It appears to be a ritual among salsa dance scholars to open by sharing a personal salsa experience. I will follow their lead: My introduction to Los Angeles–style salsa came on a Saturday night in the spring of 1999, when I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the city's salsa scene with dance scholar Juliet McMains. Already an established professional ballroom dancer, McMains was just beginning her graduate studies at the University of California–Riverside where I was visiting faculty, having recently co-edited a collection on Latin/o American social dance. Lucky for me, McMains was among the many brilliant students who enrolled in my class on race and dance. The night of our tour, she invited a handsome friend and fellow ballroom dancer to partner first one of us, then the other, throughout the night. He drove us around the city as we stopped at a cramped restaurant-turned-nightclub in a strip mall, at a glamorous ballroom in Beverly Hills, then ended the night downtown at a massive disco in a former movie palace, the Mayan nightclub.

During one of my turns without a partner, I stood at the edge of the Mayan's expansive dance floor, watching the sea of bodies that rose and fell before me, and marveling at the dancers' virtuosity. A stranger interrupted my observation, extending his hand to invite me to dance. I adjusted my steps and the sway of my hips and shoulders to mirror his. Just as I was soaking up his style, he swept me off the floor and flipped me into the air above the rest of the dancers. A few beats later, he dipped me perilously close to the ground. Luckily, I had enough training in contact improvisation that I was able to surrender to the experience. I made it to the end of the song shaken, but not broken.

I have been dancing salsa most of my life, learning different styles from Puerto Rican and Venezuelan friends while growing up in the Midwest, and yet more styles at parties and night clubs as I traveled and worked in Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, and even Munich, where I befriended a group of Peruvian immigrants. After moving to Miami, I drew from all these styles and learned more, depending on the demographics of the crowd at any given club, on any given night. Yet nowhere had I ever seen any of the spectacular moves performed in Los Angeles.

When I returned home to Miami several weeks later, I recounted the Mayan incident to Rene Gueits, founder of the Miami-based Salsa Lovers dance studio, where I had recently completed my first formal training in salsa. Since opening in the mid-1990s, Salsa Lovers has trained more than 100,000 dancers in South Florida in a form of Cuban salsa called casino or rueda, because it is danced in a circle (Baldwin Reference Baldwin2012). Alongside more than 200 fellow students in the Blue Banquet Hall in southwestern Miami every Monday through Thursday evening, I had advanced through nine levels. Yet not one of the nearly 60 maneuvers on the Salsa Lovers' curriculum included a lift, flip, or dip.

“We teach salsa as a social experience for everyone,” Gueits explained.

The Salsa Lovers' approach was out of step with a new global model for salsa dance. As Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, by Cindy García, and Salsa World: A Global Dance in Local Contexts, edited by Sydney Hutchinson, amply document, the lifts, flips, and dips at the Mayan in Los Angeles were typical of a shift in salsa practice at the turn of the twenty-first century, from a social dance performed in informal settings primarily by Latin/o Americans, to a studio dance phenomena practiced by professionals across a network of formal gatherings and competitions on every continent.

Salsa Crossings and Salsa World are also the first two books to focus exclusively on salsa as a dance practice. Until recently, the bulk of salsa scholarship has focused on the music, and has argued almost uniformly that salsa developed as an expression of urban, working class Latin/o American identity, first among Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican immigrants to New York City in the 1960s and soon after among the urban working class across Latin America.Footnote ¹ In Reference Delgado and Munoz1997, Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, which I co-edited with queer performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz,Footnote ² examined salsa as one among many popular Latin/o American social dances. Our contributors explored issues of gender, sexuality, and national and transnational identity on the dance floor, starting from the shared the premise that these dances were a form of “rebellion” against dominant cultures and oppressive social structures. Fifteen years later, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera found evidence of this rebellion still at play on the dance floor in his ethnography Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (Reference Rivera-Severa2012), including salsa among a wide repertoire of “utopian” dance practices performed in queer, Latina/o dance clubs across the United States.

Salsa Crossings and Salsa World both challenge the premise of salsa as rebellion. This is less a rebuttal to earlier claims and more a recognition of a new reality. Since the 1990s, the production and commercial release of salsa music has declined precipitously as newer genres resonate more with contemporary working class Latin/o Americans. But as salsa has declined as a social or “street” complex of music and dance, it has been reshaped and revived as a global studio dance form. The studio form is performed by dancers of all ethnicities, hailing from all continents, with enough money to pay for extensive training, elaborate costumes, and travel to far-flung congresses—or salsa conventions—and competitions.

In her introduction to Salsa World, Hutchinson adapts Arjun Appadurai's discussion of globalization as operating through a series of overlapping “scapes” (Reference Appadurai1990) to offer the useful concept of the “choreoscape, the vast array of dances circulating around the globe” (16). Together, Salsa Crossings and Salsa World survey a large swath of what we might call the “salsascape.” Salsa Crossings offers an in-depth study of the tension between working-class, Mexican- and Central American social dancers and the studio dancers who de-emphasize Mexican identity in a handful of nightclubs in Los Angeles. Salsa World takes a more global approach, chronicling the global phenomena of studio salsa in nine essays documenting the studio salsa scene in nine cities in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia.

Hutchinson acknowledges that studio salsa is “divorced from race- and place-based notions of authenticity” and “focuses on a technical competency completely separate from cultural knowledge” (15). This argument is supported by the examples of Paris and Barcelona, where contributors Saúl Escalona and Isabel Llano report that Europeans are more interested in mastering the movement than in sharing Latin/o American cultures. In Tokyo, Kengo Iwanaga finds that dancers who prefer the Cuban style do so because of a desire for cultural “authenticity,” while those who prefer either the LA or New York styles are more interested in exhibiting their skills (202).

Some of the contributors from Latin America nevertheless insist on a link between cultural identity and performance. After outlining the development of rueda, or dancing salsa in a circle, from the Casino Sports Club in the 1950s through its present state, Havana-based dance scholar Bárbara Balbuena Gutiérrez decries the “methodologies” taught by “predators of traditional popular culture” and relating Cuban dance practice to “our own gestures, attitudes, feelings, thoughts, and soul” (115). This may well be a veiled critique of the revival of rueda as a studio practice in Miami, a part of the history of rueda that Balbuena omits, as she excludes the largest center of the Cuban diaspora from her analysis.

Writing from the Puerto Rican context, Priscilla Renta laments the absence of sabor y sentimiento (“flavor and feeling”) in competitive salsa, noting that these qualities are transmitted through informal lessons in the family and “come from contesting cultural imperialism, rebellion, intense indignation, and a sense of social justice” (124).

The emphasis on technique has invited critique that studio-trained dancers focus too much on steps and counts. The preoccupation with counts comes from the primary distinction between the New York and LA styles as one of dancing “on 2” or “on 1.” In her chapter, Hutchinson describes the development of the “on 2” style in the 1980s, when Nuyorican Eddie Torres developed a ballroom-style syllabus that called for dancers to break, or change direction, on the second and sixth beats of an eight-beat measure as way of approximating how he believed the Puerto Ricans at the legendary Palladium nightclub in midtown Manhattan danced in the 1950s and 1960s.

In a later chapter, Jonathan S. Marion locates the origin of the LA style in the efforts of another Puerto Rican, Albert Torres, who has been promoting salsa events and competitions in Los Angeles clubs since the 1990s, including the first West Coast Salsa Congress at Club Mayan in 1999, and now produces scores of congresses at locations around the world each year. Claiming that marketing is the primary function of distinguishing between the New York and LA styles, Marion points out that the LA style features the same footwork as the New York style, with dancers “breaking … on the first and fifth beats” (66).

The more important distinction, Marion argues, is the distinction he calls “represented as vs. representative of.” He acknowledges that the so-called LA style represents the dance practice of only a fraction of the salsa dancers in Southern California, even though it is marketed as representing the city as a whole (68–9). This caveat appears to be directed at Cindy García and what Marion deems “oversimplification” in an earlier version of one of the chapters in Salsa Crossings. Indeed, García's analysis of the political implications of salsa dance practice in Los Angeles is hampered because she does not distinguish between street and social dance practice, and the radically different cultural functions these practices have served historically.

In her introduction and title, García promises a bold new approach to analyzing salsa dance:

García is at her best when she is thick in everynight action and thick in description. This approach yields brilliant moments, such as when she meditates on the meaning of the preference for arm styling over hip movement in studio salsa, or eavesdrops on the conversations among girlfriends in a nightclub restroom.

Unfortunately, like the studio-trained dancers who focus so intently on counting beats that they no longer hear the music, García's interpretive apparatus blocks out the ludic potential of her methodology. Throughout Salsa Crossings, she divides the dancers she meets into “sequined” and “unsequined corporealities,” where sequins serve as a metonymy for studio-trained dancers in glamorous attire and the absence of sequins stands for migrant, laboring, Mexican bodies. Thus García interprets the evacuation of cultural content from studio practice exclusively as a reflection of elitist, anti-migrant, and anti-Mexican sentiment.Footnote ³

This might make more sense if sequins were not so frequently affixed to migrant, laboring, Mexican bodies. Any single member of the politically outspoken norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, is likely to be wearing more sequins on the back of his jacket during a sold-out performance in Los Angeles than can be found on the dresses of an entire studio salsa dance team. Moreover, sequins are de rigeur in the costumes of the Mexican, working-class competitors in the annual Encontronazo Internacional Así Se Baila Banda, the culmination of a competition in Mexican regional dances such as quebradita and cumbia held in every state of Mexico and in large Mexican communities in the United States, including Los Angeles, and modeled on the studio salsa or ballroom model. In other words, there is no opposition between sequins and working class, Mexican, migrant identity.

Instead, in Salsa Crossings, sequins stand in for the borders García does not cross: she makes generalizations about the dominance of salsa and the devaluation of cumbia as dance forms in Los Angeles, but never crosses genres to visit clubs where cumbia and other Mexican regional music and dance forms dominate.Footnote ⁴ She makes generalizations about gender roles in salsa clubs, but never takes her readers to the lesbian salsa night she mentions in passing or to any other queer Latin clubs in Los Angeles. She briefly critiques representations of Latinas dancing salsa in their rare appearances in Hollywood film, but completely ignores the vast Spanish-language media that is watched more widely by Latino/as in Los Angeles, and so misses the myriad representations of dancing Latina/o bodies on Univision, Telemundo, and local Los Angeles stations. By focusing exclusively on the erasure of Mexicans within the competitive studio salsa dance, García inadvertently becomes complicit in that erasure.

Salsa Crossings further obscures Mexican presence in studio salsa dance by changing the names of all of the clubs and most of the people discussed in the book. This may be valid as a way of preserving the anonymity of the ordinary people whose paths the ethnographer crosses, but the clubs themselves are an important part of popular dance history. That history is lost to all but insiders when the Mayan is called “The Legend,” the Conga Room disguised as “Copacabana West,” Stephen's Steakhouse as “Chuck's Grill,” and so on. Even more devastating, García leaves out entirely the stories of Mexican pioneers of West Coast salsa such as the Vázquez brothers, who, far from denying their Mexican heritage, danced under the name Imperio Azteca.

Despite missteps, Salsa Crossings ends beautifully, with a presumed lesbian couple dressed in “rhinestones and evening gowns” (146), beckoning to García to join them on the dance floor to perform cumbia. Would that the ethnographer had joined them earlier in the book and explored LA's studio salsa within the context of the much larger scene of Mexican popular dance in Los Angeles.

As is inevitable with so ambitious a project, Salsa World also suffers from two critical omissions. First, concentrating on the reterritorialization of salsa in a series of specific locations, Salsa World never gives a clear map of the global network. I tried unsuccessfully to piece together the history of the salsa congresses and international competitions that drive the spread of studio salsa dance. Where did they begin? How did they spread? Who are the promoters who are competing to establish themselves on the circuit? Bits and pieces of that history are dispersed across the several chapters, yet nowhere is there a sense of what it feels like to live along the global circuit for those instructors and performers who boast on their Web sites that they have visited 60 countries or more. A separate study of the global network itself is called for.

Second, Salsa World suffers by the omission of Miami as a central site of salsa dance practice.Footnote ⁵ The majority of the population in South Florida either hails directly or is descended from nations where salsa has played an important cultural role, making for what may be the most robust and diverse social salsa scene anywhere in the world. Many generations of Cuban-style salsa are practiced here, in a complicated relationship with parallel practices on the island. Meanwhile, so are styles from Puerto Rico, Cali, and other regions of Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

That social scene provides a context for the dozens of salsa dance studios, many of which promote a version of Cuban casino, often on the same schedule as Cali, New York, and LA styles. Often, studio instruction is sought not to introduce dancers to salsa, but to help dancers share a common salsa vocabulary on the dance floor.

Embedded in this vast social fabric, Miami also is home to several key events and bodies in the global studio salsa network, including the Miami Salsa Congress, the World Salsa Cup (promoted by Albert Torres), the World Salsa Summit (promoted by ballroom eminence Billy Fajardo), and the World Salsa Championship, hosted by the Miami-based World Salsa Federation, which claims to be the official body regulating salsa dance sport.

The salsascape in Miami is so vast and varied that it almost defies analysis. In Salsa World, Hutchinson proposes “kinetopia” as a concept to help scholars comprehend the global operation of salsa dance. Departing from Foucault's writings on “heterotopias” ([1967] Reference Foucault and Mirzeoff2002), she defines “kinetopia” as “a dialectical relationship between localities and movement practices that is mediated through the body” (15). The case of Miami suggests that a dialectic might not be fluid enough to capture the global flow of salsa. As a city where nearly every inhabitant was born somewhere else, and a great many residents regularly circulate between the city and one or more other countries, Miami is less a fixed location than a node on a network of places. The same can be said, to a lesser extent, of the other global cities examined in Salsa World.

The concept of “kinetopia” is especially productive for analyzing salsa if we observe two principles of the heterotopia in Foucault's formulation: (1) “an existing society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion” and (2) “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”([1967] 2002, 236).

Salsa's significations shift across time and space and so do salseros, wherever we dance along the global network and juxtapose in our bodies several spaces, several salsas, however incompatible they may be. The tensions among the many incommensurate forms of street and studio salsa will never be resolved. Here we might turn again to Juliet McMains as a guide, this time heeding her observation in “Dancing Latin/Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport” that “the relationship between [Latin] ballroom and salsa is much more complex than that suggested by dichotomies of sabor/technique, natural/trained, colored/white” (Reference McMains and Malnig2009, 318). In every city, on every dance floor, in every body that stakes a claim to salsa, these dichotomies and others observed in Salsa Crossings and Salsa World—self/other, Mexican/cosmopolitan, Miami/Havana, migrant/native-born, sequined/non-sequined—collapse and coalesce anew. Salsa adapts form and function to history and place, as dancers respond to the music and the movement of their partners.