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Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. xiii, 239 pp. Figures, tables, notes, glossary, works cited, index. ISBN 0-8165-2632-X.
While salsa and merengue are now popular topics for academic study, few scholars have thoroughly investigated Mexican American dance styles. Sydney Hutchinson, a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University, attempts to fill this gap by exploring quebradita, a Mexican American dance style that exploded in popularity across the southwestern United States during the early to mid-1990s. Accompanied by the brassy, electronic sound of tecnobanda, quebradita dance is recognizable by its wildly acrobatic flips, fancy leg- and footwork, hat tricks, and Western wear. Though the craze was relatively short-lived, Hutchinson draws on personal interviews in order to comment on the political and social significance that the dance played in the lives of Mexican American youth, drawing connections to its emergence during a decade of anti-immigration and English-only legislation. Hutchinson ends her story by describing a similar yet distinct style of dance from Chicago, the pasito duranguense, which, she argues, currently fulfills equivalent social and political functions for Mexican American teenagers.
In her introductory chapter, Hutchinson describes her first ethnographic encounter with the quebradita at a dance contest in Jalisco, Mexico. This compelled her to pursue specific research objectives: first, to learn more about the aesthetics of the music and the dance; second, to discover their relationship to other forms of Mexican and Mexican American expressive culture; third, to unearth opinions regarding the origins of the dance; and finally, to explore the role quebradita played in the lives of individuals, particular in terms of ethnicity and class relations. In the remainder of the chapter, she delves into the theoretical foundations of her work, describes her ethnographic and Web-based research methods, and states her eventual goal of increasing readers' appreciation of the quebradita dance.
Drawing on the foundational work of Rubén Campos (1928), Manuel Peña (1985), and Helena Simonett (2001), to name a few, Hutchinson begins Chapter 2 ("Music and Meaning on the Border") by attempting to synthesize these diverse explorations...