Dancing With The Virgin Analysis

Embracing the idea of movement as more than just dance is an overarching theme in Deidre Sklar’s “Dancing with the Virgin” and Cindy Garcia’s “Salsa Crossings”. Both ethnographies analyze the implication of movement in the establishment of the community. In “Dancing with the Virgin”, members of the community are brought together through collective memories that are embodied in the dance as well as the rest of the fiesta. In the world of “Salsa Crossings”, the intent is to establish identity in the increasingly homogenized culture of L.A. salsa.
Sklar tells a story of Billy’s mother Donna being in the hospital and Billy’s choice to bring up a memory that “brought her [Donna] back into the kitchen”, instead of acknowledging the circumstances of her health (Sklar 42). She describes moments such as these as “the movement of building memories...” implying that the interaction of shared memories is as much choreography as the …show more content…
Garcia’s depiction of L.A. salsa clubs presents their dance as an embodied vehicle for the greater struggles of identification. The wars between the dancers are the result of friction that stems from the desire to preserve many facets of L.A. salsa. Dissimilar to the movement in “Dancing with the Virgin”, the dance of L.A. salsa clubs does not seek to unite the community, nor does it seek to form a definitive divide. On the contrary, it is the embodiment of the tension between the two. She depicts this interaction in terms of war saying that “the wars over salsa practices are not simply contestations over how to imagine and put latinidad into motion. The wars pit bodies against bodies, determining which bodies matter to latinidad” (Garcia 8). There is an established tension between the practitioners that are in favor of homogenization and practitioners who do not wish to lose their differentiation and that tension is embodied in the dance itself. Garcia discusses this saying