Embracing Difference: Salsa Fever in New Jersey

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.