Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce by Juliet McMains (review)

Through vivid descriptions of dances, spaces, and people, Juliet McMains’ Spinning Mambo into Salsa transported me to the New York City of my childhood and the Los Angeles of my young adulthood. My father emigrated from Cuba to the U.S. in 1959. In New York City, he would often go (when he could afford it) to the famed Palladium Ballroom in the early 1960s. As McMains explains, the Palladium was the “most popular venue for Latin dance music from 1947 to 1966” (30), and as a huge Latin music fan (and surely missing his native Cuba), my father was one of the many people who made up the racially diverse ballroom that McMains describes. To this day, my father insists that knowledge of “salsa” music must come first. You have to know the music in order to be able to tinker with its rhythmic intricacies. He still possesses a great knowledge of the music. We used to have first edition LPs of Tito Puente, Machito, and Tito Rodriguez in our house, and sometimes my father would casually mention that he saw such luminaries perform at the Palladium. He also had a huge collection of Fania All-Star records and liked to explain with pride that a particular melodic phrasing or rhythmic component was the specific “Cuban” element of the music we knew as salsa. Always one to assert his Cubanidad, my father wanted me and my brother to know that we were different from the Dominicans or Puerto Ricans who made up the majority of Latinos when we were growing up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. According to him, we had to be able to recognize the Cuban elements in Latin music so that we could always be aware of our cultural history. In his own way, my father expressed some of the important tensions within salsa that McMains examines in her book, namely, the commercialization of the form, debates around cultural tradition and “authenticity,” salsa aesthetics (both visual and sonic), and the way a form circulates through different national embodied identities.

McMains traces a meticulous history of salsa dance from the mambo dancers of the New York Palladium to the casino rueda dancers in Miami and to the salsa companies at Los Angeles salsa congresses and all over the world. In this multisited history, she deftly moves between salsa dance history and dance ethnography and offers up a rich portrait of the practitioners across decades while paying attention to the power dynamics, identity politics, and the marketplace that circulates the salsa product. She particularly pays close attention to the embodied exchanges between practitioners and their different styles and makes a wise methodological choice to allow these voices to emerge throughout her book. She writes, “Just because I used my own body as a vehicle through which to compare different dance styles does not mean that I privileged my experience over others. On the contrary, my physical dialogues with informants focus on understanding their embodied knowledge. I consider dances with informants to be interview in another language, one in which my whole body listens” (17). The importance of an ethnographer’s awareness of her positionality vis-à-vis her subject matter bears mentioning since this is how dance studies, and its emphasis on embodied awareness has shifted the ways in which knowledge about others, past or present, is produced. Given that McMains is very forthcoming and detailed about her research methods and her geographical (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) and temporal scope (1997–2014 for her embodied experience, 2006–2009 for the bulk of material collected, and the 1940s to 2014 for the historical scope of the project), she knows how to weave her authorial presence throughout the book in a way that is both subtle when trying to give voice to the dancers yet forceful when asserting some of her more passionate points about the dance form. Although at...