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

The Caribbean dance called salsa has inspired a small flood of English-language scholarly publications in the past decade. In journals, edited volumes, and monographs, scholars have addressed the dance’s local and transnational aspects (e.g., Hutchinson 2014; Pietrobrunough 2006), its relationship to Puerto Rican and broader Latino identities (e.g., García 2013; Flores 2004), and female dancers’ experience of its gendered structure and aesthetics (e.g., Borland 2009; Skinner 2008), among other themes. Juliet McMains, herself a seasoned ballroom dancer and longtime salsera, joins this list with her most recent monograph, Spinning Mambo into Salsa. Examining salsa from the mambo era of the 1950s through its commodification and stylistic consolidation at the turn of the millennium, she enriches the existing literature with myriad details culled from personal experience, interviews, and archival research. Photos from her fieldwork and archival sources further enhance her narrative.

One of McMains’s principal goals is to address how processes of commodification have affected salsa dance culture. She does this in a few ways, scrutinizing salsa history and practice in three key US cities and their relationship to the “international salsa industry” (11). Thus, she elaborates on the emergence of the salsa congress and “congress style” salsa (265), and coins a new term to express concern over the impact of recording technology on dance culture in recent decades. Kineschizophonia, “the separation of dance from the performance of music for which it was made” (50), is introduced in the first chapter, and its echoes reappear throughout the book as McMains discusses developments in the dance that may have been facilitated by its separation from live musical performance, or worries—often through the nostalgic voices of interlocutors from older generations—that younger dancers have lost the crucial connection to live music. Aside from these mentions, though, the long and rather ominous term remains relatively undeveloped, leaving many questions answered incompletely or not at all. For example, how is live music qualitatively different from recorded music, from the perspective of dancers of different generations? What different practices, experiences, and aesthetics does dancing to recorded music engender? Besides developing more complex turn patterns, are there other ways in which people dance differently? Do they listen to music differently? How do these different practices and aesthetics in turn affect dance to live music, which continues as a practice in each of these cities?

In many ways, McMains’s monograph follows pathways similar to previous scholarship on salsa, taking as touchstones such themes as the on-2 dance rhythm, studio culture, Latino identities, and the experience of female dancers. Yet the oral histories and photos she assembles put flesh on countless details of social dance history—a difficult and valuable task. These layers of detail and the passion with which McMains shares them are the book’s greatest strengths. The book’s greatest weakness is the chapter on casino in Miami and Cuba. For example, pursuing the theme of gender, the author draws on limited evidence to infer erroneously a greater agency for follows (typically women) in Cuban salsa than in other styles. Further, she inaccurately conflates timba music with casino dance—a complex and historically situated relationship worthy of nuanced discussion— but then refrains from exploring the dance practices that timba incites in the context of casino, and their gendered implications. Meanwhile, her sole focus on Miami as a pole for the export of Cuban salsa leads her to ignore the role of European and Canadian investment and tourism in the development of that cultural industry.

McMains tells us that her “motivation for writing this book was to offer thousands of salsa dancers a means of relating their own personal experiences to a broader story of salsa’s rich and multifaceted history” (25). Indeed, her most passionate writing seems directed precisely toward younger dancers, whom she believes are not sufficiently aware of the history and diversity of styles contained in their dance of choice...