Overview

In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy GarcÍa describes how local salseras/os gain social status by performing an exoticized L.A.–style salsa that distances them from club practices associated with Mexicanness. Many Latinos in Los Angeles try to avoid ""dancing like a Mexican,"" attempting to rid their dancing of techniques that might suggest that they are migrants, poor, working-class, Mexican, or undocumented. In L.A. salsa clubs, social belonging and mobility depend on subtleties of technique and movement. With a well-timed dance-floor exit or the lift of a properly tweezed eyebrow, a dancer signals affiliation not only with a distinctive salsa style but also with a particular conceptualization of latinidad.

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9780822354819

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"""Salsa Crossings is a nuanced ethnography of the embodied pleasures, struggles, and sociopolitical aspirations that Latinos enact in L.A. salsa clubs. Cindy Garcia analyzes the relationships among dancers, club promoters, wallflowers, and socializers as they negotiate the issues of belonging and exclusion that animate latinidad. She brilliantly positions the libidinal economies and stylistic hierarchies of salsa dancing in Los Angeles within the larger political economy of and among Latinos in the United States. This book makes important and illuminating contributions to the fields of dance and Latino studies."" - Deborah Paredez, author of Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory ""With her skilled recognition of the meanings and genealogies of dance styles, Cindy Garcia sets the record straight by illuminating the social hierarchies and conflicts emerging in the salsa clubs of Los Angeles. Scholars of salsa dancing who have focused on the Caribbean and New York until now will no longer be able to ignore California and the West Coast."" - Frances Aparicio, author of Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures"

With her skilled recognition of the meanings and genealogies of dance styles, Cindy Garcia sets the record straight by illuminating the social hierarchies and conflicts emerging in the salsa clubs of Los Angeles. Scholars of salsa dancing who have focused on the Caribbean and New York until now will no longer be able to ignore California and the West Coast. --Frances Aparicio, author of Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures

Author Information

Cindy GarcÍa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.

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