Salsa World: A Global Dance in Local Contexts by Sydney Hutchinson (review)

Over the past decades numerous monographs on Latino and Latin American popular musics such as salsa, merengue, cumbia, conjunto, and banda have analyzed the musics in relation to the cultural contexts within which they have emerged. These studies, however, have generally been attentive to the music per se and to the performers, with less attention paid to dancers, whose physical and social experiences can and should be distinguished from their roles as consumers of music. Sydney Hutchinson’s comprehensive anthology on salsa dancing in global and local contexts corrects this imbalance by bringing together essays on salsa dancing and salsa dance scenes throughout the Americas and beyond.

Dancing has aptly been referred to as active listening, although the social significance of dancing goes well beyond the acts of hearing and responding physically to music. Indeed, as one of Hutchinson’s sources (Judith Hamera, 2007) notes, “dance technique [is] an archive that stores information about the past for those who can read its language.” The authors in this thoughtfully compiled anthology are able to read the language of salsa dancing, and to interpret it in lucid, jargon-free prose that renders the meanings of salsa dancing accessible to general audiences, whether a reader’s interests lie primarily in the Americas as a region or in dance as performance, as popular music practice, or as indicator of how social systems are constructed in local and global contexts. Most of the authors hail from the regions they analyze, and are dancers themselves. Hutchinson is to be commended for bringing such diverse voices together, and for translating several of the Spanish language essays into English herself, thereby broadening the range of her work.

The origins and trajectories of salsa music are inevitably part of the discussions, but the authors’ primary focus is on the dance scenes that developed as dancers sought ways to organize themselves around their shared interests. Key essays, including two introductory chapters by Hutchinson, cover salsa dancing in the core locations associated with salsa music: New York, where existing Caribbean rhythms coalesced into the style marketed as salsa in the 1960s and 1970s; Cuba, whose son music with its signature clave beat is widely acknowledged as salsa’s root genre; and the island of Puerto Rico, where decades of musical and dance styles circulating between the island and New York enable claims of cultural ownership. The anthology also includes a essays analyzing salsa scenes that emerged in later decades in locations with large populations of Latinos or Spanish speakers: Los Angeles, New Jersey, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Spain. Other essays analyze salsa dancing in less predictable locations, those lacking well-established Latin/o American or Spanish speaking communities: Champaign-Urbana (Illinois), Paris, and Japan.

Within salsa dancing communities, debates about the origins of salsa music have been superseded by disagreements about the ownership and authenticity of salsa dancing techniques. While loosely correlated to the location/s from which salsa dancing is believed to have emerged, the primary distinction is between which beat is emphasized in the basic step: 1, as in Los Angeles, or 2, as in New York and Puerto Rico). The on-2 dance step is believed to more closely adhere to salsa’s clave rhythm. Instructors and schools from different geographical areas tend to identify themselves with one or the other style, and each style comes associated with its own claims to authenticity. Other distinctions also figure into how salsa is taught, performed, and valued: the degree to which various techniques such as turns, dips, or ways of moving the feet and body are considered indicators of proficiency and authenticity—or lack thereof.

Another crucial distinction is between social salsa dancing learned informally in family and community settings and studio dancing, learned by paying for dancing lessons alongside others who are not “native” dancers. Some authors lament that salsa dancing’s original cultural resonances have been lost...