Overview

As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In Fitness Fiesta! Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable “south of the border”-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today.

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9781478026570

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Reviews

“Meticulously argued and persuasively written, Fitness Fiesta! will without a doubt expand the parameters of Latinx studies while sharply revealing how popular music and dance operate on multiple registers of reception. It sets the bar for future critical assessments of the unrelenting market demands for tropicalized Latinidad and will quickly take its place as a touchstone text in Latinx cultural studies.” -- Richard T. Rodríguez, author of * A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad * “We cannot underestimate the cultural damage that is done by the practices of misrepresentation of Latinidad and Latin music to which Zumba contributes. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau outlines why we must all take Zumba seriously, as it is one of the contemporary ways that global audiences come to understand, consume, and appropriate this very particular representation of Latinness. Fitness Fiesta! will be an instant classic.” -- Vanessa Díaz, author of * Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood *

“Meticulously argued and persuasively written, Fitness Fiesta! will without a doubt expand the parameters of Latinx studies while sharply revealing how popular music and dance operate on multiple registers of reception. It sets the bar for future critical assessments of the unrelenting market demands for tropicalized Latinidad and will quickly take its places as a touchstone text in Latinx cultural studies.” -- Richard T. Rodríguez, author of * A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad * “We cannot underestimate the cultural damage that is done by the practices of misrepresentation of Latinidad and Latin music to which Zumba contributes. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau outlines why we must all take Zumba seriously, as it is one of the contemporary ways that global audiences come to understand, consume, and appropriate this very particular representation of Latinness. Fitness Fiesta! will be an instant classic.” -- Vanessa Díaz, author of * Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood *

Author Information

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, also published by Duke University Press.

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