In a booth at Chuck's GrillFootnote 1 in the City of Commerce,Footnote 2 I sit watching the dance floor, waiting for María Elena to arrive. A few newcomers practice moves they must have learned at the class taught earlier. They clutch each other with lots of tension as they unsuccessfully attempt a quick set of turns. In contrast, a very skinny man (Felipe from México, I was to learn) leads his partner with a touch so light, it appears as if he had no bones in his arms. His partner responds uncertainly at first, but then accustoms herself to the slightness of his finger signals. Without any sort of pressure exerted between their bodies, they do not gain momentum as they putter in place. An older man and woman close their eyes and cuddle. Others dance comfortably on tempo, minus the uncontained hoopla of the newcomers. A few couples cross their steps behind, with a basic step associated more with Mexican cumbia than with salsa in Los Angeles.
One couple stands out from the others because they inject their speedy dips and spins with layers of moves like head rolls and neck drops. With precision and velocity they lift, lunge, and raise their arms into the air triumphant like acrobats. Then he snaps his fingers and slicks back his hair while she swishes her skirt. They effectively distance themselves from, and occasionally bump into, those who practice less spectacular techniques—the contained sways, the jerking, the bobbing, the over-zealous exertions of the newcomers, and the boneless arms of the more informally trained. The newcomers teeter closer to the edges of the floor, giving up space to the ones who dance what is known as L.A.-style salsa—the style that has put Los Angeles on the global salsa map.
Together, the dancers with their multiple salsa moves at Chuck's Grill not only create latinidad,Footnote 3 they also socially generate a hierarchy among Latinas/os. Throughout my ethnographic research on the salsa practices in Los Angeles and its surrounding cities, I found that salsa practitioners contend with the contradictory poles of latinidad produced in Los Angeles, particularly in Hollywood films—the exoticized Caribbeanesque Latina/o manufactured with the ability to rejuvenate a white protagonist's sex life,Footnote 4 and the laboring Latina/o migrant.Footnote 5 (See Photos 1 and 2).
Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) depicts Afro-Cubans at La Rosa Negra nightclub as a mass of dancing bodies. (DVD capture from Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, directed by Guy Ferland, produced by Lions Gate Films, Miramax Films, Lawrence Bender Productions.)
In Havana Nights, the “dirty dancing” Afro-Cubans fill white American protagonist Katey with fear and fascination and her American date with disgust. (DVD capture from Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, directed by Guy Ferland, produced by Lions Gate Films, Miramax Films, Lawrence Bender Productions).
I argue that to move up the salsa social hierarchy, local salseras/os perform L.A.-style salsa that distances them from practices associated with undocumented Mexican laborers.
Based on my ethnographic work at Chuck's Grill from 1999–2005, I analyze how such danced distinctions underscore a social choreography entangled with the politics of migration.Footnote 6 At Chuck's Grill, salsa practitioners evaluate one another's performances of belonging based on whether they have trained their bodies to dance L.A.-style salsa—the practice marked by acrobatic lifts and neck drops, accelerated spins, dramatic poses, and meticulous timing. If you fail to pass as an L.A.-style salsera/o,Footnote 7 and the crowd appraises you to be Latina/o, you may be accused of “dancing like a Mexican.”
I watch as a Latina confidently steps onto the restaurant dance floor, lightly kicks into a basic step that crosses diagonally behind her, alternating sides. A few beats into the song, her partner stops her and exaggerates the linearity of his own forward and back basic. Moments later, she has changed her step, follows his lead for a few beats, and then switches back to her own basic. He stops and tries to correct her again. I have seen and been a part of these impromptu dance floor lessons previously, in which the basic steps of salsa from Mexico and Central America are either not legible, or interpreted as “wrong,” in Los Angeles salsa spaces.
At Chuck's Grill, LA salseras/os can attempt to retrain restaurant area dancers by teaching them techniques of L.A. salsa, but they can also distance themselves from Mexicanness associated with the restaurant dancers by crossing into the banquet hall. It is within the banquet hall that L.A. salseras/os develop moves that might get them invited onto the guest list at the Hollywood clubs, producing the Hollywood version of latinidad for non-Latino west side clients to consume without having to venture too far east.Footnote 8 María Elena, born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles,Footnote 9 jokingly called the L.A. salsera/o departure from the restaurant in search of banquet hall upward mobility “The Great Migration.”
María Elena's invocation of “The Great Migration” as a metaphor in this salsa setting calls to mind two long-lasting periods of migration to and within the United States. Historically, The Great Migration can refer to African American migration from the rural south to urban centers in the United States North, Midwest, and West from 1915–1970. This migration has often been valorized as a move toward upward mobility and racial integration despite considerable backlash from the European American working class and further racial segregation.Footnote 10 In this Southern California salsa context, however, María Elena's metaphor points to the northward migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to Los Angeles. In this distinctive historical context, many of the Mexican and Central American migrants have also moved from rural spaces to U.S. urban spaces. Mexican and Central American migrants, many with hopes of upward mobility, have instead been met with anti-migrant policies and the racialized violences of everyday life. In the leisure space of Chuck's Grill, María Elena deems the banquet hall the ultimate site of arrival. The performance of patrons who have arrived at the banquet hall also suggests that they belong as upwardly mobile Latinas/os in a Southern California U.S. context. Belonging in both contexts—in the banquet hall and in Southern California—does not occur without racialized distinctions and segregations.
As dance practitioners make distinctions among themselves, they determine which bodies matter to Los Angeles latinidad. Which bodies get included and excluded under the umbrella of latinidad in salsa contexts? Latinidad as a nighttime salsa corporeality does not connote a single, stable concept of Latina/o-ness, and thus leaves room open for danced negotiations.Footnote 11 An understanding of a mobile, active latinidad involves choreographically analyzing the everyday practices associated with Latina/o-ness. I envision latinidad put into motion as salsa practices, continuously contested and conceptualized by Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os in salsa settings, rather than an essentialized, bounded race, culture, or ethnicity. Latinidad does not necessarily stick to Latina/o bodies.Footnote 12 In the nighttime sphere of salsa dancing, many people, Latina/o or not, enact latinidad. As I follow the salsa dancers from the restaurant to the banquet hall, I consider the social formation of latinidad in dialogue with the politics of migration.
Situating Salsa in Los Angeles: Social Speculation, Mexicanness, and Migration
I situate this work within a body of salsa scholarship that challenges racist assumptions about Latinas/os and dance.Footnote 13 Delgado and Muñoz (Reference Delgado, Muñoz, Delgado and Muñoz1997) point to the significance of Latin American social dance in their edited volume Everynight Life Culture and Dance in Latin/o America. Rivera-Servera (Reference Rivera-Servera2004) vividly describes salsa dancing as a resistive practice in the queer clubs of New York and Texas. Renta (Reference Renta2004) carefully lays out the history and techniques of Eddie Torres's New York mambo, and Pietrobruno (Reference Pietrobruno2006) addresses salsa dance pedagogies in Montreal. Like Delgado and Muñoz, Rivera-Servera, Renta, and Pietrobruno, I am concerned with the diasporic and transnational migrations of salsa. By framing salsa in Los Angeles rather than in New York, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, I am able to address the significations of the dance practices as they circulate translocally to a city and Latino population not historically noted as central to the social performance of salsa. A focus on the social formation of latinidad in Los Angeles salsa spaces shifts away from the predominance of salsa narratives that regard Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York as sites of salsa origins.Footnote 14 I expand previous approaches to the study of salsa to consider salsa practices—deterritorialized from Afro-Caribbean origins stories and reterritorialized in Mexican/Central American Los Angeles. While salsa is historically regarded as Afro-Caribbean, Los Angeles dancers include a large number of Mexicans and Central Americans. Why, then, do Mexican and Central American movement practices fall to the bottom of salsa hierarchies even when the majority of the Latinas/os in Los Angeles clubs are Mexican and Central American? Rather than base my interpretations on sociological data, I am interested in the social speculation of who may or may not be Mexican, the term practitioners often indiscriminately use to signify the nightclub practices associated with both Mexicans and Central Americans.
Perception and social speculation over who is or is not a Mexican migrant have long contributed to bodily consequences for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. By the 1920s in the Southwest, “Euro-Americans perceived Mexicans as foreigners,” Mae Ngai writes, and that “‘[f]oreignness’ was a racialized concept that adhered to all Mexicans, including those born in the United States” (Ngai Reference Ngai2004, 132). From 1929–1939, along with thousands of Mexican migrants, Mexican Americans, despite being U.S. citizens, were deported to Mexico in an act known as Mexican Repatriation, which was authorized by President Herbert Hoover. Mexican Americans who do not pass as U.S. citizens are still vulnerable to erroneous deportation today. Racial profiling, discrimination, and other exclusionary practices contribute to a climate of antimigrant legislative structures and sentiments. On the flip side, the Hollywood film relies on ad alternate perception as it manufactures the desirable Latina/o.Footnote 15 Real-life Latinas/os who perform attributes of the Hollywood Latinas/os become more desirable in the salsa clubs.
The methodology I craft makes room for identity misperceptions, exaggerations, and desires. Such an approach emphasizes my concern with analyzing politics in motion and the relations of power between bodies. I thus attend to the ways that perceptions of identity circulate—perceptions of who is upwardly mobile, who is a migrant, who is documented, and who is not based on dance practices and spaces. I analyze the social formation of identities in dance clubs through a choreographic lens, which allows me to consider the ways that bodies move, interact, express desires, and dance. The way that dancers perceive each other and perform their identities in the clubs may or may not correlate with their identities outside of the clubs. My aim is to elaborate on the ways in which anti-migrant violences become aestheticized and mobilized in Latino-based salsa spaces.
Yet, in these Los Angeles spaces of leisure and beyond, not all dancers have the same understanding of what constitutes salsa. Some interpret salsa broadly as a term to connote numerous Latino and Latin American dance genres, including salsa. Others refer to salsa as a genre belonging to a larger grouping of other dance genres called baile popular.Footnote 16 When some salseras/os invoke salsa, they often mean the specific dance rhythm of salsa to the exclusion of other genres. Others share Willie Colón's description of salsa, not as a genre or a rhythm, but as a concept, a “social, musical, cultural, hybrid force that has embraced jazz, folklore, pop and everything else that is relevant or could stand in its evolutionary path.”Footnote 17 Salsa conversations often reference the cláve as the rhythmic authenticator,Footnote 18 women's hips as the movement signifier,Footnote 19 resistance to a colonialist past and racist present as the goal, and global camaraderie as a possibility. Scholarly writings about salsa have invoked narratives of resistance and the liberating potentials of dance.Footnote 20 Delgado and Muñoz (Reference Delgado, Muñoz, Delgado and Muñoz1997) theorize the diasporic dancing body as one that can potentially rewrite the colonialist pasts and racial, cultural, and economic marginalizations of the present—the marginalizations of everyday life. As they dance, bodies rebel against hegemonic media representations of “Latinidad as the exotic other to North-of-the-Border rationality and rule” (Delgado and Muñoz Reference Delgado, Muñoz, Delgado and Muñoz1997, 26). My close analyses of salsa practices in Los Angeles nightclubs like Chuck's Grill suggest a more complex story. Though salseras/os through their nighttime dance practices may be bodies in rebellion against their positionings in a racist urban landscape, they simultaneously produce social hierarchies based in part on the exoticisms and marginalizing conditions of Latinas/os in everyday life.
When I refer to salsa, I consider not only what are popularly understood as salsa styles, such as New York mambo (danced “on two”), Los Angeles style (danced “on one”), or Cuban casino.Footnote 21 I also consider other kinds of movement practices, such as where, how, and with whom people travel and affiliate, or distance themselves, while socializing in clubs. I address the ways in which practitioners exalt and insult one another's style or country; how they caress, step on, and crash into each other; and how, amidst the friendships, romances, and celebrations, they form social hierarchies. I write about salsa as action, but more precisely as interaction.
A couple dancing salsa does not dance alone. Even an intimate partnership cannot evade becoming embedded within the continuously changing social body of practitioners. On the restaurant side of Chuck's Grill, it is now 10:00 p.m. Dancers with a variety of practices pack the floor, and among them are several dancers who warm up in the restaurant while awaiting the opening of the banquet hall. A friend of María Elena's asks me to dance with him. He turns me away from him, holding my arms behind me so that I lean uninvited into the partnership of another couple. Across the time of six steps and two pauses, we dance as if a threesome. My elbow knocks the salsero in the jaw as I am whisked back around, duo restored. As couples, we share and compete for the same square footage, but have to maneuver in such a way that we do not simultaneously drop into the same spot. Someone's sequined toes trail up my leg as her partner lowers the rest of her into a slow dip. Cologne lingers in the airspace that my partner swings us into. As he attempts some of the fast turns that take up lots of space, I step on something thick that twists my ankle. A thick ponytail swats away my center of balance and I spin unsteadily without enough room between my partner and I to recover. He fakes a steady landing, converting my off-keel pre-stumble into a dip. A woman limps off to the bathroom to patch up a bloody foot. Did I have something to do with that?
While carefully navigating the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal movement vectors of the shared space, many dancers nonetheless make countless identity speculations based on differences in practices. They often refer to these deviations as differences in stylistic taste, which they evaluate with seemingly neutral terms such as “sophistication,” “timing,” “innovation,” and “complexity.” Assessments of dancing based on style often camouflage the more covert categories of ethnicity, race, class, and nation that inform latinidad, where “dancing like a Mexican” falls to the bottom of the hierarchy.
Many of the practices associated with Mexicanness occur in the restaurant at Chuck's Grill. The biggest giveaway that leads to these social speculations is the bounce associated with Mexican cumbia rather than the smoothness of L.A.-style salsa. In many salsa venues, when patrons perform a basic step that crosses behind rather than forward and back (as in the earlier dance “lesson”), bounce, dance too slowly, cuddle, drink beer, or even worse—socialize more than dance—they implicate themselves as Mexican.Footnote 22 At times, accusations of Mexicanness are direct. More often, though, L.A. salseras/os may assess you as being untrained, unsophisticated, and unsexy, masking direct evaluations of citizenship status, class, and nation. L.A. salseras/os have often told me that with the amount of time they spend practicing salsa, developing moves, and selecting outfits, they are more serious dancers than those who attend the club now and then simply to socialize. They select dance partners who have also dedicated themselves to their dance practice. The Latinas/os who seem to internalize these distinctions attempt to eliminate from their own performances any dance techniques that can locate them as Mexican, regardless of whether this category accurately characterizes them or not. Salseras/os often employ the category of Mexican to include the Central Americans and Chicanas/os who perform these techniques, thus socially marking them as vulnerable bodies.
Antimigrant Legislation
Salsa clubs like Chuck's Grill to some degree offer an escape from the marginalizations that many Latinas/os in Los Angeles face in everyday life, yet the hierarchies that undergird danced latinidad work with and against the dynamics of white male hegemony and the everydayness of the war against Latinas/os in (or trying to enter) the United States. In a period in the 1990s and early 2000s, preceding and during my work as an ethnographer, much legislation in California was directed against migrants.Footnote 23 California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994 to eliminate undocumented immigrants' rights to public education, social services, and healthcare. Teachers, law enforcers, and social and healthcare workers would have been required to verify the immigrant status of people, deny the undocumented services, and then report them. U.S. District Court Judge Marina Pfaezler declared that the proposition was unconstitutional, stating that legislation regarding the regulation of immigrants should occur at the level of the federal government. In 1998, Proposition 227, the “English-only” initiative, was passed by 61% of California voters in favor of dismantling bilingual education in the public schools. In 2004, then–California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to test for California drivers' licenses. These California measures have called into question the citizenship status of immigrants and those who might be perceived as migrants—documented or not.
A San Francisco Chronicle article (Sterngold & Martin Reference Sterngold and Martin2005) entitled “Governor Signals He'd Welcome Minutemen on the California Border” further marks Schwarzenegger's role in this war. The ex-Terminator praised the armed group of volunteers who call themselves Minutemen and who have been patrolling the U.S.–Mexico border to prevent undocumented crossings into the U.S. As they frame their anti-Mexican, anti-migrant vigilance as patriotic, their name invokes images of Revolutionary War heroes overthrowing British colonial rule. Though hardly colonial subjects of Mexico seeking independence, the Minutemen still fervently police the borderlands, even as U.S. businesses rely on the importation of Mexican and Central American bodies as cheap, expendable labor. Whether desired or criminalized, the bodies in these discourses are marked as laborers. These U.S. politics of migration entangle with nighttime salsa corporealities, taunting those who enter dance clubs to escape the war on Latinas/os.
The clubs do not offer a total respite because they do not exist as utopian spaces outside of politics. Salsa clubs are sites in which patrons claim and bestow social membership based on the evaluation of dance practices that can mark them as “citizens” or “immigrants” (often synonymous with “Mexican”)—a distinction that underscores conceptualizations of latinidad. Though patrons at Chuck's Grill have more leeway to temporarily reconfigure their identities by night, they also activate hierarchies of belonging based on social practices that can implicate their positionings in daily life.Footnote 24
Crossing Over: Performing Upward Mobility at Chuck's Grill
Back at Chuck's Grill, the distinctions on the restaurant dance floor also involved a physical separation of space in which those who had worked themselves to the top of the L.A.-style salsa hierarchy removed themselves from the company of the dancers in the restaurant. At about 10:30 p.m., the spectacular dancers begin to disengage themselves from the music, the dancing, and the conversations and move back toward the front entrance. In almost a procession-like manner, dancers with fedoras, brightly feathered ruffles, trench coats, and sparkly silver shoes call attention to themselves as they move toward a room on the other side of the lobby. María Elena, her boyfriend Aldo, and I follow the struts, swaggers, and sashays of these dance migrants past the lobby and into a spacious banquet hall where couples spun to quicker tempos on the long floor that stretched down the length of the room—a perfect set-up for seeing and being seen.
In daily life, successful acts of undocumented migration across geopolitical borders partly depend on one's invisibility to protect one from thirst, rape, unscrupulous coyotes, Minutemen, the border patrol, and deportation. Once someone does cross the border, his or her ability to remain undetected is crucial. Even for those who cross the border with papers, visibility is not always preferable. In reference to the migration north from Mexico, María Elena's title, “The Great Migration,” recasts the act of migration through performance as L.A. salseras/os resignify the criminalized act of migration, or of simply being Latina/o in Los Angeles, by making themselves as spectacular as possible.
“Hey, see that guy who just walked in with the sunglasses and long leather coat?” María Elena stares at a thin Matrix-type with spiky gelled hair and shiny white shoes. “He just bleached out his hair. It was black last week.” She alerts me to the kind of attention that the banquet hall salseras/os take to keep their salsa-dancing personas dramatically fresh. His leather coat opens like wings as he strides right through all the dancers up to a Latina in a cheerleader skirt whom he spins into a neck drop. The couple that stood out in the restaurant dance next to them, but now they blend in with many of the other banquet hall dancers.
Aldo, however, scrutinizes the dancers to note further differences. A white woman captures our attention as she throws her head back orgasmically, possibly her interpretation of the exoticized Latina body. Then she tosses her very straight, medium-blonde hair up into the air with her hand. The strands fall to cover her face, and she allows them to slink back into place instead of pushing them away from her eyes. “See her partner? He's from el D.F. (Mexico City),” Aldo conjectures, because of the way he bounces occasionally and truncates his steps. “But you can tell he has taken lessons in Los Angeles, because he accents the music with head gestures and he never lets his partner stay in the basic too long without performing a trick. See how he keeps turning her and dipping her?” We look back to the couple. The man pulls his partner's thigh over his hip to support her as she arches her back. He releases his hold between her shoulder blades as she drops lower, and then catches her to bring her upright. He double dips his partner, releasing the pressure on her back a second time before tugging her upright. “Mexicans from Mexico City are the best salsa dancers,” Aldo, a Mexico City native, informs me. María Elena corrects him: “You mean the ones who take classes in L.A. style.” Aldo agrees.
María Elena and Aldo suggest that techniques regarded as Mexican such as the truncated steps are allowed to pass into the banquet hall when one has trained in L.A. salsa. However, on a previous occasion, I spoke with an L.A.-style salsero who said he'd been dancing salsa for years in Mexico City, but when he moved to Los Angeles three months before, he found out he'd been dancing salsa wrong all this time. He imitated a choppy, bouncy salsa step without any of the flourishes of L.A. salsa. “I used to dance like this. When I got to L.A., I found out that salsa is supposed to be danced like this.” He smoothed out his steps. “Much more elegant. I can never go back to dancing the other way.” While the two Mexico City men differentially incorporate or excise the shortened step, they both have taken on the practice of L.A. salsa.
Perceptions from the Restaurant
Once the L.A.-style salsa dancers evacuated the restaurant, traffic toward the banquet hall slowed. María Elena was not the only one to detect this social choreography of “The Great Migration,” in which those daring enough who had developed the proper skills could cross over to a larger space with supposedly better music, more room to move, and more opportunities to dance with other L.A. salseras/os. A couple of newcomers who aspired to become L.A. salseras/os confessed that they were too intimidated to dance in the banquet hall just yet, but that they would as soon as they took a few more lessons. Some of the socializers described L.A. salsa as too flashy, too Hollywood, too much like a competition. Their reasons for these critiques differed, however. Rafael, a Colombian migrant who worked at a used-car lot in Long Beach, characterized L.A. salsa and its Latina/o “fanatics” as more like what Americans think Latinas/os are like. Not only did many working-class Latinas/os share his concern over this “diluted” latinidad, as he called it, a handful of upwardly mobile, university-educated Latinas/os I spoke with echoed this sentiment. Sarita, who identified as Chicana and a university student, expressed that she preferred the more “authentic” Cuban Casino. While she realized that there was no one authentic salsa, she said, “The people on the restaurant side are a little more relaxed. They haven't turned salsa into a spectacle.” The socializers, many who self-identify or whom are identified by other as migrants, workers from the service industry, and/or Mexican and Central American, accuse L.A. salseras/os of no longer being Latina/o. The socializers view L.A. salseras/os as contaminated by Hollywood influences—a sign of Americanness—and as perhaps as having rejected their premigrant familial, social, and cultural connections. The dancers on the restaurant side seem to suggest that the L.A. style salseras/os erase previous experiences and cultural histories of salsa in Mexico and Central America as they draw attention away from these practices and practitioners in Los Angeles.
Although many of the dancers on both sides of Chuck's Grill brought with them diverse knowledges and histories of how to dance salsa, the codified repertoire of acceptable moves and techniques of L.A.-style salsa became apparent in the banquet hall. As the L.A. salseras/os incorporated double dips, head rolls, and neck drops, they differentiated themselves from those who danced in the restaurant. Many of the banquet hall dancers took private lessons and spent several hours a week rehearsing for the next competition or performance with a dance team. Crowds in both the restaurant and the banquet hall recognized as dominant the techniques practiced in the banquet hall. To what extent does the move to the banquet hall dislocate practitioners from a Mexican identity and relocate them as upwardly mobile Latinas and Latinos?
Beyond the Banquet Hall
To be recognized as a top-tier L.A.-style dancer within the social life of Chuck's Grill is only part of the story. Maricruz, a skilled practitioner of L.A. salsa, explained that the stakes of belonging go beyond the grill. L.A. salsa, she told me, was a response to a regional hierarchy that positioned New York Latinas/os above Los Angeles Latinas/os, the group with whom she, as a migrant from El Salvador who moved to Los Angeles when she was seven, identifies. In earlier days of L.A. salsa, in the late 1990s, Maricruz said, East Coast Latinas/os did not recognize L.A. salseras/os as belonging within the framework of salsa, primarily because many of the dancers who have contributed to the development of L.A. salsa have been Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Mambo dancers in New York and in L.A., Latina/o or not, associated themselves with Puerto Rico, distinguishing themselves from L.A. salsa, Los Angeles, and Mexicanness. In dance terms, New York mambo dancers perceive L.A. salsa as inauthentic to what they perceived as the “original” mambo practice. Maricruz said that New York mambo dancers viewed L.A. salsa as a dance right out of a Hollywood blockbuster film, a dance with too much flash, no substance, and no history. One of the biggest points of contention and dance floor differentiation between the East Coast and West Coast practices is whether to start dancing on the first or second beat of the music, commonly known as dancing “on the one” and dancing “on the two.” When New York dancers began incorporating moves, if not the “on one” timing, from L.A. salseras/os, Maricruz felt that L.A. salsa had finally become legitimated beyond the West Coast. She said:
They may have the original “on two” style, but now the East Coast dancers borrow moves and ideas for routines from L.A. They are starting to copy the style that has become authentic to Los Angeles. The discrimination against us has gone on too long, and now a lot of L.A. dancers are actually proud to dance “on one.”
As L.A. salsa grows more legible across regions, practitioners on a global scale have also been incorporating techniques from L.A. salsa, often learned at international Salsa Congresses. As Maricruz, a frequent participant at salsa congresses, noted this with excitement, María Elena recognized her discomfort with learning L.A. salsa and yet the lure of dancing in the banquet hall. She and Aldo occasionally cross over to watch the L.A. salseras/os after 10:30 p.m., but they spend most of their time dancing and socializing in the restaurant. As they dance together, they demonstrate versatility with both the crossing back and the forward and back basics, they spin, and they sometimes add a bounce as they move to the slightly slower tempos and varied rhythms—salsa, merengue, cumbia, cha cha chá—in the restaurant.
Conclusion
For the undocumented, the migration north from Mexico is often a secret practice meant to avoid violence or deportation. Once in the U.S., migrants often face other challenges when they seek to work. As Camacho writes, “State officials and labor contractors have long colluded to produce the ideal migrant, the temporary worker stripped of labor rights and the entitlements of citizenship” (Camacho Reference Camacho2008, 2). Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans have also found themselves competing for the same jobs, as occurred during the Bracero Program, but also simultaneously enduring the inhumane work conditions, racisms, and classisms directed at both sets of workers.Footnote 25 To varying degrees, those with papers and Latinas/os with U.S. birth certificates also navigate legislation, social hierarchies, and racial profiling targeting Mexicans and migrants, making Southern California an embattled site for many Latinas/os to establish economic and social footing.
The performance of The Great Migration at Chuck's Grill reframes migration and latindad in an economy of leisure. The nightclub procession from one side of the club to the other temporarily offers patrons a chance to be seen and to enact a spectacular alternative to the largely criminalized migration experience. Latina/o practitioners of L.A. salsa become legible in local, regional, and international salsa fields. Yet, this visibility creates friction at Chuck's Grill, relying on practices of segregation imbricated in the politics of migration. As they negotiate the antimigrant/anti-Mexican wars of everyday and everynight life, the banquet hall dancers overshadow the restaurant patrons to activate themselves in danced discourses of latinidad.
