Danzón Days: Age, Race, and Romance in Mexico

Malcomson, Hettie (2023) Danzón Days: Age, Race, and Romance in Mexico , University of Illinois Press, 274pp.

Abstract

Through ethnographic research with danzón practitioners in Veracruz, Mexico, this book analyzes how music and dance intersect with aging, romance, nostalgia, and racial and national imaginaries. Most newcomers to danzón are over fifty years old, and the book argues that while younger people are often assumed to be the future of cultural practices, older practitioners form the new danzón generations. Older people’s romantic lives have been largely ignored in music-dance scholarship, and the book explores how they navigate romance and social mores in a context where most women are post-marriage and most men have wives and lovers. The book disrupts utopian accounts of music and dance as merely joyful and community-building, developing a typology of ambivalence as a thinking tool. It interrogates how ambivalences around the racialization of local people and danzón enable blackness to be expedient while simultaneously making racism invisible. It brings scholarship on nostalgia into conversation with ambivalence to examine how nostalgia simultaneously reproduces and erases inequalities. It explores how danzón underwent a non-heritage revival from the 1980s, and how the dance assumed a modernist aesthetic linked to elegance, whiteness, elite cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and colonial violence. And it analyzes dance group dynamics, exploring how intimacy threatens group cohesion. The book is structured like a danzón in rondo form (ABACAD): fictional vignettes appear between the academic chapters to illuminate the richness of danzón practitioners’ lives.

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