Under colonial repression and the rationalizing ideals of Enlightenment thought, one practice has long carried the pulse of resistance: dance. Habla! explores how the dancing body speaks - how, through movement, sound, and rhythm, Latinx American communities enact forms of knowing and being that "talk back" to colonial modernity. Centering the traditions of Puerto Rican bomba, Mexican son jarocho, and the global phenomenon of perreo, Jade Power-Sotomayor reveals how these practices transform the body into a site of worldbuilding, social critique, and survival. Introducing the concept of "embodied code-switching" - the corporeal strategies people use to move across cultural, linguistic, and affective registers - Power-Sotomayor traces how dancing navigates and disrupts the logics of separability, ownership, and extraction that underpin Western colonial thought. From bomba's dialogue between dancer and drummer to perreo's unapologetic assertion of a pleasure and power rooted in interdependence, Habla! shows how these embodied traditions sustain collective life and offer new grammars of relation. Through performance, community practice, and activist projects, !Habla! demonstrates how the dancing, sounding body continues to generate meaning, connection, and possibility. In its motion - rooted and mobile at once - the dancing body speaks beyond words, carrying forward the histories and futures of Latinx America, and remapping the contours of Our America.
Jade Power Sotomayor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego.
"!Habla! Speaking Bodies and Dancing Latinx America listens deeply to the flesh, attending to how movement carries knowledge, memory, and feeling. At the crossroads of dance studies, decolonial thought, and embodied ways of knowing, this beautiful and generous book understands dancing bodies as living archives of history, survivance, and world-building across Latinx America. Writing with care, lyric grace, and political urgency, the author hears theory emerge through flesh, rhythm, and motion. Moving through bomba, son jarocho, and perreo, the book shows how dance holds histories of displacement, racialized violence, and collective endurance, while opening space for more connected, sustaining ways of being together. !Habla! stays with you--in your body, your listening, your sense of what it means to be human in relation. It is a necessary and transformative work that reminds us how bodies speak when words fall short, and how dancing helps make life livable."-- "Patricia Herrera, author of Nuyorican Feminist Performances: From the Cafe to Hip Hop Theater"
