Cover for Najera-Ramirez: Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos. Click for larger image

Dancing across Borders

Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos

One of the first anthologies to focus on Mexican dance practices on both sides of the border

Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos focuses specifically on Mexican dance practices on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays explore various types of Mexican popular and traditional dances and address questions of authenticity, aesthetics, identity, interpretation, and research methodologies in dance performance. Contributors include not only noted scholars from a variety of disciplines but also several dance practitioners who reflect on their engagement with dance and reveal subtexts of dance culture. Capturing dance as a living expression, the volume's ethnographic approach highlights the importance of the cultural and social contexts in which dances are practiced.

Contributors are Norma E. Cantú, Susan Cashion, María Teresa Ceseńa, Xóchitl C. Chávez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Renée de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. García, Rudy F. García, Chris Goertzen, Martha González, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell Rodríguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, José Sánchez Jiménez, and Alberto Zárate Rosales.

"This stimulating collection expands our understanding of Mexican dance's significance by employing dance as a prism through which to view broader sociocultural issues and meaning. It sets a new standard for anthropological dance studies far beyond its U.S.-Mexico focus."--Daniel Sheehy, author of Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

Olga Nájera-Ramírez is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Norma E. Cantú is a professor of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Brenda M. Romero is an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Related Titles

previous book next book
New German Dance Studies

Edited by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht

Squeeze This!

A Cultural History of the Accordion in America

Marion Jacobson

The Ecology of the Spoken Word

Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa

Michael A. Uzendoski and Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy

Bean Blossom

The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festivals

Thomas A. Adler

Child's Unfinished Masterpiece

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads

Mary Ellen Brown

Dance and the Alexander Technique

Exploring the Missing Link

Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and Luc Vanier

Spirits of Just Men

Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World

Charles D. Thompson Jr.

Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance

Igniting Citizenship

Yvonne Daniel