While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

Winner, Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize in Dance Research, 2014
Honorable Mention, Sally Banes Publication Prize, American Society for Theatre Research, 2014
de la Torre Bueno® Special Citation, Society of Dance History Scholars, 2013

From Christopher Columbus to “first anthropologist” Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and travelers wrote about the “Indian” dances they encountered throughout the New World. This was especially true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented native dances in an attempt to identify and eradicate the “idolatrous” behaviors of the Aztec, the largest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica at the time of its European discovery.

Dancing the New World traces the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony through written and visual representations of dance in colonial discourse—the vast constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and travel books by Europeans in and about the New World. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing body to represent their own experiences of wonder and terror in the New World, as well as to justify, lament, and/or deny their role in its political, spiritual, and physical conquest. He also reveals that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an understanding that dance played an important role in the formation, maintenance, and representation of imperial power, and describes how Spaniards compelled Indians to perform dances that dramatized their own conquest, thereby transforming them into colonial subjects. Scolieri’s pathfinding analysis of the vast colonial “dance archive” conclusively demonstrates that dance played a crucial role in one of the defining moments in modern history—the European colonization of the Americas.

An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos.

Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.

Capoeira began as a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, the practice incorporates song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation—and leads many participants into activism.

Lauren Miller Griffith’s extensive participant observation with multiple capoeira groups informs her ethnography of capoeiristas--both individuals and groups--in the United States. Griffith follows practitioners beyond their physical training into social justice activities that illuminate capoeira’s strong connection to resistance and subversion. As both individuals and communities of capoeiristas, participants march against racial discrimination, celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, organize professional clothing drives for job seekers, and pursue economic and environmental justice in their neighborhoods. For these people, capoeira becomes a type of serious leisure that contributes to personal growth, a sense of belonging, and an overall sense of self, while also imposing duties and obligations.

An innovative look at capoeira in America, Graceful Resistance reveals how the practicing of an art can catalyze action and transform communities.

The painful sixty-year process that brought Nicaragua from colonial status to incipient nation-state is the focus of this fresh examination of inner struggle in a key isthmian country. E. Bradford Burns shows how Nicaragua's elite was able to consolidate control of the state and form a stable government, resolving the bitter rivalry between the two cities Le&oacu;n and Granada, but at the same time began the destruction of the rich folk culture of the Indians, eventually reducing them to an impoverished and powerless agrarian proletariat.

The history of this nation echoes that of other Latin American lands yet is peculiarly its own. Nicaragua emerged not from a war against Spain but rather from the violent interactions among the patriarchs of the dominant families, the communities of common people, and foreigners. Burns is eloquent on the subject of American adventurism in Nicaragua, which culminated in the outrageous expedition of the filibuster William Walker and his band of mercenaries in the 1850s. It was a major breach of the trust and friendship Nicaraguans had extended to the United States, and the Nicaraguans' subsequent victory over the foreign invaders helped forge their long-delayed sense of national unity.

The decimation of Nicaraguan archives for the period prior to 1858 renders the study of early nineteenth-century history especially challenging, but Burns has made ingenious use of secondary sources and the few published primary materials available, including travelers' accounts and other memoirs, newspapers, government reports, and diplomatic correspondence. He provides valuable insight into Nicaraguan society of the time, of both the elite and the folk, including a perceptive section on the status and activities of women and the family in society. This book will appeal not only to professional historians but to general readers as well.