Commentary

The other night, I happened to be in the vicinity and eavesdropped on a fellow salsera, who I believe is an ethnic Filipina, angrily retorting to her interrogator: “I’m American; that’s all you have to know.” Missing the conversation, I am not in the position to judge, but I can’t help speculating. Although we haven’t had a chance to talk beyond exchanging names, I have certainly been paying attention to her since I joined the local salsa community six months ago. She favors tight clothes in sharply contrasted colors, often showing a sizable area of bare skin, and her dance moves are unambiguously exaggerated with frequent hopping and skipping. An eye-catching presence on the dance floor, she is also popular and partners with many good dancers. I am unsure how much of her visibility is due to the fact that she looks Asian. Perhaps partly because of jealousy, I feel averse to her style and subconsciously do everything to avoid being like her. I wear rather conservative clothes, form-fitting but in decidedly obscure colors, and focus on dance techniques instead of overly explicit self-expression. It is curious – and sometimes irritating – that some men with whom both of us dance, be they African-American, White, or Latino, mix up the two of us. Her frustration, however, unexpectedly strikes a chord with me.

Recent controversies and policy changes in Salsaland remind me of the Los Angeles-based salsa band, Orquesta Tabaco y Ron, whose multinational members made those two items their joint badge of honor. The band’s most memorable album cover features tobacco-stained fingers holding a lighted cigar; the owner of a CD store in San Francisco’s Mission District showed it to me when I was still a novice in salsa. Aghast and confused, I failed to recognize the clandestine shacking up between salsa dancing and cigar smoking. Much later, I learned that the forbidden island in the Caribbean, while producing salsa, generated two famed byproducts – tobacco and rum. All of a sudden it dawned on me: those two siblings were inspirations for salsa! What illicit pleasures!

Tonight represents the eve of smoking in Michigan bars and clubs and personally I wish it had come years ago.  Smoke free will make the overall dancing experience much more pleasant odor wise.

Salsa costs money. While the recession persists, some of us may be priced out of the dance floor. Salsa clubs resort to selling water to make ends meet; otherwise they might as well cater to sedentary alcoholics who interpret dancing as wiggling one’s oversized bottom on a bar stool. The situation is pretty bad for us salseros/as. Could it be worse? Well, yes.

Salsa’s roots reside in Afro-Cuban dance. Originally practiced as part of a religious ceremony, the dance was essentially the only form of self-expression allowed among African slaves. When food was scarce, freedom unattainable, abuse and torture random and brutal, and death a constant threat, dance was not just artistic innovation or entertainment – it was life itself! True art, as an outlet for repressed emotion or a necessity for self-preservation, survives and thrives not only in boom time and abundance but also in sheer deprivation and abject misery. Adverse conditions can give rise to great art and creativity, often inadvertently.

On a recent night out at my regular dance place, I was “friended” three times in quick succession. That is, these guys somehow unanimously and almost simultaneously requested to be my “boyfriends.” I was a bit overwhelmed, thinking to myself that it was probably because of the weather – when the air is balmy, flowers bloom, and everything comes back to life after the long Midwest winter, desires buried at the bottom of our consciousness also begin to wake up from hibernation. Of course, as a veteran on the dance floor (albeit new to the Midwest), I am not unfamiliar with such dynamics. Whenever I’m in a relatively good mood and reasonably dressed (which generally means wearing a seven-dollar but carefully selected, form-fitting outfit newly bought from a second-hand clothing shop), there is a high chance that I’ll be “friended.” With hands lingering on me, I often hear the feigned surprise that someone as “sexy” as me can possibly have no boyfriend, and after that, a generous offer of fixing the “problem.” Despite the likelihood that they actually are, I hate to think of these guys as ferocious predators in a quintessential “singles’ bar,” which I have never been to and only learned about from indirect sources. Those who “friended” me are, in fact, guys with whom I love to dance and to chat sometimes between songs. In a technical sense, we are already “friends”, even though it’s not exactly deep friendship.

My great-grandmother had bound feet. Those were real “three-inch golden lilies.” Under her long cotton dress, the tips of her feet were barely visible. She had several pairs of embroidered silk shoes with gaudy colors, so tiny that even my six-year-old feet couldn’t fit in them.