulty dancers face in trying to move up the salsa hierarchy, even for those who can pay for private lessons in street training. “You don’t get to place yourself in the hierarchy, you get placed into it by everyone else.” She places at the top a handful of world-class teachers who travel the globe (to places like Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and North Carolina) to give workshops all year long. Next come the competitors, then the ones who perform with a dance team, then the intermediate dancers who are thinking about joining a group, and lastly the beginners and the now-and-then dancers (the ones who know how to dance, but haven’t learned the latest moves). Maricruz’s hierarchy of good dancing does not include the cumbia dancers or socializers.

Dancing salsa “right” includes techniques that deterritorialize latinidad, occluding an association to any specific Latin American locality or identity. LA salseras/os generally strive to situate themselves and their dance practices within Los Angeles while infusing them with US pop-cultural injections of a highly street-trained, exoticized latinidad to indicate that they are not the bodies the US divides itself from with a long, tall fence at the border. By recrafting their dance practices they in turn fashion latinidad so as to be desirable within the United States. Yet the clubs do not offer a total respite because they do not exist as utopian spaces outside of politics. Although dancers have more leeway to temporarily reconfigure their identities by night, they also activate hierarchies of belonging based on social practices that can implicate their positionings in daily life.13 LA-style salseras/os depend on the presence of the ones they consider “untrained,” contrast themselves against the ones whose dance practices remind them of their marginalized statuses as Latinas/os in the USA. The cumbia dancers at

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