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  • Preface:Latin American Dance in Transnational Contexts
  • Katherine Borland, Associate Professor of Comparative Studies in the Humanities (bio)

The idea for this special issue emerged from a panel at the 2006 American Folklore Society meeting entitled "Diasporic Moves in Latin American Dance," which was sponsored by the Chicano and Chicana Section and the Folklore Latino, Latino-americano, y Caribeño Section of the AFS. For that panel, three of the authors in this issue explored Latin American dance practices that crisscross national borders. I was a participant in this panel, and reading each others' work, we each came to an increased appreciation for the importance that dance, as an embodied form of expressive culture, has in identity formation, group maintenance, and pleasure. In our presentations, we were interested in examining how dances associated with one community or group are affected by the ongoing movement of people and goods to new social and cultural locations. The papers investigated relations of power that facilitate, hinder, or impinge upon the transfer/transformation of cultural practices of dancing. We began to develop our work into a larger project, and with the addition of a fourth participant, we noted that all of the dances we document have thrived over the past fifty years. However, the patterns of adaptation to a globalizing environment were as different as the dances and dance scenes themselves. For example, the Dance of the Cúrpites, a ritual courtship dance examined by Joyce M. Bishop, powerfully ties individuals to their local Mexican community, despite massive and continuing out-migration from a relocated indigenous homeland. Participants in Aztec dance, the Mexican spiritual movement discussed by Sandra Garner, are only partially successful in developing relations of reciprocity through shared ritual with indigenous groups outside the country. Argentines, Ana C. Cara found, market a version of tango for external consumption precisely to safeguard their very different homegrown tradition. And in my work on the salsa scene of multicultural New Jersey, I observed dance instructors self-consciously constructing socially and racially diverse spaces of interaction with-in North American popular culture, inviting everyone to learn the dance.

In the ensuing months of research and writing, each author developed her argument in productive new directions, considerably broadening the themes of this issue. Moreover, I was delighted to welcome Latin American dance scholar and ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson as co-editor of the issue. Her introduction provides a welcome and overdue assessment of the history and current promise of dance ethnography within the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology. [End Page 375]

The articles in this issue build on the work of dance scholar Deidre Sklar. In a 1991 article, Sklar advocated for the relevance of dance theory to ethnographic method by introducing the notion of kinesthetic empathy, what she calls "feeling with," as a primary means of understanding experiences of dance (7). The practice of dancing, she argued, provides clues to the underlying ideas and values embedded in culturally choreographed movements, ideas that may not be evident through observation alone. More than just revealing the meanings of dance, the concept of kinesthetic empathy is valuable because it underscores how complex and multifaceted the attainment of cultural knowledge is. The contributors to this issue note that attitude, flavor, or style is achieved not by successfully copying the form or steps of a dance but by embracing and making one's own the underlying cultural attitude. This is most clearly illustrated in the analysis of tanguicity (tango ethos) that Cara's article in this issue provides. Tanguicity, as Cara shows, pervades many aspects of Argentine culture—language, poetry, song, and visual imagery—not just the dance. Embodied learning can be fraught with tension, however, as Garner's examination of self-identified Aztec dancers demonstrates. These urban Mexicans of the majority "mestizo" ethnicity reconnect with their indigenous heritage through a ritual dance of purportedly ancient origin, and many embrace a lifestyle of voluntary poverty. This earnestly lived, oppositional practice aids them in their attempts to connect with others worldwide with whom they believe they share religious and political affinity. Aztec dancers are blocked in making these transnational connections, however, by their failure to acknowledge different and distinctive histories of cultural loss...

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