Salsa Dance as Cosmopolitan Formation: Cooperation, Conflict and Commerce in the Midwest United States

Abstract

In recent decades, salsa dance and music have entered a number of global social distribution networks, being performed in dance clubs around the world by Latinos and non-Latinos alike. In the process, the genre has accumulated meanings beyond its Latin American identity, both resonating with it and complicating its associated pan-Latino/Latina discourses. This article presents a community of amateur salsa dancers in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a small town in the Midwestern United States. Based on ethnographic fieldwork during the mid to late 1990s, it follows the development of this community during the time of its emergence, tracing relationships between various and racially diverse stakeholders as they negotiate the local, small-town entertainment industry to establish salsa dance performance in the region. The scene comprises a diverse collection of people who made alliances along and across ethnic and class categories at various points—alliances that shifted over time in order to ensure a vibrant salsa dance scene in this small-town context. During the formative period for salsa performance in the region, tension arose between various social groups as a result of competing notions of salsa ownership and authenticity. The article explores this friction, highlighting the intersection of commerce and identity that distinguish this particular salsa dance scene from other types of salsa dance contexts, and investigating salsa performance in light of economic realities specific to the local entertainment industries in small-town America. This is placed within a larger ‘cosmopolitan formation’ to propose that particular social and economic factors have the potential to undermine the genre's capacity to serve as an expression of Latin American ethnic or racial identity.