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Embodied Archives: Dance, Memory, and
the Performance of Latinidad
Ramón
H. Rivera-Servera
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Preface
On July
2000 I had the opportunity of assisting curator Marvette Perez on an interview
with Vincent Livelli, an Italian American Latin music collector from Brooklyn,
for the Oral History Program at the National Museum of American History. Livelli,
who in the 1930‘s heard the buzzling sounds of Spanish Harlem on the radio and
was immediately hypnotized, remains one of the most valuable sources on the
social and performance culture of Latinos in New York City during this period.
I was moved by his knowledge about and love for Latino culture. He responded
eloquently and passionately during three hours of probing questioning. We
discussed many aspects of the developments of Latino social life including innovations
in orchestral performance for Latin music bands, production histories, the complex
trajectory of Latin sounds from Spanish Harlem to midtown Manhattan, and its
subsequent spread into the tourist tropicalia of the 1940s and 1950s.
The details
of his account are rich, and I invite anyone interested in a real historical
jewell to peruse through this and many other oral histories thus far archived
at the Smithsonian Institution through the Oral History Program. However, and
despite of all this wealth of annecdotes and historical reference, I, as a performance
scholar who focuses on the live event, continue to feel at a loss when approaching
the archive, national or otherwise. Livelli could simply not address the subject,
it escaped his capacity to explain through language. His detailed protrait of
Spanish Harlem, of The Paladium, the bugaloo, vanished right before my eyes
with the absence of movement, gesture, bodies. I am struck by the difficulty
of evoking a memory sufficient to articulate the performing body from within
such a rich and complex history.
My experience with Livelli and my
conversations with many others in his generation have in many ways shaped my
current research. I study movement, and dance in particular dilligently, not
only because of its importance here and now, but because I don’t want us to
forget. Because I don’t want to loose the tickness of the performance moment.
This is a labor of love, a record of those gestures that have impressed me,
those that have challenged me and those that have seduced me. The piece that
follows is a sample of my project to archive Latino social dance practices in
the present . . . so that we may remember our bodies in the future.
I.
Consider the following
situations:
In a small mixed gay club in Rochester,
New York, Nestor, a 43 year old Chicano gay man from the Texas Valley, takes
to the dance floor, alone, as a remixed version of “Rumba” a Latin House track
recorded in 1993 by New York City based Pirates of the Caribbean blasts its
heavy house base to the polyrhythmic layers of congas, bongos, timbales, and
electronic percussion. He uses the percussive line to mark his stylized stepping
in a cutting forward motion across the floor. His choreography is explicitly
about demarcating space in the dance floor and is characterized by a slight
bending of the right knee rythmically pausing to allow right shoulder punctuation
that travels through the curving of the torso and onto the hip, followed by
a pointing forward with the left foot on the step. This full sequence is adorned
by a forward rotation of the bent arms with on the beat inward contraction at
the chest (as in salsa). This territoriality is further articulated by the intensity
of his cutting stare fixed across the room during the forward progression. He
ends his approximately ten feet travel with a sudden pause accentuated by a
coquettish smile and slow swaying of the hips that usher the quick right turn,
sustained pose and sudden back drop to the floor that follow. An almost immediate
recuperation follows initiating his travel towards his starting spot. This travel
is very much with the rhythm, synchronizing his performance to the dominant
sensory stimuli in the club, sound. But his on the beat motion, matching the
intensity of the music, is subverted by the softer feel of the pause and pose
sequence. These flirtatious instances book-end the travel across space. Nestor
slowly shifts his hips from side to side, titls his head in synch and smiles
before and after the drop and recover sequence. For the next four hours he will
remain on the dance floor, travelling back and forth on his kinesthetically
constructed catwalk, adjusting his strut to the style and rhythm of DJ Hector’s
mix and pausing only to get a drink of water from a bottle he has strategically
placed between the speakers and the go-go boy platform.
In a primarily Anglo gay male club
in Austin, TX, Clara, a Puerto Rican lesbian in her late twenties, enters the
dance floor with her partner to a house mix version of Nuyorican actor/singer
Jennifer Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud.” She uses a very small amount of the space
around her, focusing instead on a tight kinesphere with her partner. She faces
the crowd positioning her back toward her partner who comes close from behind
with slow, rhythmic, weight shifts to the sides at the knees initiated with
the marking of the beat in a forward isolation of the shoulder. Clara begins
moving in sinc with her partner, who indicates the rhythm with her hands on
the hips. As the rhythmic line accelerates, Clara breaks her synchronization
with her partner’s movement, who can no longer follow her, and shifts her aligment
to teasingly flaunting her behind towards the crowd. She quickly transitions
from the slow, cool shifting of weight to the sides to an on-the-beat isolation
of the hip in a back and forth rocking motion. As the song invites the crowd
to get loud, to take life on their own terms, her feet remain motionless as
she playfully articulates her hip movement with the rhythm, then pausing counterpointally,
accelerating to a double time articulation, to return to the on-the-beat base
line once again. She repeats this sequence multiple times until the end of the
song. At that point she smiles devilishly with her partner and exits the floor
for a break.
II.
Both of these examples represent
different choreographic practices employed by U.S. Latino queers in dance clubs
at distinctly different geographies: one 45 min. from the Northern border and
in a state where Puerto Rican presence, although no longer as demographically
dominant, remains the primary cultural referent for latinidad. The other
just a few hours from the Border with Mexico in a city where latinidad
is defined through the historical negation and current suspicion of the citizenship
of ethnic Mexican communities. In both examples, how the dancer moves and how
she reacts to the movement choices of others represents both a strategic negotiation
of the social realm of the gay dance club and an engagement with a larger scale
of social issues and discourses. Furthemore, taking into account their respective
locations—a Chicano gay man in an upstate NY club and a Puerto Rican woman born
in California in a mostly white and male gay club in TX—yields a rather multi-leveled
socio-spatial model characteristic of the current tranlocated geographies of
latinidad in the United States. The movements performed by Clara and
Nestor are in a very immediate sense a matter of pleasure, sexual and otherwise,
through an engagement with the sensorial machine of the gay club, but it is
also, at another level, a complex and critical articulation of their place in
the world and a creative articulation of citizenship in an era of globalization.
Here, in the realm of pleasure,
these dancer’s negotiate, on the body, the current shifts in the Latina/o social
and cultural conditions promoted by the increased mobility of capital, peoples,
and cultures characteristic of globalization (Jameson, 1999). In the case of
Latina/o America, new patterns of migration have significantly altered what
previously were perceived as homogenous concentrations of diasporic or border
communities. Advances in communication technologies have brought conceptions
of “home” closer than ever before. Mass cultural productions, for example,
connect Latin America and communities in the United States to each other, redefining
the notion of shared culture. Niche marketing, popular music, magazine and
literary culture, and television stations such as Univision and Telemundo hybridize
the conception of Latina/o America. (García-Canclini, 2001). Latina/o America
is thus not only a rhetorical or political strategy but also a tangible series
of practices that enable new cultural imaginaries (Anderson, 1983, 1991). This
relationship between the representation of Latina/o lives in popular media and
the self-presentation of latinidad, at the dance club for example, demonstrate
an enhanced circuitry of exchange between live performance, mass media, and
everyday life. Latino dance practices negotiate globalization through the production
of embodied notions of community across borders and diasporic locations.
Because latinidad is constituted
as a strategic geography that negotiates late capitalist mobility and globalization,
it functions as a site of convergence beyond, but always overlapping and intersecting,
the national. More specifically, this intersectional nature of latinidad
may function as a strategy of “grassroots globalization.” Anthropologist Arjun
Appadurai defines “grassroots globalization” as organizing efforts that seek
to negotiate globality from below (Appadurai, 2000). According to Appadurai,
“grassroots globalization” practices take advantage of the technologies of globalization
to advocate for the concerns of the local. This strategy relies on the identification
of common concerns and the mobilization of constituencies across national borders.
Dance—as a local practice that negotiates
globalization from below—is both immediate materiality—getting ready, traveling
to the club—and utopian futurity—the emergence of community, the possibility
of change, pleasure. In her recently published ethnography of club dancing,
Fiona Buckland explores the worldmaking power of improvised social dance at
gay/lesbian/queer clubs in New York City. She observes how improvised social
dancing in the club is a:
playful practice
that depends upon the agency of its performers, improvised
social dancing produces queer club culture, not as a homogenous,
transhistorical object,but as a process of counterpoint, contestation,
and polyvocality. This more fluid model shifts agency away
from culture and its structural forms, including dance, to
participants who improvised movement in response to everyday
experiences, which in turn, influenced the experiences and
understanding of everyday life. (Buckland, 7)
According to Buckland’s argument
dancing serves as a creative forum from where to articulate as well as experience
the quotidian. For Latino queers these acts bring together a whole series of
intersecting identities, experiences, and desires that produce a truly hybrid,
at times conflicted, notion of place and being in the world.
In my interview with Nestor he explains:“Dancing
in the club is my chance to have space of my own. Even if I am surrounded by
a bunch of people, I make sure that my dance floor is my dance floor and nobody
better mess with me. I am fierce when I take on the stage, honey, and I has
got to shine!” (Nestor, Interview 1999) For Nestor, who works supervising seasonal
farm-worker in Sodus, NY and shares a small one bedroom apartment with five
other men who labor at the same camp, the club is truly a space of his own.
It is during his weekend outings
to Rochester that he is able to live his identity as a gay man, far from the
homophobia prevalent in his household. The club, however, is not without its
own conflicts as he explains: “You know, people are generally nice, but you
never know. I’ve seen a lot going on around here, some dude thought I was a
puto the other night! Man you know, just cause I’m Latin and shit. And I’m not
about to just fall de pendejo for the first one that comes around. That’s why,
you know, you see me in my corner, you know. I like keeping to myself. I also
want to meet someone, you see, I am nice and I flirt and all . . . I just don’t
want to be messed around with, you know. I got to test people out, you feel
me?” These are the issues shaping and being shaped by Nestor’s experience in
the dance club. He sees his time in the club as a time for the free expression
of his sexuality, but at the same time resents the risks of racism and stereotyping
present in the club.
Nestor’s dance is an invitation
to watch, perhaps engage, as much as a setting of boudaries. The spectator is
at onced lured and challenged. His cutting across is deliberately about owning
the floor, and yet, his attitude is ultimately imbued with irony as he works
his upper body on counterpoint to the step progression and eases into the teasing
sequences that frame it. His movement is not an emasculated stance, instead
it gains its strength from a directed and articulate performance of queer effeminacy.
Combining fiercely a reperoire of “queenie attitude,”much like in voguing, to
accumulate the spectacular sense of groundedness he performs.
Clara, on the other hand, complains
about the assumed entitlement of other dancers. “They just think they own the
place, especially white boys. They’ll just dance around bumping into everyone.
That’s rude, you know. I keep to myself and to my girlfriend. It’s no body’s
bussiness how I dance.” (Clara, Interview 2002) She prefers contained polyrhythmic
movements and sees the kind of more open movement choices as intrusive. She
explains that she doesn’t want to deal with forced contact with other people
in the dance floor. She says, “I am tired of it. You grow up going out to straight
clubs and all these guys be commin up and trying to get it with you. I mean,
even in the street people are always talking about your ass out loud and shit.
That’s just wrong!”
Clara’s choreography with her girlfriend,
although allegedly in total isolation from her surroundings, is invested a complex
dynamic of display that establishes her difference from the crowd that she is
seemingly ignoring. Her strategy lies in the rhythmical articulation of the
body, a strategy the Nestor also prioritizes in his own dance choices. She maintains
a closed space around her, but throught the flauting of the hip isolation movement
facing the audience she commands attentive spectatorship. It is on the dance
floor that Clara reacts to her spectators on the street, by rearticulating the
racialized and oftentimes racist comments about the size of her glutes through
the virtuso contraction of her rear muscles. Shaking her ass on the dance floor
is a way to address her everyday experience, to exorcise, the at times racist
fetishism of her onlookers.
Both performers stress
a rhythmic layering on their movement that challenges the more common on-the-beat
choreographies prevalent in these clubs refusing to be mere ‘slaves to the rhythm.’
Both dancers experience the music with an active sense of agency, communicating
relationships through the body that go beyong mere synchronization. The showcasing
of skill is paramount to these performances. In the display of rhythmical understanding,
through flaunting that they get it, arises the assertive corporalization of
latinidad. And it is at this juncture and through this act of identification
with rhythm and its critical embodiment that a local articulation of globalization
takes place.
The most readily accessible element
of contemporary club culture is music. It is published, publicized, and distributed
on a global scale. As George Lipsitz has obsereved:
It has a peculiar relationship
to the poetics and politics of place. Recorded music travels
from place to place, trascending phyisical and temporal barriers.
It alters our understanding of the local and the immediate,
making it possible for us to experience close contact with
cultures from far away. Yet, precisely because music travels,
it also augments our appreciation of place. Commercial popular
music demonstrates and dramatizes contratst between places
by calling attention to how people create culture in different
ways.” (Lipsitz, 3)
For diasporic Latino communities,
music can be a sight of historical recovery and through translocal identification
a way of constituting a present strategy based on affectual relationship to
other latinos and their respective cultural traditions. For example, salsa,
a musical and dance genre associated with the Spanish Caribbean diaspora to
New York City, may provide a space of identification for Mexican migrants in
Michigan (Aparicio, 1999).
In their introduction to Everynight
Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America Celeste Fraser Delagado and José
E. Muñoz say that, “dance sets politics in motion, bringing people together
in rhythmic affinity where identification takes the form of histories written
on the body through gesture.” (9) Latino identities are aurally transmitted
through rhythm and embodied in the act of dancing. This relationship to rhythm
is historical in the case of Latin America and has been much articulated in
Caribbean societies where it is explicitly connected to an African derived aesthetic
heritage. But through the circuits of music publishing, promotion and distribution—including
live performance tours, radio, television and film; rhythm, and more specifically
Afro-Latin rhtythms, have become international markers of latinidad.
Latinidad in the United States
is to some degree constituted in rhtythm, a phenomena most recently expemplified
in the 1999 media frenzy over the Latin Explosion. And this characterization
is not only aural. The established connection between latinidad and rhythm presents
a repertoire, oftentimes stereotypical, of equally defining movements. Follwing
a long history of Latino performers that have included Desi Arnez, Carmen Miranda,
and Rita Moreno, Ricky Martin shakes his bum, bum; Jennifer Lopez crosses over
to pan-latino success through the authenticity of her behind; and most recently
Cameron Diaz shakes her groove thing on every film, possibly marking a latinidad
that has remained, for the most part, hidden behind her Goldy Hawn-type characterization.
The swaying of the hips, the aggressive undulation of the back, and the polyrythmic
stepping by Latina/o queer dancers constitute embodied practices that imbue
the Latino queer body with a sense of history, community and an agency not generally
afforded to them.
Dancing in the club
becomes a practice of what I term choreographies of resistance, embodied practices
through which minoritarian subjects claim their space in the social and cultural
realms. The Latino queer body in motion, her ability to move to the Latin rhythm
eloquently, shifts the power dynamics of the dance floor and the club, at least
temporarily. Similarly, club dancing, for queer Latina/os, represents an engagement
with commodified popular culture, but one in which the dominant narratives of
the global market are interpreted and rearticulated. This strategy, I argue,
exemplifies grassroots globalization. In this dynamic the sexual economies of
the globalized Latin Explosion, generally assumed as heterosexual, with the
exception of Ricky Martin of course, are queered at the site of the local, reconfigured
under a different cultural economy. So, the localizing maneuver performed at
the club not only bring a specifically Latino sensibility to a typically urban
American social space, but it queers latinidad in the process, re-articulating
it for the circulation of queer pleasure.
While some theorists have positioned
media as antithetical to performance, in Latina/o queer performance this tense
relationship appears to be complementary one that privileges local sites of
liveness as the only available means for the cultural articulations of those
disenfranchised from access to the cultural capital of mass media technologies.
In fact, the queer acts of dancing in a club articulate ways in which the dominance
of media is negotiated by those who, while subjects of its redefinition of cultural
spatialities, are often represented by its overdetermining narrative without
having the opportunity to access its mechanisms for self-representation (i.e.
Latin Explosion). These spaces are intersections or crossroads, sites where
the impulses for Latina/o comminuty in the U.S. at large are negotiated and
queered at the level of the local, the immediate experience.
Arjun Appadurai establishes a compelling
connection between this grassroots globalization practice and the realm of the
imagination. And it is precisely in that leap of faith from the experience of
everyday life to the imagination of cummunity, even across borders, that latinidad
suggests in its most utopian performances.
Cultural critc Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez
has eloquently described this two-leveled relationship between the engagement
with the global aspirations and hopes and the more local immediate experience
as a “pa’ca y pa’ya” aesthetic, a here and there aesthetic. She utilizes salsa
dancing as a metaphor to the social and cultural maneuvers of the Boricua community
and other diasporic populations in the United States. She explains:
As it glides
between the p’aca, the whole context of its immediate interaction—the
dancing, improvisations,
and joy we experience, as well as the racism, exploitation,
and sorrow we encounter everyday—and the p’alla, a geo-philosophical
projection of past, present, and future possibilities, an
audaciously hopeful realm that is just beyond reach but so
close that you can feel it coming. (Sanchez-Gozalez, 168)
This dual logic, here and there,
is masterfully articulated in Nestor and Clara’s choreography. As Nestor explains:
“Anyone can come into the club and walk around, you know, I just think I do
something special . . . I shake my can better, I don’t know how to explain it
like it’s a Latin thing you know, you just got that ryhthm from inside you.
I just let it loose.” It is this dance between immediate materiality and history
and jumping onto a larger ontological category that is complicatedly hybrid
what characterizes identitarian practices on the dance floor. Assuming ownership
and belonging of a worls spun out of control. Pa’ca y pa’lla, here and there,
anywhere, when there is one such character assuming her/his place on the dance
floor, flowing majestically with the music, challenging its assumed desiric
investments, making it pleasurable, grinding the hips, shaking that ass, stepping
in a fire of pain, of struggle, of hope . . . that is where latinidad
dances.
References
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983,
1991).
Aparicio, Frances. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular
Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Wesleyan UP, 1998)
Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research
Imagination.” Public Culture 12.1 (2000)
Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-making
(Wesleyan UP, 2001).
Fraser-Delgado, Celeste and Jose Muñoz. Every-night Life: Culture and Dance
in Latino/America (Duke UP, 1997).
Garcia-Canclini, Nestor. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural
Conflicts ( U of Minnesota P, 2001).
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Duke UP, 1999).
Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music Postmodernism and the
Poetics of Place (Verso, 1994).
Lopez, Ana M. “Of Rhythms and Borders,” in Celeste Fraser-Delgado and Jose
E. Muñoz, Eds. Every-night Life: Culture and Dance in Latino/America
(Duke UP, 1997).
Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto
Rican Diaspora (New York UP, 2001)
Thorton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital
(Wesleyan UP, 1996).
Copyright © 2003
Smithsonian Institution |
