Through vivid descriptions of dances, spaces, and people, Juliet McMains’ Spinning Mambo into Salsa transported me to the New York City of my childhood and the Los Angeles of my young adulthood. My father emigrated from Cuba to the U.S. in 1959. In New York City, he would often go (when he could afford it) to the famed Palladium Ballroom in the early 1960s. As McMains explains, the Palladium was the “most popular venue for Latin dance music from 1947 to 1966” (30), and as a huge Latin music fan (and surely missing his native Cuba), my father was one of the many people who made up the racially diverse ballroom that McMains describes. To this day, my father insists that knowledge of “salsa” music must come first. You have to know the music in order to be able to tinker with its rhythmic intricacies. He still possesses a great knowledge of the music. We used to have first edition LPs of Tito Puente, Machito, and Tito Rodriguez in our house, and sometimes my father would casually mention that he saw such luminaries perform at the Palladium. He also had a huge collection of Fania All-Star records and liked to explain with pride that a particular melodic phrasing or rhythmic component was the specific “Cuban” element of the music we knew as salsa. Always one to assert his Cubanidad, my father wanted me and my brother to know that we were different from the Dominicans or Puerto Ricans who made up the majority of Latinos when we were growing up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. According to him, we had to be able to recognize the Cuban elements in Latin music so that we could always be aware of our cultural history. In his own way, my father expressed some of the important tensions within salsa that McMains examines in her book, namely, the commercialization of the form, debates around cultural tradition and “authenticity,” salsa aesthetics (both visual and sonic), and the way a form circulates through different national embodied identities.

McMains traces a meticulous history of salsa dance from the mambo dancers of the New York Palladium to the casino rueda dancers in Miami and to the salsa companies at Los Angeles salsa congresses and all over the world. In this multisited history, she deftly moves between salsa dance history and dance ethnography and offers up a rich portrait of the practitioners across decades while paying attention to the power dynamics, identity politics, and the marketplace that circulates the salsa product. She particularly pays close attention to the embodied exchanges between practitioners and their different styles and makes a wise methodological choice to allow these voices to emerge throughout her book. She writes, “Just because I used my own body as a vehicle through which to compare different dance styles does not mean that I privileged my experience over others. On the contrary, my physical dialogues with informants focus on understanding their embodied knowledge. I consider dances with informants to be interview in another language, one in which my whole body listens” (17). The importance of an ethnographer's awareness of her positionality vis-à-vis her subject matter bears mentioning since this is how dance studies, and its emphasis on embodied awareness has shifted the ways in which knowledge about others, past or present, is produced. Given that McMains is very forthcoming and detailed about her research methods and her geographical (New York, Miami, Los Angeles) and temporal scope (1997–2014 for her embodied experience, 2006–2009 for the bulk of material collected, and the 1940s to 2014 for the historical scope of the project), she knows how to weave her authorial presence throughout the book in a way that is both subtle when trying to give voice to the dancers yet forceful when asserting some of her more passionate points about the dance form. Although at times too self-aware, her authorial voice is never absent. McMains carefully guides the reader along turns and spins through the history of salsa.

McMains’ embodied research works alongside movement analysis, “oral history, archival research, and ethnography” (18), in addition to “video analysis and dance reconstruction” (18). “The tension between tradition and innovation” guides the organizational structure of the eight chapters (22). Additionally, the organization is not so much a linear history but, as McMains explains, “a spiral that circles back on itself, each layer adding more detail and complexity to the narrative” (22). She even suggests reading individual chapters in isolation, which helps professors assign a chapter or two without feeling the need for more thorough contextualization of the work. However, the rich history emerges through the way all eight chapters work together to both illuminate and complicate salsa dance history.

Each chapter covers a significant issue within salsa history. Chapter 1 looks at the difference between mambo and salsa and the practitioners of each style from the 1950s and 2000s. Chapter 2 addresses the development of the salsa dance and music scenes with the 1970s proving a crucial decade for both. Chapter 3 examines the difference between learning salsa in a studio versus learning salsa at home as part of one's embodied culture, while Chapter 4 eloquently frames the ongoing debate concerning when one should “break” (change direction): on count 1 or on count 2. McMains traces the debate back to differences in rhythmic expression between Cuba and Puerto Rico, but these differences play out on many dance floors, particularly in Los Angeles. When I moved to Los Angeles, I started to go out salsa dancing in the mid- to late 1990s, but I found I danced it differently. I had learned at home in a Cuban-Colombian household in New York City, where the emphasis on the 2 (as described in Chapter 4) is common. I used to get frustrated dancing with partners who had been studying Los Angeles on 1-style salsa because they would accuse me of being off the rhythm and would often not invite me to dance again. It was they who were wrong, I thought. Not one to give up, I began taking LA salsa lessons with many of the teachers McMains mentions, attending well-known salsa nightclub venues (I was probably dancing alongside McMains and never knew) and watching the performances of the burgeoning LA salsa spectacle scene with a mix of awe and concern. Eventually, I grew weary of the investments in particular forms of Latinidad that were required in order to, as Cindy Garcia (Reference Garcia2013) writes in her book Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, “make it on the dance floor,” and I stopped going altogether. As someone who has both learned salsa at home and at dance academies and has struggled with the expectations from the on-1 and on-2 camps respectively, I found myself personally invested in these two chapters. They are a welcome and necessary contribution to salsa history.

Chapters 5 and 6 look specifically at the ways salsa is danced in three distinct sites: Los Angeles, Miami, and Cuba. Los Angeles is known for its flashy, pyrotechnical displays, while Miami and Cuba examine the history and aesthetics of Cuban salsa, also known as casino rueda. Chapter 6 is concerned with cultural tourism in Cuba and how demand for a particular type of cultural product affects the presentation, marketing, and standardization of the style. Chapter 7 continues the theme of commoditization and examines the rise of the salsa congress alongside the rise of the World Wide Web. Of particular note in this chapter is the gendered analysis McMains makes when discussing how female dance practitioners were able to become successful salsapreneurs because of the Internet. Chapter 8 compares current extravagant salsa performances to the theatricalized mambo performances of the Palladium in the 1950s and 60s. The difference between the aesthetics of stage and those of the social dance floor is significant and really asserts the inherent spectacularity of salsa dance no matter the space or time period.

The more memorable claims in the book include McMains's coining the term “kineschizophonia” (50) to elaborate on what it means when one separates the dance from the performance of the music for which it was named. She explores how this term enabled the differences in style between Palladium-era and contemporary salsa. Later in the book, she suggests a working definition of salsa's “essence” (a loaded issue to be sure). She writes:

I like the idea of a community of dancers committed to creating social and political coalitions, but as her book demonstrates, salsa (like many culturally specific dance forms) is a space where this potential for coalitions is often complicated by racial, classed, geopolitical, and gendered embodied realities that do not sit together neatly, given the even more complicated histories of contact and conquest that brought forth the world of salsa to begin with. I hope that McMains will theoretically elaborate on this provocative claim in a future publication.

Toward the end, certain chapters took on a didactic tone, perhaps spurred by McMains's commitment to and passion for the salsa style and community. This is often the challenge dance scholars face when working with a dance community as either insiders, outsiders, or both (I am aware that each of these labels carries complex identity politics), especially when, as an author, one must think about the different audiences within and outside the community who will read the book. The book is not heavily theoretical, nor does it does it claim to be. I think it is important that McMains maintains her focus on her book's intended salsa community audience.

One might wish for a more relaxed, improvisational rhetorical tone to mirror the dynamism of salsa's style, history, and its practitioners both young and old. Would a more inventive writing style have detracted from the book's important historical details, voices, and dance analysis? I am convinced that dance scholars are capable of weaving through these multiple rhetorical registers and would encourage it more. There were some issues in the book with Spanish to English translations and transcriptions, and the spelling of el pueblo (the people), while correct in the index, was misspelled as el pueble throughout the main body of the text. Perhaps this was due to copy-editing issues or lack of Spanish grammatical fluency by the author, translator, and/or copyeditor, but these mistakes have particular political implications depending on the reader's “politics of location” (Rich Reference Rich, Lewis and Mills2003).

The collection of photographs and archival images is one of the strengths of the book. It helps paint a dynamic, corporeal picture, which serves as a welcome supplement to the text. Other strengths include its thorough bibliography, use of chapter endnotes (not having to flip to the end of the book should a citation or footnote be of interest), and its reasonably accessible tone. It seems geared toward a broad audience, from undergraduates to graduate students, who will appreciate the clarity of the methodologies used and the book's structure, from non-salseros to salsa novices to salsa aficionados, and perhaps most important, for the community of dancers McMains has gone to great lengths to represent with care, compassion, and respect. This book is a strong resource on the history of salsa, its transnational flows, and how these circuits of movement affect the practitioners, music, style, and ongoing history of the dance.