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5 Small-Town Cosmopolitans Salsa Dance in Rural America Joanna Bosse Rick It’s close to 4:00 a.m., and we’re halfway home from a night of salsa dancing at Inta’s in Chicago, riding along southbound I-57. Everyone is sacked out in the back, except Rick,1 who keeps me company while I drive. My willingness to serve as designated driver is one of the ways I have ingratiated myself with this group of dancers. Rick is talking of his family, his Cuban father and white American mother, growing up in a well-to-do northern Chicago suburb, and his newfound love of salsa. He says, “My father and his brothers, when they get together they tap out rhythms on the table, they dance with the women, and speak a little Spanish. And all growing up, I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. It seemed oldfashioned . I was playing baseball and hanging out with my friends.” It was only in graduate school, after being introduced to salsa by his Surinamese girlfriend Maria (who learned about it the year before from her Colombian friend Angel), that he became interested in anything “Latin.” He then began dancing and collecting salsa recordings, learning Spanish, and taking conga lessons. In two years’ time, he became one of the most popular salsa deejays in town and started a salsa band, Adelante, with two non-Latino ethnomusicology doctoral students. His aunt told me that his family is surprised at the transformation, and so is Rick to some degree. “I barely even noticed that I was Latin before, but now it means something to me, and I’m . . . well, protective of it. I’m wary of outsiders trying to figure it out,” he says pointedly to me, an outsider trying to figure it out. We talk on about “Latinness” and outsiders, and I ask him about his favorite musicians and dancers. “Take, for example, Enrique,” he continued. Enrique had just won yet another local dance competition earlier in the week, and he was also trying to Small-Town Cosmopolitans 81 break into the dance deejay business. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Enrique and I think he is a good dancer,” he says. “But he’s not really dancing salsa. It’s cumbia. But no one around here knows that.” EnRiquE Enrique eyes me on the periphery of the dance floor, sidles up beside me, slips his hand into mine, and we head to the dance floor for a popular song by Marc Anthony . A twenty-something Mexican immigrant, Enrique wears dress slacks and a dress shirt, unbuttoned enough to show the edge of an indecipherable tattoo and three large gold chains. Both ears shine with multiple piercings, and he wears several rings and bracelets. His short sleeves reveal several other tattoos; one, a small firefly, is for his father, an electrician in Mexico City. It is clear that he misses his home and his family, a feeling magnified by the salsa music pumping through the sound system here in a club in rural Illinois. “I love salsa. It is my life, my heritage, you know? From the time I was this tall [he gestures to his waist], there was salsa in my house and we danced.” For Enrique, dancing salsa was a way to connect to his homeland and his family far away. He was aware of salsa’s Cuban roots, but this in no way hindered the music’s ability to signify his own heritage, his homeland, and his family. He is one of the best salsa dancers in town, and we light into what will be the best salsa of my night. Enrique works as a kitchen manager at a local T.G.I. Fridays, alongside two of his brothers. In a few years he will earn his American citizenship and request a transfer to an Indianapolis restaurant in the hopes of achieving his goal of promotion to house manager. “They don’t usually want to put us [Mexicans] up in the front of the house,” explains Enrique, “but I’m working on my English and my . . . you know, my presentation [with the word, he taps his chest with his hands and stands up taller, broadening his shoulders]. I think I can do it.” Several years after this conversation I visited Enrique on my way through Indianapolis to visit family , and though he was still working as a kitchen manager in a new T.G...

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