Im/mobile careers of salsa dance professionals

In this section, I focus on the im/mobile careers of three salsa dance professionals to examine the obstacles these dancers must overcome, as well as the ways they position themselves to take part in the transnational salsa circuit.¹ The stories reveal some of the ongoing power struggles within the salsa circuit that unfold at the intersections of gendered and racialized bodies, salsa’s commodification and issues of class (which includes access to mobility). The three stories shed light on the career possibilities available to differently positioned dancers by virtue of salsa’s global diffusion and popularity. I chose the three cases for their diversity in terms of the dancers’ positions in the transnational field of salsa. However, it is important to note that this choice is not representative in terms of the gendered mobility dynamics of salsa dancers in general. In other words, while this article discusses the im/mobility stories of two women and one man, this selection of case studies is not meant to suggest that female dancers are more mobile than male dancers. I will start with Melanie, a German salsa dance professional in her mid-forties at the time of the interview; then present the story of Yanet, a Cuban salsa dance professional in her twenties, circulating back-and-forth between Cuba and Europe; and finally develop the case of Frank, a Cuban salsa dance professional in his forties, based in Cuba.²

From travelling artist to local dance studio owner

Melanie was born in a German city and started ballroom dancing at an early age. In her twenties, she encountered salsa on holiday in Miami, caught the ‘salsa virus’ and started regularly attending the few clubs that played salsa music back home. As she recalled during the interview, she was soon asked to share her dancing skills and started teaching others alongside her daytime job as an industrial management assistant. For Melanie, salsa allowed her to tap into an energy, joy and passion that she now wanted to transmit.

I no longer felt German; I never felt German. Suddenly I found my vocation, truly, in dance, in passion. And indirectly or directly I also passed this onto my students in class; they learned much more than just steps with me, but also learned to feel themselves, to achieve self-worth. They were seeking something in the somewhat boring German everyday life, and discovered through dance and music a joy of life that fulfilled them, that fulfilled me.

Melanie embodied an ‘alternative sense of self’ (Bosse 2008: 60) that she perceives to be more vibrant than her German self. Smiling, she told me that people often thought she was ‘a Latina or Spanish’. For Melanie, dancing salsa provides her with a space in which to perform an alternative set of identifications in terms not only of national identity, but also gender, as described below.

Once Melanie had found her calling, she proceeded to dance at events, where she met her dance partner, and together they slowly established a name in the transnational salsa circuit. Here her German passport, which allows her to travel freely to many countries, was helpful. During the 1990s, salsa events started to be established in cities all over Europe and North America, and Melanie and her dance partner were invited to perform their show and teach paying salsa students at these events. For salsa dancers, partnership is central, because in the heteronormative space of salsa events, couples are invited to teach men and women, while solo dancers are rarely invited. There was, however, one exception: Melanie proudly told me that she was one of the first to teach ladies’ styling, a set of movements that focuses on specific body parts such as the hips, upper torso and arms, mostly performed by female dancers. As she mixed salsa movements with movements from other dances such as tango, she was soon asked to teach her special styling at events. Melanie thus found herself occupying a niche in salsa teaching even after breaking up with her dance partner.

After ten years working at events in many places and countries, Melanie decided to settle down and open her own dance studio in her native city. In her mid-forties at the time of the interview, she had successfully been running the studio for many years, employing several dance teachers alongside herself. She had stopped travelling to events when she became a mother a few years previously. She believed that, besides her passion, developing a specific teaching concept ‘for the Germans’ was key to her success.

They teach very badly, the Latinos. Yes, Cubans are great dancers, but they don’t have any idea how to teach Germans. I know how Germans think and I can get a feel for them, and I developed a method so they can learn and feel themselves better.

The proliferation of dance studios and salsa events with paying guests in the 1990s meant that formalized teaching and specific methods of teaching became more important. As McMains (2015) shows, dancers at this time implemented teaching techniques they had learned in standardized ballroom dancing. Put simply, salsa dancing was presented as a series of steps on counts that need to be acquired in the specific context of a dance lesson (Urquía 2005). Here Melanie draws on this vision and a set of culturalist ideas of methodical Germans versus less organized Latinos/Latinas or Cubans. When she presents the latter as great dancers, she repeats a common discourse that assumes that racialized people are naturally endowed with dancing skills, though lacking the necessary teaching skills. This argument relies on a problematic construction of ‘the other’ that not only reproduces colonial categories but is also particularly dangerous in an immigrant context, where the association of emotionality or excessive sexuality with non-white bodies may serve to legitimize unequal treatment or exclusion (McMains 2016). I observed several European-born dancers using this argument as a way to distinguish themselves from Cuban dancers, who might be better positioned in terms of the ‘authenticity value’ attached to their dancing.

Back-and-forth between Havana and Europe

Among dancers in the salsa circuit, the origins of salsa music and dance are hotly debated, though on the imaginary salsa map, Cuba holds a special place as (one of) the place(s) from which today’s commercialized salsa originated. Many European dancers told me that they had been in Cuba at least once to take dance or, occasionally, percussion lessons. For some adepts of Salsa Cubana, or what in Cuba is called casino, the trip to Cuba is seen as a ‘rite of passage’ in an individual’s salsa career. In this, the rumba plays a particularly important role as a marker of authenticity. Rumba is a dance with a complex history of colonial repression and stigmatization before its institutionalization by the socialist government after the revolution of 1959, and later its inscription on the UNESCO List of Intangible Heritage in 2016. Despite its increasing public recognition, not least at salsa events around the world, practitioners of rumba in Cuba are still often racialized and associated with low social status (Ana 2017). At European salsa events, rumba movements are often taught by Cuban salsa instructors who found that stressing the so-called ‘Afro-Cuban’ origin of their dance proves a fruitful marketing strategy in the competitive field of teaching opportunities.

One of the successful teachers of this style was Yanet, whom I first met when she was teaching a workshop in a big dance school in a Swiss city. One and a half years later, I joined her and a group of students on a dance trip to Havana.

Yanet was born in Havana and grew up in a family of musicians and dancers, identifying as Afro-Cuban. As a teenager, she assisted her family members in teaching groups of European students. Later, she danced in several performance groups and continued teaching tourists as opportunities arose. Nevertheless, as she stated in the interview, she wanted to see something else: ‘I always wanted to travel, get to know cultures, people, and I was always very interested in culture. So I said to myself, I could show them my own culture; I’ve always wished to do that.’

With no economic means, no official diploma from any of the state’s dance academies and without the necessary travel documents, leaving Cuba and following such a cosmopolitan lifestyle was not possible for Yanet, as is the case for many other street dancers in Havana. Travel was only made possible when she met and fell in love with a German man who eventually became her husband. As she remembered during the interview, her future husband had invited her to Germany before their marriage, but she was not able to obtain the required visa. Instead the couple married in Cuba, after which the German authorities allowed her entry to the country. Another six months passed before she could leave Cuba because she had to wait for authorization to live in a foreign country. Finally, she moved to Germany at the age of 23.

Once there, Yanet started to learn German and started teaching salsa and rumba in an established salsa school, building on her teaching experience in Havana. At the same time, Yanet was introduced to the festival circuit through an old Cuban friend of her family who already performed at several festivals annually. She performed with him and in this way started her career, performing and teaching at salsa festivals at weekends. She was now able to obtain a residence permit and thus travel to other European countries with no restrictions. In this way, through her dancing, her dream of travelling and participating in the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the salsa circuit came true.

As for many other non-European dancers I talked to, personal social networks such as friends or family members were decisive in dancers launching a career at European festivals. Making contacts and then organizing the necessary documents to obtain the right to travel and stay are barriers few dancers are able to overcome. For Yanet, her German husband proved to be pivotal, allowing her to obtain a residence permit and access the local salsa scene in Germany. At the same time, she relied on contacts her family had established previously to access the salsa circuit and perform at festivals.

Once in Europe, Yanet quickly recognized a growing interest in the Afro-Cuban and folkloric dances she knew from her childhood. Parallel to her teaching and performance activities in Europe, she therefore started to organize teaching opportunities at European festivals for family members and friends still in Cuba. However, this proved to be difficult and financially prohibitive. Therefore, she decided to take her European dance students, whom she had met at workshops at salsa events all over Europe, to Cuba. Yanet advertises her dance holidays with slogans such as ‘authentic experience’ and ‘cultural roots’. In doing so, she builds on a specific understanding of ‘Cubanness’ that she performs on particular occasions.

She describes herself as a cultural broker, enabling friends and family in Cuba ‘to have a job and transmit their culture.’ At the same time, she emphasizes that dance students from Europe ‘also get something,’ as they strive to learn the dances in the Cuban context. These tourists from Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway and other North and West European countries have the financial means to travel to Cuba and pay for dance lessons, simply requiring a tourist visa. The direction of movement here and Yanet’s insuccess in organizing for Cuban dance students to come to Europe point to unequal global power dynamics. Yanet’s trajectory shows how dancers, once participating in the salsa circuit themselves, may try to include other individuals, thus connecting the European salsa circuit with localized, immobilized dancers elsewhere.

Teaching incoming tourists

Since the 1990s, tourism in Cuba has been growing as a result of the authorities’ efforts to develop international tourism as a path out of the economic hardship Cuba faced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many musicians and dancers engage in the informal tourist economy, attempting to share in the opportunities offered by the growth of cultural tourism. Tourists in Havana often seek a genuine experience of learning and dancing salsa in Cuba ‘with Cuban dance partners’. Organizers thus advertise dance holiday packages, catering to the visitors’ wish to dance with Cubans on Cuban soil.

One of the dancers teaching visitors in Havana is Frank, a man in his late forties who has been dancing and teaching casino for over twenty years. I met him during an organized salsa holiday where he was acting as a dance partner for female participants during lessons.

Frank learned to dance ‘in the street,’ as he told me, and never had any formal training. During his interview, he nevertheless insisted that he was a professional dance teacher, keen on passing his knowledge on to motivated people. Describing a French student who believed he knew the steps better than his Cuban teacher, he stated: ‘casino is mine, it’s Cuban. Nobody can take that away from me, it comes from my country.’ Frank thus positioned himself as the rightful owner of Cuban dances, mobilizing a symbolic resource available to him in an otherwise restricted space for manoeuvre. While he enjoyed teaching European tourists, he also referred to the organizational challenges of his dependence on the seasonal rhythms of tourism. Whenever a befriended dance holiday organizer or a student called him to work, he had to drop everything else. At the same time, during the low season there was practically no work for dancers like him. Frank thus managed his life in Havana based on the influx of tourists and their requests.

Frank told me that he did not approve of the numerous young Cubans who left the island with tourists they had met in Havana’s salsa space. He himself rarely had the opportunity to leave the country. The first time he was able to travel was when he was working as a tourist animator on a cruise ship, and the second time when he travelled with a performance group to several countries in Europe. He returned to Cuba and continued teaching salsa to tourists at a dance school in Havana, as well as working as a dancer for organized salsa holidays. His second attempt to teach at a small salsa event in Europe, organized by a dancer he had befriended, failed because he could not get the necessary visa: ‘It’s not that I don’t like to travel, it’s just that I haven’t been given the opportunity yet. One day it will come, I don’t despair.’ Although Frank would like to travel to festivals in other countries and partake in the salsa circuit, he told me that he could only imagine travelling to another place if he could also work there: ‘I’d like to travel, but for work. I don’t like to go on holidays. You know why? The moment I go on holidays, I depend on another person (…) The bills go on you. (…) No! I have two hands and two feet.’ He was conscious of the economic disparities between himself and his European students and discouraged by stories he had heard of men living abroad without work. Instead of becoming mobile himself, Frank remained in Havana, where he has been building up his professional career on the incoming flux of tourists. Facing asymmetric power dynamics, dancers like Frank find themselves at the edge of the salsa circuit, with no opportunity to partake in the transnational mobility of travelling artists, but capitalizing on the mobility of others.