Christofer Rodelo

Humanities

Chicano/Latino Studies
UC Irvine

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So Moved: Dance, Migration, and the Making of Latinx New York

So Moved: Dance, Migration, and the Making of Latinx New York is an innovative cultural history of Latinx dance from the 1920s to the 1950s. I argue that dance cultures in New York City, including modern and ballet dance, were essential to the incorporation of Latinx migrants to the United States. In particular, I insist that dance became a resource of self-making and self-identification for Latinxs across ethnic and racial groups in the wake of increased migration from Latin America to the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Latinx dancers and choreographers took to creating their own works in relation to White, Black, Asian, Native, and other minoritized subjects as ways to contest and imagine new worlds for themselves. In doing so, they served as active participants in shaping the developing of American dance as a cultural institution. This project brings to light these often-occluded figures—including Francisco Moncion, Nicholas Magallanes, Josefina Garcia, Rosa Rolanda Covarrubias, and Jose Martinez. I write these histories through a focus on the duet, foregrounding the personal and artistic relationships between different performers across the project as a methodological intervention in performance historiography. Using newspapers, photographs, letters, and other ephemera, I reconstruct these dance histories—and the relationships that sustained them, from more than a dozen institutional and private archives. In doing so, I model a mode of aesthetic historical scholarship that makes significant interventions in Latinx studies, dance and performance studies, and queer American literary and cultural history of the twentieth century.