Sydney Hutchinson’s From Quebradita to Duranguense presents an intricate world of music and dance full of complex relationships between the dancers and their environment, and shows how through this dance Hispanic migrants, normally a marginalized and “invisible” social group, acquire recognition and respect from other communities in the United States. Through the study of quebradita, at the micro and macro levels, Hutchinson addresses topics such as migration, ethnicity, mestizaje, hybridity, transnationalism, gender, race, class, and generational gaps. Hutchinson’s main interest is not the music but rather the experience of dancing quebradita. She argues that “conflict over the quebradita, as expressed in the discourse surrounding the dance,” (13) demonstrates the “uniqueness of youth experiences on the border” (12).
As a border region phenomenon, quebradita, or more specifically, the dancers, quebradores, appropriated different dance elements from musical genres such as norteña, banda, technobanda, Mexican cumbia, and other Mexican-American music. Since quebradita is a dance born on the border between Mexico and the United States, Hutchinson agues that the dancers “[created] a dance that expressed both the conflicts and the uniqueness of the Mexico-U.S. border region” (9). According to Hutchinson, the quebradita culture provides a space for creating and combining different cultural elements. This combination of elements flourishes in border areas, these “in-between lands, ambivalent sites of instability and potential conflict” where they offer “the possibility of change, the exploration of alternative paths, and the forging of new identities” (9). But Hutchinson does not limit the idea of the border to the political and geographical; for her, the border is “a region of culture contact” (9). Her research spans the terrain from Hermosillo, Mexico, to Tucson, Los Angeles, and Chicago, sites of high degrees of culture contact. At the time of her research, the so-called golden era of the quebradita was being displaced by the pasito duranguense; even so, Hutchinson was able to trace the history and the impact of quebradita in the Latino youth culture in the United States.
Hutchinson divides her book into seven chapters. In the first chapter she introduces the world of quebradita by sharing her first encounter with the dance and music, during a vacation trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, prior to beginning her graduate studies at Indiana University. The first chapter presents an overview of the work, theoretical foundation, and main research questions. In her second chapter Hutchinson takes us deeper into the musical world of Mexican/Mexican-American music and presents the development of quebradita and the current state of the music. Her principal argument in this chapter is that while many people consider banda a hollow and tasteless music, in reality banda musicians make strong statements about current social realities by the use of “an aesthetic system that subverts middle-class culture and insists on strong ties to roots” (49). In the third chapter Hutchinson provides insight into the world of quebradita as it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She discusses the clothing trends, dance steps, venues for dancing (school performances, competitions, dance halls), and how the idea of lo ranchero (ranch or country style) is embedded in quebradita aesthetics. In chapters 4 and 5 she focuses on the communities of Los Angeles and Tucson to demonstrate “the importance of the dance in that place and time” (19). In the case of Los Angeles, the quebradita scene ran parallel to the local gang scene. And while the general population normally equated these activities, thinking that dancing quebradita was part of gang culture, in many situations dancing and participating in a quebradita club provided an alternative social space for young people who were not members of gangs but were looking for a social support network. In her discussion of the quebradita scene in Tucson, Hutchinson focuses on the relationship of the dancer to the larger community at national and transnational levels. Moreover, the research area closest to the U.S.-Mexico border, the Tucson case, allowed Hutchinson to expand on the history of the development of quebradita and how different groups define the music/dance. In this chapter she also mentions differences between the quebradita scene in Mexico and in the United States. The principal difference, according to Hutchinson, is that while banda music in Mexico was considered a tool of class resistance, in the United States, banda was a tool of both class and cultural resistance (166). In the sixth chapter, Hutchinson compares the quebradita movement to that of duranguense in Chicago.
The sixth chapter serves as a transition into the last chapter of the book where Hutchinson discusses the popularity of pasito duranguense in recent years, the continual transformation of Mexican-American and Mexican music (for example the development of the chuntaro style), and the influence of banda in other musical genres (such as in rock latino). She locates pasito duranguense and quebradita in a “continuum of border youth cultures” (20). Hutchinson concludes her work with the hope that through the understanding and appreciation of minority cultural production, national and state agencies, policy makers, teachers, and community activists can recognize the importance of popular music and dance in the healthy development of the young people of this country.
Before reading Hutchinson’s work I did not fully appreciate the significance of banda and quebradita; I now have a newfound respect for what they represent. If at times her argument seems too tightly packaged, it is clear that Hutchinson is thorough in dissecting and presenting the somewhat contradictory elements that come together in quebradita and banda, showing how they relate to larger national and transnational phenomena. Hutchinson’s work is a fine contribution to the literature in Mexican-American studies.
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[Review length: 928 words • Review posted on July 8, 2008]