In Rebellions in Everynight Life, the authors pitch on the use of music and dance to preserve culture while expressing dissent at issues such as racism and colonialism. Salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteno were metaphors for historical memory and contemporary strife. Everynight Life is a collection of essays examining the significance of dance in Latino/a American culture from various academic perspectives (Delgado & Muñoz, 1997). These perspectives include literature, culture, dance, performance, queer studies, and feminist studies. By translating the motion of bodies into speech and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar, Everynight Life highlights dance as a privileged site of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latinos and other parts of the Americas. It is accomplished through dance as a vehicle for artistic expression.
Dance is a vehicle for enacting politics because it brings people together in a shared experience of rhythm, and identities are revealed through the gestures people make while dancing. From the continent’s conquest to the passage of the racist Proposition 187 in California, the body moving to Latin rhythms analyzes and articulates the conflicts that have crossed Latinx identity and history (Delgado & Muñoz, 1997). For centuries, Latinx people’s bodies have been the target of racial, cultural, and economic strife. Whether they were enslaved in the sugarcane fields, migrant workers in the apple groves and vineyards, or undocumented workers in the sweatshops and restaurant dish rooms. Some were lynched in the recently annexed territory of Texas and subjected to forced sterilization in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. The rich history of Latinx bodies can be reinterpreted in new ways through dance (Delgado & Muñoz, 1997). Dance is the kind of magnificence that makes one need to break free every night from the daily grind and all the restrictions society imposes. For example, Barbara Browning’s article on capoeira demonstrates how dance has been used as a form of literal resistance throughout history. Similarly, Jose Piedra’s investigation of the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba demonstrates how dance has been used to express opposition in the past.
The more widespread and generalized memories of slavery and colonization that Latinos hold are more powerful than the memories of slavery and colonization that Africans have. Ancestors believed that by playing the drums, one could communicate with the gods that resided within the human body. Due to the limitations imposed by chains, the primary movement of traditional slave dances was a rocking motion of the hips. Tango, danzon, rumba, and mambo are just some of the dances that spread across the continent that were influenced by African rhythms (Delgado & Muñoz, 1997). In popular music and film, they came to represent “Latin” or “Spanish” identities, which laid the historical groundwork for forming a pan-Latino identity. It is not just a continuation of the legacy of colonial rule that distinguishes Latinx/o dance from other forms of African American dance; instead, it is an attempt to trace how these African traditions have migrated and been encoded as Latinx/o through mass mediation. Some of the most well-known dances in the Western world today, such as the tango, danzon, rumba, and mambo, can trace their origins back to Africa.
The dances are also symbolic of preconceived notions about what it means to be of Latin or Spanish descent. This footwork can be seen in various dance styles, including tango, danzon, rumba, and mambo. The pace and nature of change worldwide are neither steady nor predictable. It is possible to create a harmonic polyrhythm out of accounts of history that are very different from one another (Delgado & Muñoz, 1997). Through dance, one’s subjugation as an enslaved person or worker can be questioned and reimagined. Dancing defies conventional interpretation as valuable labor because it is a form of nonverbal expression and political protest.
Reference
Delgado, C. F., & Muñoz, J. E. (1997). Rebellions of everynight life. In Everynight Life (pp. 9-32). Duke University Press. Web.