In her new monograph, She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body, Melissa Blanco Borelli makes a compelling case for the wisdom and power of the hips. She shows how the Cuban mulata, a mixed-race woman of European, African, and Native ancestry, wielded her hips to make a living, find pleasure, and negotiate with tropes that framed her existence. By analyzing mulatas and their historic dances, Blanco Borelli contributes importantly to Cuban studies and dance studies. For scholars of Cuba, the book not only illustrates the centrality of mulatas to Cuban national identity, but also complicates existing portrayals of the figure by showing how mulatas “step outside the limits of tragedy” that often mark their bodies (7). For dance studies scholars, Blanco Borelli interrogates the complexities of writing about subaltern bodies that danced in the past. Refusing the extremes of unshakable oppression and utopic agency, the author embraces a middle ground where women found spaces for economic and spiritual survival within coercive structures. Dwelling on the middle, She is Cuba invites deep reflection on the cadera, or hip, as a seat of knowledge with much to say about individual and collective histories.
This “genealogy of the mulata body” has four chapters and three interludes all linked by the theoretical thread of “hip(g)nosis.” Each chapter title begins with the neologism, which comes from the hypnotizing effect that mulata performers have on male observers. Described as a “feminist response” to the objectification of the dancing mulata, hip(g)nosis “presents the mulata body as an intelligent, powerful materiality” (13–14). This theoretical intervention exposes racial and gendered violence while also showing how women of color used their hips to disrupt and even contest prevailing norms. Blanco Borelli examines hip(g)nosis in three historical moments: the nineteenth century in Chapter 1, the mid-twentieth century in the three interludes and Chapters 2 and 3, and the period from the 1970s to the 1990s in Chapter 4. The chapters analyze a wide range of materials including rumors, literature, advertising images, oral histories, interviews, periodicals, films, family history, and personal experiences. The interludes (following Chapters 1, 2, and 3) feature “performative writing” that riffs on themes covered in the preceding chapter (27). With varied materials and writing styles, Blanco Borelli honors the impressive dynamism of mulata performers who experimented and improvised in dance and daily life.
The bulk of the book focuses on mulatas dancing in mid-twentieth-century Cuba, and there lies Blanco Borelli's greatest contribution. In Chapter 2, she tackles the elusive topic of academias de baile, a type of taxi dance hall that was a mainstay of Havana nightlife. Though discussed by previous scholars, Blanco Borelli focuses an unprecedented amount of research and analytic energies on the academias. She problematizes tendencies to dismiss the locations as marginal covers for prostitution. Instead, she suggests that academias were sites where mulata instructors and student-clients enacted Cuban-ness as they danced. To find new perspectives on these institutions, Blanco Borelli details her pilgrimage to where academias once stood. She wonders about the growling stomachs, monetary exchanges, aching feet and backs, and moments of joy—in other words, the social histories of dancers, during long, hot Havana nights. Despite a dearth of sources, she critically employs literary representations, interviews with male musicians, a published testimony from a female dancer, and her imagination to commune with the “ghosts of women who danced for dollars” (104). With her haunted analysis, Blanco Borelli revises understandings of mid-twentieth-century Cuba, placing mulata dancers at the center of a period undeniably shaped by their laboring hips.
Even as Blanco Borelli gestures to the past, she illustrates how mulata vitality defies temporal boundaries, especially through faith and film. In Chapter 1, she examines the connections between mulatas and the Yórùba energetic force deified as Ochún in Cuba and other parts of the Black Atlantic, which Blanco Borelli calls the “hip-notic torrid zone” (38). Ochún, invoked by different voices throughout the book, has different avatars including a beautiful dancer, astute market woman, and old woman cursing her lost beauty. Poetic homages to Ochún remind readers that “the mulata as producer of Ochún” factors importantly in the spiritual practices of many (39). Along with the ethereal, Blanco Borelli reflects on the celluloid. Through close readings of filmic performances in Chapter 3, especially those by Chela de Castro and Ninón Sevilla, the author demonstrates how women shook their hips “for pleasure, vengeance, or defiance” (134). Mulatas command religious and cinematic spaces, celebrating their individuality while simultaneously moving others with their eloquent hips.
As promised in the introduction, She is Cuba remains a “seductive invitation” to pick up where it left off, particularly on the period following the 1959 Cuban Revolution (21). Chapter 3 briefly discusses the film Soy Cuba (I am Cuba, 1964), trusting others to identify the actress and dancer Luz María Collazo Reyes, who played María/Betty. In addition to starring in the film, Collazo was the first “black” model in Cuba and a star dancer with the Cuban modern dance company, now named Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, from 1961 until the 1990s (Rodríguez Reference Rodríguez2010). Along with Collazo, dances that happened in the decades after 1959 and before the 1990s despelote (discussed in Chapter 4) also await their scholars. Blanco Borelli writes: “The Castro Revolution closed major entertainment venues, such as the world-famous Tropicana nightclub” (168), and, “by the 1980s, popular dance in Cuba had waned, owing to the closure of bars and clubs” (175). In fact, the 26th of July Movement closed nightclubs only briefly after taking power in 1959, reopening them a few weeks later and nationalizing them in 1960. The government then closed nightclubs and bars during a “revolutionary offensive” in March 1968 but reopened them in the summer of 1970 (see Moore Reference Moore2006, 61–63; Schwartz Reference Schwartz1997, 196–203; Orejuela Martínez Reference Orejuela Martínez2013, 158; Guerra Reference Guerra2012, 301; Salkey Reference Salkey1971, 40, 52–53, 75–76; Lam Reference Lam1997, 65–66). Therefore, aside from a few weeks in 1959 and a year and a half in the late 1960s, Cubans avidly patronized centers of revelry as well as círculos sociales de obreros (workers’ social circles) founded in 1961. Vibrant evidence of popular music and dance in post-1959 Cuba can be found in films such as P.M. (1961), Nosotros, la música (1964), Los del Baile (1965), Cuba Va! (1971), and Son o no Son (1980), to name only a few. The decades of understudied performances evidenced in these films merit closer attention.
She is Cuba, then, provides a mandatory starting point for future discussions of Cuban dance and national culture. The book would serve undergraduate students of dance, music, and women in Cuba, the Americas, and the Global South. Additionally, graduate students and scholars have much to learn from Blanco Borelli's theoretical contributions, not only hip(g)nosis, but also her efforts to problematize history by taking seriously the informal and emotional. Most important, She is Cuba encourages readers to analyze the rich knowledge emanating from mulatas and their authoritative hips. As a result, Blanco Borelli shows the rear end to be a wonderful beginning for Cuban dance histories.
