Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles by Cindy García (review)

Cindy García's book, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, analyzes the ways in which diverse modes of salsa dancing reproduce notions of Latinidad that largely correlate with US frameworks of racialization. García, a dance instructor turned scholar, provides an ethnography of the choreographies of salsa and "not salsa" (xvi) as enacted in particular Latina/o nightclubs and salsa dancing competitions and conventions. Her observations reveal the intricacies of Los Angeles salsa dancing spaces and the bodies in movement in and between them. The analysis is centered on the lived and experiential realities of Latina/os in diverse dancing locales; the ways in which movements and steps, self-fashioning and appearances, as well as personal accounts and interpersonal connections allow the participants of the larger dancing scene in Los Angeles to perform Latinidad. The book's title, Salsa Crossings, references both the cross-back step of the salsa moves García witnessed in different social settings as well as the ways in which dancing enacts an interaction between diverse publics and spaces. These crossings evidence the ways in which Los Angeles Latina/os dance salsa "wrong" through incorporations of movements that position the dancers outside of the salsa scene, and subsequently outside of Los Angeles hegemonic Latinidad.

Salsa Crossings is divided in five chapters with additional preface, introduction, and conclusion sections. The preface frames the book by introducing both the narrative style as well as the critical and theoretical scaffoldings of García's ethnography. The introduction takes into account the position of salsa music as a "crossover" phenomenon and situates the study in the context of Los Angeles instead of New York, Cuba, or Puerto Rico, precisely to analyze the circulation of dance and music in the context of globalization. Based on the visual representation of salsa through the costumes and outfits of the dancers, as well as their flourishes and movements, García reads Latina/o salsero dancers as performing what she terms sequined and unsequined corporealities. The sequined corporeality indexes a performance of Latinidad that borrows from stereotyped and tropicalized renditions of Latina/os through Caribbean exoticization, while the unsequined relates to what García calls "la limpieza": the Latina/o bodies that participate in the economic sectors related to migration, farm work, day labor, and cleaning.

The first chapter, "The Salsa Wars," examines three competing modes of salsa dancing in Los Angeles: New York mambo, L.A. style, and Cuban casino. Questioning the idea of "salsa as unity," García untangles the conflictive legibilities of particular bodies through movement and the ways in which dancing inscribes hierarchies of power, class, and race. García uncovers the racialization hidden beneath dancers' selective movement styles. For instance, mambo dancers attempt to "refine" and "stylize" Cuban casino in order to distance themselves from the historical Afro Caribbeanness of Cuban salsa dance moves. But at the same time, García's observations reveal that dancers of the three styles arrange their particular choreographies as a reaction to wider processes of racialization and discrimination of Latina/os as black, brown, and immigrant. Bodies legible as such contradict the carefully constructed notions of Latinidad that accommodate Latina/os as acceptable for the larger Los Angeles society.

García expands on this issue in the second chapter, "Dancing Salsa Wrong," where she addresses precisely those unsequined corporealities that are kept at a distance from the glamorous, tropicalized styles of salsa dancing indexed through L.A. style, "mamberos," and casino dancers. Dancing salsa wrong implies reproducing cumbia-styles and other "not-salsa" modes of dancing that goes against the tropes of exoticized Latinidad found in L.A. style. This chapter allows García to explore the ways in which Latina/os grapple with traumatic pasts and the histories of violence to which their communities have been subjected through dancing and socialization. She contends that sequined dancers embody stereotypical self-fashionings while incorporating highly stylized moves that emulate salsa competitions, as a form of...