From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture (review)

“It was either [dance], or do something crazy” (117). Embodied knowledge counts; this dictum is clear enough from author Sydney Hutchinson’s rigorous theoretical framework and analysis of quebradita and duranguense dance forms and their musical accompaniment. From the author’s detailed text, we learn the value of this unique but relatively short-lived music and dance cultural complex, a moving target that both reflects and helps define the transnational character of Mexican-identified youth culture. Hutchinson’s comparative study of dance practices in Los Angeles, California, and Tucson, Arizona, places expressive culture within the cultural studies discursive area, citing ethnic and folklore studies, ethnomusicology, semiotics, and kinesics. Citing cultural theorist Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hutchinson draws us into the value of a “feeling culture”:

Dance should play a central role in our analysis of Mexican culture . . . a type of visual art . . . it is also inherently ephemeral in that it exists in time . . . [and] therefore difficult to study . . . .Yet dance reaches a larger audience than many visual arts: as spectacle, as theatrical form, and as a participatory activity . . . . [D]ance can be more powerful than other arts in that participants literally “feel”, thus internalizing its messages [my italics]. For this reason, observing, participating in and talking about dance can reveal aspects of culture that otherwise may be unspoken or unrecognized

(8, 9).

This crucial statement resonates throughout the text. Using Canclini as a catalyst, Hutchinson makes a clever theoretical move by sustaining the ephemeral viscerality of movement as an overarching metaphor for her argument. Dance becomes a figure for the transitory, unstable, and ambivalent yet active and expressive cultures of border zones between Mexico and the United States. These zones are figured as both geographic locations, where boundaries shift in space, over time, and cultural locations, in the evolutionary sense, as culture swiftly changes due to the effects of media. The author metaphorizes the visceral expansion and contraction, advancing and retreating “states” of being, especially of border youth in these locations. By tracing shifting economies, class status, gender, and ethnic identities, Hutchinson reveals these unstable states of being by rendering dance and music praxis into graspable form. This rendering is compelling for its detailed material culture (coded clothing and body decoration such as boots and hair fringes; visual culture such as film and advertising posters) and an extended analysis of musical typologies that can only be derived from extensive on-the-ground fieldwork. And the field is not an easy Cartesian plane: Hutchinson visited dance clubs full of gyrating bodies and flashing lights, occasionally violent competitions in parking lots or local high school gymnasia where the flash and violence lie subdued just beneath the surface.

As a bilingual native of Tucson, Hutchinson accesses these locations and their complexities through oral interviews of practitioners. The voices of dancers, musicians, and audiences are heard, mostly through short citations from recorded interviews embedded in the text. In particular, the author’s analysis of oral accounts of regional differences, including variable motivations for dancing these forms, reveals the underlying consciousness of her narrators. However, while the author uses natural language to describe the actual process of dancing quebradita and duranguense, a more developed sense of embodied experience is missing. Early in the text, through cited oral sources, the reader discovers a visceral sense of the dancing itself. Oral cites tantalize readers with vivid action verbs and spatial description of virtuoso movement but lacks any follow-up interrogation of detailed practice. A more explicit question protocol for the many interviews recorded is needed to delve more deeply into the narrators’ embodied experiences. As Canclini suggests above, how the dancers felt the movement would have enlivened the text and, more to the point, more completely articulated her metaphor of dance as a figure for cultural displacement and adaptation. While Hutchinson has clearly participated by dancing herself, she may lack the adequate disciplinary vocabulary of dance studies to fully explicate the dance moves beyond...