RONALD-DISSERTATION-2016.Pdf (1.565Mb)

Kirsten Marie Ronald

2016

The Dissertation Committee for Kirsten Marie Ronald

Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Dancing the Local: Two-step and the Formation of

Local Cultures, Local Places, and Local Identities in Austin, TX

Committee:

______Steven Hoelscher, Supervisor

______Janet Davis

______John Hartigan

______Jeff Meikle

______Jason Mellard

______Rebecca Rossen Pavkovic

Dancing the Local: Two-step and the Formation of

Local Cultures, Local Places, and Local Identities in Austin, TX

Kirsten Marie Ronald, B.A., B.S., M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2016

Dedication

In memory of

Jerome Brooks Ronald, Jr.

Acknowledgements

This is a study of Austin’s two-step dance scene and of the ways dancers create local cultures, local places, and local identities through dance. It has been a wonderfully social project, and it could not have happened without the kindness and support of many people, both on and off the dance floor. As promised, to protect the identities of dancers and interviewees, names within these pages have been changed unless the person has expressly given me permission to use their real name; public figures within the scene, such as venue owners, teachers, and musicians, are also referred to by their real names. Within these bounds, however, there are many, many people I wish to thank. For their insight into the inner workings of the dance scene, many thanks to Pat Cosgrove, Mark Holcomb, Mateo Barrerra, Peter Turner, Matt Jones, Nick Ybarra, Jaime Moreno, Elizabeth McGreevy, Shaan Shirazi, Brendon Bigelow, Rhonda Morin, Thea Williamson, Nicole Contero, Ben Ruggiero, Celeste Villareal, Eunice Garza, Ben Lynch, Leslie Williams and Jen Nezzar. Ricardo Lerma, Elizabeth Howe, Liz Klein, Dan Hardick, John Carbone, Danny Swan, Laura Malloy, and Keith Byrd have helped me think critically about the thing I love so much. Houston Ritcheson, Kelly Cunningham, and Scott Browning have been the best co-teachers a girl could ask for. Terra Gravitt keeps me safe. Denis O’Donnell and Nathan Hill have been kind enough to talk with me at length about running the White Horse and to let me teach two-step there for going on four years. And without Mandy Harrell and Josh Lightnin, I probably wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. On the business end of things, thanks to my chair, Steve Hoelscher, and my committee, John Hartigan, Rebecca Rossen, Janet Davis, Jeff Meikle and Jason Mellard, for supporting such a resolutely local dissertation. Jeannette Vaught read and commented on Chapter 2 and helped me figure out a lot of the stuff that goes unsaid. Thanks also to Anne Gessler, John Cline, Andrew Busch, Sean Cashbaugh,

Brendan Gaughan, Carly Kocurek, and Cary Cordova for making academia a more hospitable place, and to Christine and Jon Law for giving me a home away from home. Finally, thanks to Barbara McBride and Noelle Ronald Heyman: your support throughout this project is what got me through it. I can’t thank you enough.

Dancing the Local: Two-step and the Formation of

Local Communities, Local Places, and Local Identities in Austin, TX

Kirsten Marie Ronald, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2016

SUPERVISOR: Steven Hoelscher

This dissertation uses Austin’s two-step country dance scene to examine the construction of the local in American culture. Two-step is a social dance that is central to country music culture in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Southwest. Without a central governing body, the form and social norms associated with the dance vary across dance communities, which means that dancers use two-step to both construct and express their local culture. In Austin, the local two-step scene is a conservative response to neoliberal globalization, which many dancers feel is destroying Austin’s unique identity and culture. Here, the local operates along four interrelated dimensions. As a scene, the local is constituted through the performance of traditional gender roles; as a place, it is preserved and policed via social and structural constraints; as a form of belonging, it is a whiteness that is shaped by the Mexican and Mexican-American bodies and practices that it excludes;

vii and as a scale, it is a terrestrially bound social formation that is inextricable from the global culture it purports to resist. Many cultural theorists emphasize the progressive potential of the local. However, the inner workings of Austin’s two-step scene suggest that the local can just as easily espouse an insular, exclusive politics, even in a supposedly progressive city.

viii

Table of Contents Introduction: It’s Just Dancing ...... 1 Dancing to America’s Music ...... 5 The Little Town South of Round Rock, Texas ...... 10 Local Contexts and Contestations ...... 18 Dancing the Local in Austin ...... 18 Chapter 1: Sometimes, When Guys are Being Creepy, They’re Not Kidding ...... 34 Gendering the Honkytonk ...... 38 Of Style and Substance ...... 49 Choreographies of Gender ...... 62 Teaching Girls to Dance ...... 73 Conclusion ...... 85 Chapter 2: Two-Step Turf Wars ...... 87 The Pull of Place ...... 90 Old Texas, Real Texas ...... 102 There is No Dance Floor at the White Horse ...... 113 The Honkiest Tonkiest Beer Joint in Town ...... 123 Conclusion ...... 134 Chapter 3: Dancing Belonging on Austin’s East Side ...... 137 The Embodied Aesthetics of Gentrification ...... 140 You can’t have a Mexican Plaza without Mexicans ...... 152 Belonging in an East Austin Honkytonk ...... 162 Dancing Like a Texan ...... 172 Conclusion ...... 186 Chapter 4: Tourists Behaving Badly in Honkytonks ...... 189 Producing Scale on the Dance Floor ...... 192 The Best Souvenir Ever ...... 199 Everybody’s Somebody in Luckenbach ...... 212 Two-step in Translation ...... 225

Conclusion ...... 240 Conclusion: Another Night in the Same Old Bar ...... 242 Works Cited ...... 245

Introduction: It’s Just Dancing

Everything interesting begins with one person in one place… The universal is the local, but with the walls taken away. Out of the particular we come on what is general. - John McGahern1

Houston, Terra and I pull up to the Broken Spoke at 7:50 on a warm April Tuesday night, just ten minutes before Weldon Henson is scheduled to start his set. The parking lot, now greatly reduced by the big condo buildings going up on either side of the old dance hall, is already full of pickup trucks, with more trolling the few spots that remain. Houston parks a little bit north in the big lot by Kerbey Lane and we walk over. Though I’ve come out to two-step to Weldon every Tuesday for over a year, this is the first time I’ve been to the Spoke since February, and things are noticeably different. The condo building to the north of the venue has retail spaces on its ground floor and “708” – the name of the complex – is embedded in brass in its freshly-poured sidewalks; the storefront windows are high and glossy, with permits taped to their doors, and we can see the construction of the new bars and eateries within as we walk by. Newly-installed floodlights reveal that the Spoke, perhaps inspired by its new neighbors, has gotten a bit of a facelift: they have a new neon sign, fresh and clean, with a little billboard below the big wagon wheel that says “voted best dance hall in Texas!”, and the lot has been regraded with fresh, even gravel. When I point out that the sign is new, Houston says jokingly, “yeah, and don’t go parking your janky trucks out front, neither; we gotta keep this place neat!” “It won’t be here much longer,” I say, looking up at the massive condo buildings on either side and then at a big banner strapped to the front of the building that says “Happy 49th Anniversary! 1964.” It’s 2014, their 50th anniversary, and despite their up-to-date new neighbors, they haven’t yet bothered to change it.

1 John McGahern, Love of the World: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2009), 11. Cited in John Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 5 (2013): 667.

We pull open the door to go inside and Amanda Cevallos is singing in the little front room that serves as a restaurant and all the tables are full and the room is silent, listening: old people, men in white button-down shirts, a few tourists, a young couple with a girl with long, straightened hair and a sequined gold and black striped top and a guy in a navy polo with fading bruises on his face and a large, stitched scar over his right eyebrow. Houston and Terra walk straight to the chute to the left of the bar, where you go into the dance hall. I turn to follow them but the door to the hall is closed, so they order drinks and I look around at the generations of memorabilia tucked into every nook and cranny, a “Tourist Trap” that is both a tribute to previous generations of singers and dancers and dance hall patrons and a gentle mocking of those “tourists” who think they can glean decades of country culture by looking at a bunch of dusty old pictures. Just before eight, the dance hall door flaps open and we can see a woman with dark hair going back and forth between the register and the bar, probably moving the cash box over, and then they let us in. Houston goes first and pays for himself and Terra, and I pay for myself after - $5, and she cards me. The girl in the sequined top comes in right behind us; she eyes Terra’s and my dresses and asks “are y’all gonna two-step?” Terra says “hell yeah!” and I say “are you?” and the girl says “Hell no, we’re from Idaho, I don’t know how. We’re just gonna watch you all dance.” I say “people dance in Idaho!” and she says Yeah, some people do, and tucks her chin up into her neck and laughs a little. “Not me,” this says. I won’t be dancing. I don’t belong here. We make our way up to the second tier of tables on the north side of the building, where the Tuesday night crew usually sits. Houston says hi to Mike Bernal, the drummer for Dale Watson, a short, stocky little man, fun and intense and active, dark plastic- framed glasses and a black walking cap, and he introduces himself to me. I say hi and we chat for a few beats. When the band starts, the floor is still pretty open – a fair number of dancers, but none that I recognize. Since Terra is frowning at her phone and Houston is frowning at his beer, I ask Houston to dance. That must have been the magical hour,

because by the second song I start to realize that I know a lot of people around me: Hunter, Kelly and Didi, Eric and Alyssa, Jesse. As we round the stage (dance at the Spoke still proceeds counter-clockwise), Ricky Davis, Weldon’s steel player, makes faces at Houston, and Houston starts smiling. The floor is actually not like an ice rink for once. People say they put the dance salt down on Thursdays, and since it’s Tuesday it’s the perfect texture: smooth but not overly slippery. I look up as we head down the floor toward the back of the room and see the girl in the sequins and her boyfriend with the black eye at a table right next to the floor. He’s sulkily nursing his beer and staring at his phone; she, on the other hand, can’t take her eyes off the dance floor.

***

Like many “creative” cities – Portland, Asheville, Seattle – Austin has a long history of both fostering its local artistic and cultural scenes and marketing these vibrant scenes to well-heeled consumers in search of authentic local culture. This combination of local cultural production and cultural tourism is still alive and well at honkytonks and dance halls like the Broken Spoke, where dancers gather weekly to dance, drink, and socialize to live music; the skilled dancing of the Tuesday night regulars both structures a tight-knit, deeply rooted community and constitutes a spectacle of local Texas culture for those tourists and non-dancers who happen to stop by. Yet the Spoke, dwarfed by its hulking new neighbors and made shabbier by bright lights, fresh gravel and a neat new sign, also highlights the difficulties of managing Austin’s explosive growth while preserving existing cultural institutions within the urban landscape. While they are designed to foster community, with street-level storefronts and dense condos above, the new buildings on either side of the Spoke represent a dramatically different logic of the local from that of the old dance hall between them. As a vernacular structure, the Spoke is meant to be lived in, not looked at; its ramshackle exterior, out-of-date sign, fifty-year-old plumbing,

and perfectly smooth dance floor clearly reflect the priorities of the vibrant participatory community within. By contrast, the condos, with their solid concrete walls and homogeneous glass storefronts, seem cold and imposing by comparison. In a city that has long prided itself on being “weird” and human, these new buildings seem out of place, even as they serve as harbingers of the new local that is likely to come. This is a study of what it means to be “local” in Austin, Texas, as experienced ethnographically in the city’s vibrant two-step dance scene. It is a study of Austin’s dance culture from the inside, on its own terms, with all the loving and leaving and drinking and fighting – and, of course, dancing – that make it both unique to Austin and connected to “overproductive signifying communities” everywhere.2 In these pages I examine how dancers in Austin shape the local, and how the local shapes them: how they use dance to shape spaces and communities around dancing, how they construct value systems and social networks based on the dance event, and how they use dancing to make sense of, and in many cases resist, both the pop country music industry and the cultural, economic, and geographic changes that Austin’s dramatic growth brings. This is thus also a study of the local itself: what it means, how it operates, how it is connected to other geographic scales, and what, if any, politics it might have. The local is, of course, not a new concept. Yet despite renewed interest in the local as both a respite from an impersonal cosmopolitan world and a commodity promising the comforts of home, community, and belonging, we still know relatively little about what it means to be local, to do local, in the context of neoliberal globalization. As John Tomaney argues, much of the work on local cultural production is done from a cosmopolitan perspective, one that values the big picture over the small one.3 This is certainly true in country music studies, where Aaron Fox’s work in Lockhart, Texas, is still a rare example of local country music culture

2 Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock “N” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 122. 3 Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence.”

understood on its own terms.4 It is also true, oddly enough for a discipline that focuses on the body, in dance studies, where Cindy Garcia’s study of salsa in Los Angeles is one of only a few recent works that examines local club culture from the inside.5 Yet life is lived locally, if for no other reason than what Tomaney, paraphrasing Mike Savage, calls “the embodied nature of our dispositions and the necessity of their territorial location.”6 As this study shows, examining local places, communities, identities and politics on their own terms, from what Tuan calls “the perspective of experience,” provides a detailed, nuanced, and messy understanding of local life that is inaccessible from any other perspective.7 What better way to examine the changes in local culture – American culture – than from the vantage point of life as it is lived?

Dancing to America’s Music8 Two-step is the partner dance associated with “traditional” country music and, by extension, with Texas as a mythic origin of American culture. It is also a regional social dance that is danced primarily in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, with studio-supported pockets in other parts of the United States. There is a competition circuit, but the competition form, with its emphasis on clean visual lines, perfect footwork, and pre-determined choreographies, rarely interacts with

4 Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 5 Cindy Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013). 6 John Tomaney, “Region and Place 2: Belonging,” Progress in Human Geography, July 8, 2014, 1. This argument is based on that made in Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst, Globalization and Belonging, Theory, Culture and Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2005). 7 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 5–18. 8 Country dance choreographer Robert Royston begins all of his HowCast dance tutorials with an encouragement to “experience what it's like to move to America's music, and that's country music.” Country music is differentiated (as he explains in his tutorial on the Cupid Shuffle) from hip-hop and, presumably, other non-American musics. The exclusionary racial and ethnic politics of this claim underlie much, but not all, of country music culture. See https://youtu.be/iJH6Ce588Mc

the dance’s social forms.9 Rather, two-step is the culture of country music as it is produced and experienced locally, in the bodies of dancers and musicians, in honkytonks and bars and dance halls and living rooms, at quinceaneras and balls and weddings and weeknight dance events. As American social dances have long done, two-step serves as the backbone of interaction at these social events, with a basic step that is embedded in rules about, among other things, where dancing is appropriate, who may ask whom to dance, how to say yes or no, how to manage space, which moves to use and when, how to make pleasant conversation and how to know when good chemistry on the floor might translate to good chemistry off it. The dance shapes, and is shaped by, the dance scene. But two-step is also a way of knowing, an embodied, movement-based way for dancers to make sense of the world and of their position within it. While country music scholars are currently making substantial inroads into the critical analysis of country music as culture, two-steppers still largely serve as the backdrop to the music. So, for that matter, do the unique local spaces in which country music is consumed and produced.10 In some ways, this emphasis on music over dance in country music scholarship is understandable, given that music is far easier to record, distribute, and play back than dance. Further, as Joe Schloss points out, social dance, with its emphasis on the dancers’ pleasure in dancing over any audience’s pleasure in viewing, is often only interesting to other dancers, thus making it more difficult to commodify and market to non-dancers in the way that music is marketed to non-

9 Juliet McMains distinguishes between ballroom and social dancing and argues that the two have evolved separately, with separate value systems. While there are ballroom dancers in Austin’s two- step scene, they dance socially; her differentiation between the two seems largely to hold. See Juliet McMains, “Dancing Latin/ Latin Dancing,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 302–22; Juliet McMains, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), chap. 2. The two major country western dance competition circuits are the United Country Western Dance Council (UCWDC) and the American Country Dance Association (ACDA); see http://www.ucwdc.org/ and http://www.americancountrydanceassociation.com/ for details. 10 Aaron Fox’s work is a notable exception.

musicians.11 Yet two-step has long been key to country music’s association among rustic, white working-class communities, “real” American values, and Texas as a key site of American cultural production because it is in local dance communities and scenes where these broader connections are actively negotiated. Despite Katrina Hazzard-Gordon’s important work on dance in African-American honkytonks, the honkytonk, glorified in Bill Malone’s work as the (white) working-class drinkin’ and fightin’ club where country music began, continues to be an important cultural site in the lyrics, scholarship, and culture centered around “America’s music.”12 Urban Cowboy, for instance, centered its tragicomic analysis of the plight of the white working class around Gilley’s, the “world’s largest honkytonk,” and, as Jason Mellard documents, the accompanying national fad for Texas chic imagined Texas as the heart of American culture, even as it caricatured and aestheticized Texan identity, Texan spaces, and Texan ways of life.13 The Texas dance hall is no less important in the construction of country culture. As Gail Folkins argues in Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit (2007), dance halls in Texas have long served as a “cultural crossroads,” supporting travelling musicians’ explorations of Texas-specific musical forms even as they serve as local community centers.14 Her conception of dance halls as simultaneously global and local places for music positions two-step at a similar crossroads. In tourist-oriented publications like Texas Monthly and Texas Highways, two-step is often packaged and sold as Texanness, the kind of “pure Texas

11 Joseph G. Schloss, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12 See Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., Second Revised Edition (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002); Barbara Ching and Pamela Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic - Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt country Music,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt country Music, ed. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1–27; Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock “N” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. 13 Jason Dean Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), chap. 5. 14 Gail Folkins, Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2007). For a history of country music and western swing in Texas dance halls, see Jean A. Boyd, The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998).

moment” that makes an outsider feel at home in a strange land.15 And in Austin, much of the two-step is done (and watched) in self-styled honkytonks and dance halls in homage to these important cultural spaces, and many dancers regularly take trips to dance halls in the hill country for a sampling of “real” two-step culture. Like cumbia, conjunto, zydeco, and other “folk” dances, two-step is closely associated with the deeply rooted culture of a particular region, so that doing these dances in their places of origin is constructed as an important way of accessing local and regional cultures. Further, like other folk practices, two-step can function as a kind of escapist folk fantasy, where local culture serves as an escape from globalization that is (paradoxically) structured by the very forces it attempts to flee.16 In practice, two-step often functions more like a social than a folk dance, but it retains the deep connections to place, community, and “dwelling” that folk dance suggests. As Julie Malnig argues, in social dance, “a sense of community often derives less from preexisting groups brought together by shared social and cultural interests [i.e., a “folk” community] than from a community created as a result of the dancing.”17 The dancing brings a diverse group of people together, and the resultant community is in turn structured by the dance at its core; accordingly, social dances are “symbolic or expressive of a host of social and cultural values… particular to their time, place, and historical contexts.”18 Further, because two-step is not standardized, it varies across dance communities, so that experienced dancers can usually tell where other two-steppers learned to dance by their footwork, the way they hold their partner, the smoothness of their steps, and the way they perform their turns. South Texas dancers, for instance, often move from the hips and incorporate cumbia steps and turns into their dancing; North Texas and Oklahoma

15 Dale Weisman, “Texas Two-Step: The Iconic Dance-Step Keeps on Kickin’ in Halls and Honky-Tonks across the State,” Texas Highways: The Travel Magazine of Texas, January 2012, www.texashighways.com/index.php/component/content/article/39-news/6348-texas-two-step. 16 John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, Blackwell Manifestos (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 17 Julie Malnig, “Introduction,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 4. 18 Ibid., 5.

dancers dance with the lead’s left hand on his follow’s shoulder rather than around her waist; and many West Texas dancers speed up their turns by eliminating all “pause” steps. Different two-step communities also develop different turn vocabularies that reflect both traditional moves that are handed down across generations of dancers and innovative moves created by members of the community. In Austin, this combination of deep local roots, global escapism, and a dance community that is structured by its unique “time, place, and historical context” is reflected in its unique variation of the two-step, which incorporates elements of the foxtrot, East Coast swing, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, and conjunto, as well as moves borrowed from Austin’s large salsa, Lindy hop, blues and ballroom scenes. It also changes over time: over the course of my study, for instance, newer dancers like Eric and Jorge have introduced several new turns, and dancing at the Broken Spoke has shifted away from travelling and toward spot dancing, a transition unfavorably compared by many long-time Spoke dancers to the swing dance craze of the 1990s. The form of the dance is thus the product of both traditions passed down from one generation of dancers to the next and new moves invented or introduced from other dances; it grows and adapts with the city while retaining its ties to the past. But two-step, as with all social dance forms, is not just about the dancing; as Cindy Garcia argues, dancing is as much about the interactions or “crossings” that happen off the dance floor as on it.19 In Austin, two-step is part of a larger alt- country scene, which includes not just dancers and musicians and dance halls, but also the people who produce and promote music and shows, as well as the infrastructure that supports frequent live dance events: venues, clubs, rehearsal space, recording studios, dance studios, vintage clothing and record shops, and so on.20 Dance events are crucial to the continued operation of the scene because they

19 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 7. 20 Geoff Stahl, “Crisis? What Crisis? Anglophone Musicmaking in Montreal” (PhD Dissertation in Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, 2003), 58–59. Discussed in Christopher Driver and Andy Bennett, “Music Scenes, Space and the Body,” Cultural Sociology 9, no. 1 (2015): 102.

are sites at which musicians and dancers produce the cultural forms that connect them, and also because dance events are where gigs are booked, recording sessions are solidified, and interpersonal relationships are forged and broken. The scene only looks coherent from the outside: from within, it is a shifting set of allegiances that both shapes and is shaped by Austin’s broader cultural and economic landscapes. Learning to dance is a matter not just of learning the steps but of spending a substantial amount of time learning to navigate the social landscape both on and off the dance floor. To the extent that dancing is doing culture, the dance scene is continually reinventing what it means to be local, as it integrates new dancers, new moves, new venues and new perspectives into an always-already local dance form.

The Little Town South of Round Rock, Texas21 The local two-step scene is small, but crucial, part of Austin’s cultural and economic makeup. Austin has billed itself as the “Live Music Capital of the World” since the early 1990s, and in 2010 the economic impact of Austin’s music industry and music tourism was $1.6 billion, with over 8,000 people working in music- related fields, so perhaps it’s not surprising that much of the research on Austin is culture industry-related. 22 Combined with work on Austin as both a local place and a site for the production of social difference, studies of Austin’s cultural production provide a rich context for studying its local two-step subculture.

For the specifics of the alt-country scene in Austin, see Aaron A. Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt country Music, ed. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 83–110. 21 Dale Watson, South of Round Rock Texas, CD (Oakland, CA: HighTone Records, 1995). 22 Tom Zeller Jr., “Don’t Mess with Austin’s Music Moniker,” The New York Times, The Lede: Blogging the News with Robert Mackey, (November 29, 2006), http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/dont-mess-with-austins-music-moniker/; Austin Music People, “The State of the Austin Music Industry: An Austin Music People Biennial White Paper,” White Paper (Austin, TX, February 2013), http://austinmusicpeople.org/wp- content/uploads/White-Paper-2013.pdf.

Building on Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (1974), many studies of Austin center around the 1970s progressive country scene that put the city on the map as a local site of national cultural production.23 Barry Shank’s Dissonant Identities (1994) situates Austin’s pre-1980s music scene in honky-tonks, bars, interviews, and local newspapers; he argues that Austin’s scene was not just a site of in-person communal production but an “overproductive signifying community” in which musicians create “far more semiotic information is produced than can be rationally parsed” and can thus use music not just for pleasure but for cultural critique.24 By contrast, Craig Hillis’ semi-autobiographical dissertation argues for the national importance of Austin’s progressive country scene as a local site of cultural production. He uses his insider status to show not just that “songs matter,” but that the scene itself, as a “localized culture factory that creates environments, goods, and services per the needs of the participants,” matters.25 Focusing on the same scene but with an eye to its national political significance, Jason Mellard examines the figure of “the Texan” as it was reinterpreted in 1970s Austin; he finds that the “cosmic cowboy,” an unlikely combination of hippie and redneck culture, both “furthered and foreclosed” the possibility of national unity after the tumultuous 1960s in ways that resonated at local, state, and national levels.26 Finally, in The Politics of Authenticity (1998), Doug Rossinow examines Austin’s role in the formation of the New Left.27 He shows that the New Left mushroomed away from its radical intellectual roots in the mid-1960s, so that by 1965 the influx of “prairie power” people into Austin, with their greater diversity, emphasis on style, Christian liberalism, and “dissident” search for authenticity and

23 Jan Reid, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, new edition (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004). 24 Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock “N” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas, 122. 25 Craig Hillis, “The Austin Music Scene in the 1970s: Songs and Songwriters” (PhD Dissertation in American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2011). 26 Jason Dean Mellard, “Cosmic Cowboys, Armadillos, and Outlaws: The Cultural Politics of Texan Identity in the 1970s” (PhD Dissertation in American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2009). 27 Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

inner wholeness, had made Austin a leading local node in the national Leftist movement. Paradoxically, this retreat into local, personal identities helped people find the meaning they sought even as it increased their alienation from the national movement; the resultant complexity was then navigated nationally in local cultural politics – and the city’s progressive country scene – in the 1970s. But the city of Austin is not just a backdrop for cultural production or the local battleground for national cultural or political movements; it is also a physical place whose infrastructure, economics, and culture shape and are shaped by the people who live there, as well as an integral component of regional economic systems and urban networks. Anthony Orum’s Power, Money, and the People (1987), the first book-length work on the history of Austin, relies on some 180 interviews to detail the development of the city as the product of a tension between “capitalism and democracy.”28 Orum’s basic outline – the establishment of the Lower Colorado River Authority and the construction of dams in the 1930s; the city’s decision to move its black community out of Clarksville; the gradual shift from urban boosters promoting Austin’s natural resources to real estate developers promoting growth; and the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s – all inform subsequent histories of Austin. In Environmental City (2010), for instance, William Swearingen, Jr. explicitly takes up Austin’s history where Orum left off, arguing that Austin has taken the shape it has because the environmental movement eclipsed other attempts at preservation.29 Joshua Long’s Weird City (2010) is more explicitly topophiliac: based on over 100 interviews with Austin residents (primarily conducted in central Austin, so that the city’s non-white and poorer populations are largely excluded), Weird City argues that a sense of place is critical for vibrant urban communities and for sustaining creative class cities.30 Further, Long argues that this

28 Anthony Orum, Power, Money, and the People: The Making of Modern Austin (Austin, TX: Texas Monthly, 1987). 29 William Scott Swearingen Jr., Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010). 30 Joshua Long, Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010).

sense of place is strongest in landscapes that combine unique, place-specific elements with homogenized or global features – the former reminds people that they are in Austin, but the latter connects them with the familiarity of home. In this sense, Long’s work is similar to Deborah Kapchan’s work on Austin’s salsa community – the combination of the familiar and the other, or home and anti-home, composes the creative class’s sense of place in Austin.31 While much of the discourse on Austin celebrates its creative-class culture, Andrew Busch’s “Entrepreneurial City” and Ben Chappell’s study of Austin lowriders, Lowrider Space (2012), reject the facile acceptance of creative class development and look closely at how residents, particularly people of color, create and interpret Austin’s landscape.32 Contrary to Richard Florida’s paradigm that cultural amenities attract creative class people, Busch shows how Austin has leveraged knowledge-based industries and federal and state funding to generate enough surplus capital to support further cultural, economic, and geographic development – in other words, relationships between labor, production, and consumption have shaped the city over time, and thus a “creative class” city cannot be forced. Nor does creative class development benefit everyone: Busch also shows how Austin’s celebrated creative class development marginalizes communities of color socially, economically, and spatially, so that the rest of Austin can retain its “bucolic imaginary” in the urban landscape.33 Similarly, Ben Chappell’s Lowrider Space uses ethnography to trace cultural resistance to the creative class landscape. Chappell shows how Mexican-Americans who participate in lowriding culture do so because customizing cars and cruising through Austin reconfigures space around a

31 Deborah Kapchan, “Talking Trash: Performing Home and Anti-Home in Austin’s Salsa Culture,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 3 (August 2006): 361–77. 32 Andrew M. Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011” (PhD Dissertation in American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2011); Ben Chappell, Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012). 33 Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011,” 188. On the creative class thesis, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

lowrider aesthetic, which in turn flips the spatial and social politics of their everyday lives upside down. This reconfiguration is particularly empowering for its practitioners because as Mexican-Americans, they are halfway between two cultures, and also because lowrider culture is an ongoing, improvisatory process, allowing customizers to endlessly riff on the “standard” factory car in the same way that jazz musicians “version” on standard jazz tunes. Like Busch, Chappell breaks down unitary platitudes about Austin as a place and shows how the local in Austin is a contested site, divided along racial, class, and geographic lines. In conversation with Austin’s celebration of the creative class and its nostalgia for the wholeness and unity of the progressive country scene, these works also provide models for using two-step to scratch beneath the surface of Austin’s topophilia. As a creative class city, Austin is also implicated in many critiques of the creative class thesis, especially those that connect the creative class with neoliberalism, gentrification, and socioeconomic marginalization. In “Struggling with the Creative Class” (2005), Jamie Peck finds that the ‘hipsterization strategies’ of the creative class thesis fit with current “neoliberal” development strategies, which revolve around “interurban competition, gentrification, middle-class consumption and place-marketing,” all of which marginalize the poor.34 Neoliberal/creative class development can take the form of gentrification, which Neil Smith defines in “Gentrification and the Rent Gap” (1987) as a complex process by which upwardly mobile people, who have both the economic capital to invest in rehabilitating an area and the social capital/access to information to recognize the

34 Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (December 2005): 740. Recent work on the neoliberal city, David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) and Jason Hackworth’s The Neoliberal City (2007), supports Peck’s claim. For Harvey, neoliberalism is historically and spatially contingent, but its roots derive from a combination of a liberal emphasis on social liberty and a neoclassical privileging of the free market economy over state intervention; Hackworth’s work complements Harvey’s macro approach with close readings of gentrification, public-housing policy, downtown development, and new forms of urban resistance in specific American cities in the 1990s, as poorer residents and people of color protest the remaking of the urban landscape in a bid to attract mobile capital. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Corness University Press, 2007).

potential future value of a property, reclaim that area from less privileged groups.35 It can also take the seemingly more benign form of cultural colonization: Sharon Zukin’s most recent work, Naked City (2010), critiques the neoliberal/creative class nexus in New York using the concept of “authenticity,” which she articulates with impulses toward both “primal, historically first or true to a traditional vision” and “unique, historically new, innovative, and creative.”36 Zukin’s book examines what is lost in the neoliberal focus on new, upper-class development: she writes that though New York “pays its respects to both origins and new beginnings, it does not do enough to protect the rights of residents, workers, and shops – the small scale, the poor, and the middle class – to remain in place. It is this social diversity, and not just the diversity of buildings and uses, that gives the city its soul.”37 Creative class development can also be connected to a shift in urban governance strategies: in “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism” (1989), David Harvey argues that urban governance in the 1980s was shifting from a “managerial” role, wherein city government was primarily concerned with providing services and maintaining facilities for residents, to an “entrepreneurial” one, in which cities began to actively foster local development and employment growth in the private sector.38 Many of these processes are well-documented in Austin; in each case, neoliberal/ creative- class development favors the wealthy and the upwardly mobile over the poor. Further, as Mike Davis and Saskia Sassen argue, the wealthy increasingly have ties to global capital while the poor tend to be isolated in local and regional capital

35 Neil Smith, “Gentrification and the Rent Gap,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 3 (1987): 462, 463, 464. Sharon Zukin’s Loft Living examines gentrification as the process by which real estate speculation, population influx, and globalization transformed New York’s SoHo neighborhood from small industries and tight-knit, lower-middle class communities to upper-middle class artists, professionals, and the nouveau riche; though she emphasizes gentrification, hers is a case study of the impact of the new creative class on the urban fabric. See Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 36 Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2. 37 Ibid., 31. 38 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3– 17.

flows; this division of wealth across geographic scales serves only to heighten wealth disparities in creative class cities like Austin.39 But Austin does not just have ties to other creative class/ neoliberal cities; it is also connected geographically to three overlapping regions: the West, the South, and the Sunbelt, and to the technological, economic, and social concerns that undergird them. For instance, the WPA dams that keep Austin from flooding are a small instance of the technologies described by Donald Worster in Rivers of Empire (1985); Worster argues that the West is “a modern hydraulic society… a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting… [and therefore] a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.”40 Similarly, Austin is in the heart of the area examined in Neil Foley’s The White Scourge (1997). Foley investigates central Texas as a “borderlands province between the South, the West, and Mexico,” where the transformation of cotton farming from small, manual-labor operations to giant mechanized agribusiness, combined with a disruption of both Western Mexican-Anglo and Southern black-white binaries, “fractured” whiteness along class lines.41 Because of its position at the edge of multiple racial and economic systems, central Texas emerges as both a unique laboratory for

39 See especially Mike Davis’ chapter on “Fortress LA,” where he describes the rise of heavily policed “fortress cities” and the decline of public space, and Saskia Sassen’s introduction to the second edition of The Global City, where she describes changes in the global economy since the 1980s. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 40 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 7. Similarly, in America as Second Creation (2003), David Nye argues that narratives of America’s creation center around a “second creation,” the “technological transformation of an untouched space.” See David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 4. On the American West as a middle ground between different populations, see also Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Studies in North American Indian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 63, no. 1 (January 2006): 9–14. 41 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, American Crossroads 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xiv.

investigating the construction of whiteness and a generalizable case study of “ethnoracial borderlands” as a site for the production of American culture.42 Jose Limon’s American Encounters (1998) also treats Texas as a borderland, this time between “Greater Mexico,” which encompasses “all Mexicans” living in both the United States and Mexico, and the United States, “an Anglo-dominant entity whose representatives have come into contact with and sometimes internalized Greater Mexico and vice versa.”43 But his particular interest is with the relationship between Greater Mexico and the American South, and he constructs a geographically and historically specific theory of the border as a place where cultures, peoples, and identities from both sides are fundamentally intertwined based on a shared experience of Northern capitalist domination.44 Finally, while Foley and Limon focus primarily on the cultural characteristics of the regions in which Austin participates, several edited collections, including Raymond Mohl’s Searching for the Sunbelt (1990) and Janet Pack’s Sunbelt/Frostbelt (2005), examine the economic and geographic characteristics of a region called the Sunbelt, which stretches from Florida to Arizona and is the result of a complex set of factors including the post-war economic boom, increasing income, greater car ownership, globalization, and national, state, and local policy- making.45 As a “creative,” neoliberal city at the intersection of multiple regions and

42 Ibid., 15. 43 Jose E. Limon, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, The United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 3. 44 More recently, Ramon Saldivar’s The Borderlands of Culture (2006) examines Americo Paredes’ earlier work within a transnational context, reading interviews with Paredes alongside Paul Gilroy, Walter Mignolo, and other subaltern thinkers. Saldivar’s biographical/ autobiographical strategy locates Paredes, the person, as both a self-described “mexicano who happened to be living in Texas” and a sharp critic of uninformed Mexican nationalism, as well as an interdisciplinary thinker and writer working at the intersections of fiction, anthropology, and folklore. While Limon, following Paredes, argues that Texas-as-borderlands could be the site of a new, utopian transnational culture, Saldivar suggests that by internalizing the border, Paredes himself exemplifies the construction of that new culture. See Ramon Saldivar, The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 45 Raymond A. Mohl, ed., Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Janet Pack, Sunbelt/ Frostbelt: Public Policies and Market Forces in Metropolitan Development (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2005). Also, Kevin Phillips

multiple cultural, technological, historical, and economic contexts, Austin is at once a unique city and a place that shares characteristics with many other parts of the US.

Local Contexts and Contestations The local is at once a concept, a social construct, and a lived experience, so that the messiness of each unique terrestrial manifestation both shapes and is shaped by the whole. For many people, investing in local cultures and parochial viewpoints is a way of privileging human subjectivity over the placelessness of neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism, according to David Harvey, is often presented as a utopian project, but the neoliberal emphasis on globalization, free markets, private property, and the decentering of the welfare state mean that in practice it operates as a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”46 In Austin, the inequality resulting from this political project is what Tejaswiki Ganti calls a “structural force that engenders material effects,” and it is both a visible part of the urban landscape and a felt component of everyday life, as development targeted at an upper-middle-class income bracket increasingly threatens the livelihoods and cultural institutions of the musicians, artists, dancers, service workers and other people who contribute to the city’s overproductive signifying communities.47 In this context, the local is both a response to and a symptom of the neoliberalization of the urban landscape. Among two-steppers, the local operates along four overlapping dimensions: scene, place, belonging, and scale. Each contributes to the construction of local cultures and local identities that are intimately involved in negotiating the incursions of neoliberal development.

coined the term “Sunbelt” in 1969, and Carl Abbott wrote the first book-length work on the region in 1981; see Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969); Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 46 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19. 47 Tejaswini Ganti, “Neoliberalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 94.

As a scene, the local is shaped through liveness, embodied co-presence, and the regular performance of cultural norms and social relations within dense social and spatial networks; the local is embodied and emplaced, so that members can both experience feelings of collective belonging and enact in-person sanctions for deviations from the norm. In Austin’s two-step scene, much of the regulation revolves around proper performance of gender roles. Geof Stahl argues that unlike subcultures or communities, which emphasize social homogeneity, stasis, and equal levels and kinds of participation, a scene is hybrid and fluid, a performance-based assemblage of people, places, events, movements, cultural norms, and economic practices that reconstitutes regularly around an interest that its members all share.48 Because gender performances are so important to the functioning of the scene, an understanding of performance as multiple, complex, and hybrid is especially important where the scene’s gender relations are concerned. Gender performances in Austin’s two-step scene can partially be interpreted through the Birmingham School concept of style, especially where clothing, dance skill, and choice of venue are concerned particularly as they pertain to dance skill and clothing choices and their function as signs of subcultural belonging. But gender performance in the dance scene, particularly in the case of men and women who attempt to subvert “traditional” gender roles, make more sense as what Cindy Garcia calls “choreographies of gender,” patterns of gendered behavior created through repeated social interactions at dance events.49 Yet because the traditional gender performances in the Austin two-step scene contrast sharply with Austin’s reputation as a progressive city, the scene also provides a safe space for some men to preserve or exploit power imbalances facilitated by the lead-follow relationship on the dance floor. These gender performances are closer to a Butlerian conception of performance, where dancing gender, as Ben Malbon puts it, “constructs” the gendered self and naturalizes the relationship between biological sex and

48 Stahl, “Crisis? What Crisis? Anglophone Musicmaking in Montreal.” 49 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 95.

performed gender roles.50 Together, all three versions of performance suggest that belonging in the dance scene is more a matter of acting the part than of internalizing the scene’s traditional gender politics; the actual backgrounds and gender politics of scene members can vary widely. By extension, this performance-based interpretation of scene suggests that the local itself is multiple, hybrid, and layered, a complex assemblage of people, places, and ideologies all engaged in the in-person production of local culture. Although scenes are primarily associated with leisure activities, they serve as important nodes for both social bonding and cultural production, and the performance of scene norms and values often extends beyond the boundaries of the leisure space and into members’ everyday lives. But even among dancers, the local is not just a scene, or even multiple scenes. It is also closely related to concepts of place, so that dancing in place, in both its construction and the fantasies surrounding it, is a big part of dancing the local. In the 1970s, channeling a generational nostalgia for the safety and security of home, Yi-Fu Tuan differentiated between space and place by arguing that places “stay put;” they acquire value when humans pause in their movements through space and stop to experience them, to create memories there, or to otherwise create links between themselves and a physical location.51 Making place was thus much like Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” and in much the same mode, as Heidegger, in the aftermath of World War II, withdrew to the German countryside in an effort to reconnect with the land and himself.52 Important to this understanding of place is its subjective quality. Place both shapes and is shaped by human experience of the world; accordingly, it is defined both by what it is and against what it is not. Lucy Lippard draws heavily on

50 Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 27– 28. 51 Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. 52 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco / HarperCollinsPublishers, 1977), 323–39; Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2006): 5.

this humanistic definition of place in her study of the local in American culture. Lippard’s place attracts people to the local through the dense sedimentations, layers, connections and memories that anchor both personal and cultural meaning in a landscape.53 Place, with its connotations of home and meaning and belonging, is where we can go to find ourselves; in contrast to the alienation of modern life, with its global connections and seeming placelessness, the local offers many dancers a pre-modern existence, the possibility of connection and togetherness. In this, the local is much like Tuan’s place, or Stahl’s scene, but it is also like an earlier construction, the “folk,” a turn-of-the-century longing for tight-knit, unmediated, homogenous communities that manifested itself in folk song and dance.54 In all cases, the (romanticized) local, place, and folk are constructed against the alienation and placelessness of an increasingly global modern world. Yet despite its involvement in escapist fantasies, the local is part of the world and its politics, not isolated from them. Lippard writes that “[w]e are living today on a threshold between a history of alienated displacement from and longing for home and the possibility of a multicentered society that understands the reciprocal relationship between the two.”55 To move from “a history of alienated displacement from and longing for home” to a “multicentered society” is to open the possibility of a progressive politics of the local. Similarly, by conceiving of place as a process, Doreen Massey argues that if the local is thought relationally, as an event rather than a subjective entity, “the potential, then, is for the movement beyond the local to be rather one of extension and meeting along lines of constructed equivalence with elements of the internal multiplicities of other local struggles,” with the possibility

53 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York and London: The New Press, 1997). See also Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 54 Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, 1. 55 Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 20.

that local struggles might eventually become global ones.56 But this argument discounts the capitalist imperatives at work in shaping both specific places and place more generally. As David Harvey points out, it’s important to critique both “the chimerical ideals of an isolationist communitarian politics and the inevitable insensitivities of any kind of universal emancipatory politics,” because neither takes into account the possibility that place might be a hybrid construct, both a meaningful location to people and a pause in the network of global capital flows, or that each locality might be unique.57 And in practice, of course, places do occupy this middle ground: they are neither completely isolated nor completely contingent upon external flows for their definition. To be local in terms of place is to have roots in human experience in a specific location and to carve out a unique, human-scaled niche in the network of global flows. But constructing the local through dance is not just a matter of placemaking; it is also a matter of developing attachments to a place, of being able to say “I belong here.” Dancing the local is thus also about dancing belonging. And in Austin, where neoliberal development is often in direct conflict with placemaking practices, dancing belonging is a matter of actively navigating gentrification in the landscape. The kinds of belonging associated with social dance reveal gentrification to be an embodied, affective class project, where resistance is integral but often neutralized through cultural co-optation. In social dance communities, where the formal act of dancing is embedded in a host of other “socially structured movements,” belonging operates as a kind of “muscular bonding,” a performance of social and technical “competence,” and subtle and not-so-subtle exclusions, co-optations, and fantastical imaginings.58 Similarly, as an integral part of the gentrification process, belonging is

56 Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2011), 183. See also Don Mitchell, “The Lure of the Local: Landscape Studies at the End of a Troubled Century,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 269. 57 David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 324–5. 58 Norman Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 58;

often evoked in the tensions between the warmth of home and the placelessness of mobility, in performances of community solidarity or feelings of being “at home,” and in co-optations of movements, memories, and place-knowledges that signify, even if they don’t represent, a deep attachment to place. Dancing belonging, then, is an embodied aesthetics of the local in contemporary Austin; it is a performative process that integrates felt personal attachments to place and community with the political boundary maintenance that separates “us” from “them.” In the context of gentrification, dancing belonging has a different meaning based on the position of the dancer: for the gentrified, it is often a matter of resistance and retrenchment, while for the gentrifier, it is a matter of appropriation, of entrenching oneself in local practices to detach oneself from the “gentrifier” label, of embodying a fantasy of communal, post-racial (or at least multicultural) togetherness. Dancing belonging uses the dancing body to reveal that gentrification is not a process of erasure, but rather an ongoing struggle between inclusion and resistance. Incorporating aesthetics, performance, affect, place, and politics, dancing belonging allows for a complex, holistic analysis of the local in the context of Austin’s gentrifying landscape. Together with dancing-in-place, dancing belonging reveals the local to be at once subjective and processual, simultaneously spatial and social; for dancers in Austin, the local is a meaningful location where neoliberalization is actively negotiated. Yet the scale of the local, the nature of its relationship with other locals and with larger and smaller bounded spaces, is also crucial to its construction. Since the mid-1990s, most understandings of scale have attempted to reconcile two different constructs: scale as a geographical hierarchy, in which spaces are divided into local, regional, national, global, and so on; and scale as a more fluid “network” of places connected through social, cultural, and economic relations instead of physical

William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2; Tim Wall, “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 189.

contiguity.59 In both conceptions, the local is always both shaping and shaped by other geographic scales, so that scale relations are always “operating in a dialectical fashion, ‘multi-directionally and simultaneously,’ ‘between and within’ various scales.”60 In Austin, to the extent that place is processual and relational, this makes sense: local places, nested within larger political or geographic entities and networked with other local places, contain elements of these other scalar nodes within them. Austin’s burgeoning population includes longtime residents, domestic transplants, and immigrants from the US and abroad; its culture and economy are tied to its residents’ places of origin, to the central Texas Hill Country, to the network of “creative” cities to which it belongs, to the various governmental structures (city, county, state, country) that regulate it, and to the global cultural and economic structures that shape and are shaped by it. Like all local places, Austin is unique in its particular scalar relations. Further, as a local place, Austin is not just shaped by its connections, but also an active agent in shaping them; as Massey argues, places are “the moments through which the global is constituted, invented, coordinated, produced.”61 Far from being dominated by “the global,” local places have agency and, through their networks with other places, actually create the global themselves. Theorized as both a unique intersection of global flows and a “bounded space” within a hierarchical network of differently-sized bounded spaces, local place plays an active role in cultural processes at multiple scales so that it both shapes and is shaped by a wide range of geographies. Siting the production of global culture in local places in this way has important potential for global politics. Ascribing agency to a networked, globalized

59 Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4 (December 2005): 417; Helga Leitner, “The Politics of Scale and Networks of Spatial Connectivity: Transnational Interurban Networks and the Rescaling of Political Governance in Europe,” in Scale & Geographic Inquiry, ed. Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 237. 60 Richie Howitt, “‘A World in a Grain of Sand’: Towards a Reconceptualization of Geographical Scale,” Australian Geographer 24 (1993): 38. Cited in Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 419. 61 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 11.

local can mean that protests in local city streets can have global impact; that women and people of color can take control of their bodies and their neighborhoods; and that citizens of the global South can rework and dismantle cultural and economic imperialism.62 As Don Mitchell argued in the late 1990s, “[n]o longer is localism, no matter how contextualized, sufficient…. [A]ctivism must simultaneously be engaged at multiple scales, linking location, region, nation-state and globe.”63 However, this cosmopolitan perspective, which largely values the local only insofar as it contributes to a global politics, often neglects the sense of belonging and the felt attachments to place that lead people to a progressive politics in the first place. Drawing on Gibson-Graham, Doreen Massey pointedly notes that this disconnect may be due to the vestiges of outdated Enlightenment thinking, as “the rejection of local politics as seeming ‘to emanate from a bodily state, not simply a reasoned intellectual position’… resonates with all those arguments about Western science’s desire for removal from the world (the messiness of the local).”64 This is the same kind of thinking that kept dance studies out of the academy until the early 1990s, and despite the arguments of Tuan and other humanist geographers, the ‘globalization craze’ that began in the mid-1990s often relies on similar thinking. As John Tomaney argues, “[h]umanist geographers note that local attachments are persistent and universal. The cosmopolitan critics tell us that these attachments are wrong, but not why they endure.”65 While theorizing about globalization is important, examining the lived experiences of people as they go about their lives in local places can provide a more accurate understanding of how the local actually

62 Many theorists of the relationship between local and global are tremendously interested in a progressive politics of the local. See, for instance, Massey, For Space; Mitchell, “The Lure of the Local: Landscape Studies at the End of a Troubled Century”; Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20 (2001): 139–74; J.K. Gibson-Graham, “Beyond Global vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame,” in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 25–60. Tim Cresswell attributes this tendency to the reconceptualization of place in terms of practices rather than home; see Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 39–43. 63 Mitchell, “The Lure of the Local: Landscape Studies at the End of a Troubled Century,” 270. 64 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 11. 65 Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence,” 664.

operates. Situated knowledges at human scales indicate that regardless of whether the form or the content structures the local, it is still, or again, an important component in American life. Finally, while acknowledging that recent associations between the local and a progressive politics are an attempt to right centuries of associations between the local and backwardness, escapism, exclusivity, homogeneity, poor quality and small- mindedness, it is important to note that the politics underlying local places, local communities, and local identities are often conservative. Sometimes this conservatism is simply expressed as a reassertion of existing “power geometries” and a solidification of power along existing class lines.66 The construction of neolocal landscapes in many cities across the US, for instance, represents a commodification of the small-town sense of belonging that many cosmopolitan elites seek, rather than a celebration of actual urban life in all its messiness. The neolocalism movement in the United States, a business-driven movement that began in the artisan beer industry in the early 1990s, represents a conscious attempt to cultivate communities, identities, and business opportunities at a local scale.67 Based on an understanding of the local that has shifting bounds because “scales are social/ cultural constructions and have no intrinsic meaning,” the movement capitalizes on the desire of a class of mobile “cosmopolitan elites” to “’forge better geographic identities.’”68 Accordingly, the neolocal is constructed against the placelessness of the global: it is personal instead of faceless, unique instead of homogeneous, community-building instead of community-destroying, small business instead of corporations, authentic and emplaced instead of mass- marketed.69 At the same time, the neolocal is supported by national corporations, like Go Local and Wal-Mart, that take advantage of interconnections across scales to

66 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 11. 67 Steven M. Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” Journal of Cultural Geography 30, no. 1 (2013): 56. 68 Ibid.; Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 445; Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” 56. 69 Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” 66–69.

promote individual locals by connecting them to the idea of the local more generally. Like festivalization, new urbanism, and other coordinated placemaking practices, neolocalism intertwines the cultural politics of place with capitalism’s globalization project, so that the place-specific difference enunciated by neolocal champions becomes a commodity in the regional, national, and international tourism trade.70 Within this context of commodification, this conservatism is also expressed in local processes of inclusion and exclusion, even though boundary-making is not in itself a conservative project. Karen Halttunen acknowledges that “many of us remain suspicious of the political pitfalls of place in a world torn between the extremes of globalization and local heritage crusades,” and with good reason: place- based uprisings, ethnic cleansing, exclusive gated communities, and the use of place to exclude people deemed “out of place” do often develop out of “a politics of place that is reactionary and exclusionary, using place to define one group of people against others in a calculated war against mobility, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism.”71 Especially when the local is defined in terms of the embodied co-presence of the scene or the subjective rootedness of dwelling in place, we may fear, and with strong historical precedent, not that the local is not interpenetrated with the global, but that it is, and that locals based on essentialism, isolationism and exclusivity might gain power through the same networks that might also support progressive political projects. Similarly, David Harvey argues that place-bound politics also has its ugly side, because “defining the ‘other’ in an exclusionary and stereotypical way the first step toward self-definition.”72 We are us because we are not them. Yet while the local is always already within the global, becoming local – be it a place, community, identity – is always a process of drawing boundaries to some extent, always a process of including some and excluding others. And this process is

70 Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 325. 71 Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” 6–7. On gated communities, see Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. On anachorism, or being out of place, see Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction. 72 Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 325.

not necessarily conservative or progressive. As Tomaney argues, “[b]oundaries may be porous, but abstract notions of globalization, founded on globally networked forms of social life, neglect the complex ways in which people continue to live locally, albeit in altered ways.”73 Rather, it is – and this is important – contingent upon the makeup of the local itself. The neoliberal emphasis on free markets and deregulation impacts different locals differently, as individuals, governmental structures, NGOs, corporations, and long-sedimented networks and traditions form local assemblages that deal with global structures in their own unique ways.74 Here, perspective matters: local actors may be embedded in networks that span geographic scales, but ultimately they can only act from their own situated perspectives to shape and protect themselves, their resources, and their communities. Examining their actions from the inside is key to understanding not just their own politics, but the neoliberal encroachments to which they are often responding. In conclusion, the local in contemporary American culture is both a response to neoliberalism and a cultural formation that could only exist in the context of neoliberal globalization. Understanding the local requires taking into account romanticized associations with local places; the forms of belonging and difference that inform place as both a process and a subjective, lived reality; and the complex relationships of scale that differentiate/connect the local with larger and smaller geographic units as well as other localities. The local his a politics, certainly, but rather than (over)emphasizing its progressive political potential, a thorough, ethical examination of the local investigates a local place, community, or identity on its own terms. Far from being unnecessarily limiting, this “parochial” perspective reveals the ways in which lived experience and inter-scalar flows both shape and are shaped by the local. Examining the local from within Austin’s two-step dance scene, then, can answer important questions about the local both as a concept and a lived

73 Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence,” 660. 74 Ismael Blanco, Steven Griggs, and Helen Sullivan, “Situating the Local in the Neoloberalisation and Transformation of Urban Governance,” Urban Studies 51, no. 15 (2014): 3130.

reality. As they dance, dancers show how politics of gender, class, and race are produced; how local cultural productions interact with local places; how gentrification of the local landscape impacts the construction of local identities; and what it means, in an increasingly interpenetrating world, to live life locally. As John McGahern writes, “[e]verything interesting begins with one person in one place;” close attention to local perspectives and local experiences reveals the broader cultural processes at work.75

Dancing the Local in Austin The two-step scene in Austin suggests that the search for local communities, local places, local identities – the search for local culture and the warm feeling of belonging in place – is tied to the desire for terrestrial belonging and for the unique space of “home” and “community” and “togetherness.” Dancing the local is about creating feelings of togetherness by connecting community practices at regular live events with deep roots, and about carrying tradition forward while also incorporating elements that reflect the contemporary moment. For many dancers, preserving and perpetuating the local dance scene is particularly poignant at a time when the influx of new residents and the dramatic changes in the landscape threaten the unique cultural spaces that support their way of life. Thus, while Austin’s local two-step scene is not an overt resistance to globalization, it is certainly an embodied response to global processes as dancers experience them in their everyday lives. As it is danced in Austin’s dance halls and honkytonks, the local is an embodied community that operates along its own logics and has its own meaning-making processes, even as it draws heavily on cultural and economic flows at regional, state, national, and international scales. Accessing and critically analyzing the local from within Austin’s two-step scene requires a variety of sources and methods. Two-step in Austin has been associated with Texanness since at least the 1970s and is relatively well-

75 McGahern, Love of the World: Essays, 11. Cited in Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence,” 667.

documented in local and national newspapers as well as in tourist-oriented publications, but the embodied, constantly evolving nature of social dance practices, combined with the rapid development of the physical landscape, make in-person data collection methods necessary. Thus I draw on archival press coverage in both mainstream and alternative publications, but I also rely heavily on roughly one year of embodied ethnography in the two-step scene, with four additional years as a member of the dance scene and three as a dance instructor at the White Horse in East Austin. Because access to the “good” dancers, as well as an understanding of subtle differences in form and technique, requires strong dance skills, a large portion of my work has included learning the local variants of two-step and dancing with men and women who are well-practiced in the dance.76 Through classes, dance-oriented films, instructional videos, and dancing with fellow enthusiasts, I have also learned many of the dances that contribute to Austin’s version of two-step, including jive, conjunto, foxtrot, East Coast swing, and Lindy hop. Further, because social dance includes the social practices, norms, and values of the community that are shaped by, but extend beyond, the dance itself, I have also been active in the social lives of these dance communities.77 Many of my interpretations are shaped as much by events and conversations that happened off the dance floor as by those that happened on it. Accordingly, this dissertation also relies on nearly two dozen oral history interviews with dancers, musicians, venue

76 In his study of race in contemporary Lindy Hop, Black Hawk Hancock uses ethnographic methods derived from Waquant’s carnal sociology. He argues that “[d]ance is an art that is learned, understood, and expressed through the body. In order to acquire this knowledge, I could not simply watch and ask questions about the Lindy Hop, I had to reach a point where I could understand the art as a dancer.” See Black Hawk Hancock, American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 28–35, esp 29. 77 In her ethnography of LA salsa communities, Cindy Garcia writes that “[a]s a (red-haired) Chicana feminist choreographic ethnographer, at times I step away from an analysis of the predominantly heterosexual dance floor partnerships to devote my attention to the interactions among women in out-of-the-way salsa spaces: among wallflowers at the edges of the floor, in women’s bathrooms, at the bar, and in cyberspace. These decentralizing moves allow me to consider the nuances of salsa corporealities, hierarchies, divisions, and alliances.” Following Garcia, I am attentive throughout to interactions both on and off the dance floor; since conversations are highly structured by the lead- follow partnership on the dance floor, watching and interacting from the sidelines was extremely fruitful. See Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 4–7, esp 4.

owners, and community leaders. Social dance is a nonverbal form of expression and experience; these interviews helped contextualize it in its broader affective, social, spatial, and economic contexts. Finally, because dance and gentrification are so closely linked to space, I have used photography, archival sources, and written landscape analysis to document the radical transformation in Austin’s South, East, and near north neighborhoods and to provide geographic support for shifts in dance practices. Throughout, I have been attentive to danced expressions of place, belonging, scale and politics in the dance scene, from creating an inviting (or not) dance space, to learning that dance is as social as it is technical, to dancing through frustrations with rising rents, changing landscapes, and dramatic demographic shifts. In the chapters that follow, these sources reveal the complexities of dancing the local in Austin, and the ways in which dance communities and individual dancers use dance to shape and respond to neoliberal development. In Chapter 1, I examine the local through the basic unit of partner dancing in the two-step scene: the heterosexual couple. Here, “local” becomes “scene,” a network of industries, institutions, infrastructures, people, and practices that is based around the liveness and copresence of the honkytonk dance event. I examine dancers’ performances of “traditional” heterosexual masculinities and femininities at these events as constructions of alternative identities that are at once ironic and genuine, and I show how, at this scale, the local is neither conservative nor progressive, neither entirely authentic nor entirely fake. Rather, it is “messy,” a hybrid, embodied, multiple thing, and as such it constitutes a safe space for some and a dangerous, unregulated space for others. Chapter 2 broadens the focus of investigation from the heterosexual embrace to the broader space of the honkytonk, where the Austin variant of two-step is a unique version of the dance that reflects both Austin’s deep roots in central Texas and its cosmopolitan connections across a national network of creative cities. Here, the concept of “dancing-in-place,” a form of “doing place” where social dance communities shape and are shaped by their cultural and geographic contexts,

informs the analysis of three dance venues that are important to the Austin dance scene: the Broken Spoke, the White Horse, and the Little Longhorn. The chapter shows how dance and place are both integral to the construction of the local. Building on the understanding of the local as a hybrid, messy, embodied place, Chapter 3 focuses on a single honkytonk, the White Horse, in the context of its rapidly gentrifying East Austin neighborhood. Long the home of Austin’s African- American and Mexican-American populations, the East Side has been experiencing gentrification since the 1980s, but the dramatic changes along the East Sixth Street corridor since 2008 represent an acceleration in changes in the landscape. Here, I use the concept of “dancing belonging” to examine what it means to belong in a place – what it means to be a local – when the local landscape is undergoing a massive upheaval. “Dancing belonging” is a three-part concept: both embodied and emplaced; performative in that it both constructs and expresses the self; and differential and thus dependent on fantasy and imagination. I argue that at the White Horse, Mexican-American cultural resistance is commodified into “authenticity,” so that to belong in this gentrifying landscape is to dance in the aesthetic language of the gentrified, who are compelled to dance as a matter of self- preservation, even as their dancing belonging obliterates their right to belong. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the interactions between dancers and tourists to examine the politics of scale in the construction of the local. Here, I follow dancers as they engage with the expectations of others in multiple contexts: with tourists in everyday dance spaces, as tourists themselves in nearby Luckenbach, and as guides who complicate the class politics of the local scale. In these dance spaces, interactions between dancers and “tourists” show that dancing in Austin is a matter of negotiating multiple scalar constructs and the interpenetration of the global and the local. The tension between dancers’ and tourists’ ways of knowing suggests that local cultures must find a way to shape tourists’ experiences that is both inclusive and respectful of local boundaries, traditions, and desires.

***

I have centered this study in Austin, Texas, because the neoliberal growth machine that guides its rapid redevelopment, combined with its burgeoning population, are dramatically reshaping the city’s local places, local communities, local economic processes and local culture. Austin’s dance halls and honkytonks attract tourists, transplants, and local dancers to their floors; the dance scene includes people from a wide range of classes and occupations, and all are engaged in determining what it means to be local, how the local operates, and how the local is connected to other geographic scales through their interactions on the dance floor. Examining the dance scene from within, through active engagement with dance practices, social networks, and ways of knowing, reveals the local to be heterogeneous, tightly connected with both local resistance and the processes of neoliberal globalization that threaten its existence. Interpreting the local through Austin’s two-step scene also reveals that the value of the local is changing. As cities move from managerial government to entrepreneurial governance models; as capital becomes more tightly integrated and urban revitalization projects shape cities according to a homogenized idea of the local that often has little to do with local cultural, economic, or environmental processes; and as so-called market-based solutions integrate local economies into ever broader and more impersonal scales, the local becomes simultaneously more and less important. The local is always already in conversation with power geometries operating across geographic scales, but as local landscapes, cultures, and economies increasingly seem to be directed from somewhere else, local resistance – as placemaking, as belonging, as embodied copresence, touch, and human creativity – becomes as sought-after by tourists as it is held dear by locals, however they define themselves.

Chapter 1: Sometimes, When Guys are Being Creepy, They’re Not Kidding

There may be creepy guys, but they’re our creepy guys. - Delores, two-stepper

It’s a warm Saturday evening in early May 2014 and I’m late to Spring Fling, one of two large private two-step formals held each year in Austin’s Saengerrunde Halle, a turn-of-the-century hall with exposed rafters and a deliciously soft sprung wood floor. It’s been a long day, with two sets of dance lessons, so I’ve been in my Fling attire since 2pm: a vintage reproduction dress with a pink-and-black harlequin print, a massive petticoat, a big pink mum pinned to my bouffant hair, and my old t- strap character shoes that are more comfortable for dancing than boots. I felt out of place in the divey atmosphere of my White Horse dance classes, and I imagine that I look even stranger pedaling through government buildings on my old fixie, a weathered bike bag full of home-baked cookies strapped over my outfit in some kind of weird bike hipster/ rockabilly mashup. The hall is unmarked, so I locate it by its neighbor, Scholtz Bier Garten, and lock my bike to a rail – no bike parking here, it’s not that sort of place. Scholtz is showing a sports game on TV, and all its doors and windows are open, so the sweet yeasty smell of beer and the shouts of game-watchers spill out onto the otherwise silent street, surrounded as it is by parking garages and quiet government buildings. I smooth my hair and walk past the bar, through a small crowd of t-shirt-clad smokers, and step up to an unmarked door, slightly set in from the street. I pull open this door to reveal a tiny foyer. A few steps later, I open a second door, this one with a bright stained-glass window on its upper half, and immediately I am engulfed in another world: Moot Davis is singing and the steel guitar is wailing and the dancers are whirling around the floor and the whole place is sticky with sweat and humidity and the secret pleasure of the two hundred lucky people who managed to get tickets to Austin’s most exclusive two-step event. I give my name to the woman working the front desk. She takes another bite from her plate of barbecue, rummages around in a small drawer in

front of her, pulls out an envelope marked “Harold B.” with three names on it, including “Kirsten R.,” and pulls out a ticket, saying “you’re the last one!” I tell her I’m glad I made it, and she wraps a paper wristband around my left wrist and waves me in. This is the first time I’ve ever been to a Spring Fling or a Fall Ball without a date, and I have no idea where my sponsor Harold’s table is, and I feel a little uncomfortable showing up alone, so I put a pleasant smile on my face and make my way carefully down the side of the large dance floor, nodding at the people at the tables. Spring Fling, and its November iteration, Fall Ball, are something of a cross between a prom and a barn-raising: a volunteer decorating committee wraps the old hall’s rafters in tiny white lights and puts handmade centerpieces on each of the long tables flanking the dance floor; people bring dates and spend weeks discussing their hair and outfits and who has tickets and who doesn’t; and the women make and bring food for the potluck, which takes up much of the back of the hall. Dancers tuck their rolling coolers of beer, liquor, and sodas between tables – it’s not a heavy drinking crowd, but it’s not a dry event, either. Invitations to these events operate on a social network system: “sponsors” buy packages of tickets and then distribute them to their friends free of charge, which means that attendees are almost exclusively dance insiders, a who’s-who of the local dance scene. A tussle between an older couple and a new dancer at the 2013 Fall Ball led to a drastic reduction in the number of available tickets and an accompanying hike in price. But even though the number of attendees is visibly lower, the key players in each corner of the scene are here. Denise and Mike hold court amidst the rockabillies in spring florals up by the stage; Alyssa, Eric, and the rest of my ex’s friends (and my former dance crew) are camped out back by the food; and scores of excited new dancers are clumped along the edges of the dance floor and dispersed among generations of older dancers travelling counterclockwise around it. If my dress felt out of place outside the Fling, here it’s in good company: the women are in sparkles, spring florals, vintage, lace, petticoats; the men are in suits or slacks and western shirts. It is, after

all, a two-step formal. Halfway down the floor, I spot Giles and Sonya, a dance couple in their late 40s, and stop to give them a hug, ask if they’ve seen Harold or know where his table is, and they say “you can join us!” I thank them and stash my bag near the wall by their table, hug Whitney, who’s sitting at an adjoining table in a short maroon jersey dress, a little matching feather in her hair, pull the cookies out of my bag and bustle over to the dessert table to put them out among brownies, cakes, cookies, and what looks like a bowl full of banana pudding. A moment later the band starts a fast song and I ask Ron, a computer programmer and part-time police officer, to dance, and we whirl off onto the dance floor. Many dances later, I’m taking a break to observe the crowd when a short woman named Delores, with a New York accent and long dark hair and East Coast manners, comes up to me and tells me she loves my dress and asks me where I got it. I tell her and ask her where she got hers and she says Anthropologie three years ago and I say really, I never find anything there like that and she says yes, you’re right, it’s inconsistent. She apologizes for being so forward and I say I’m the same way, if you don’t ask, how are you going to know? This appears to put her at ease, because we start talking about the guy she’s seeing and how he’s not much of a dancer, but she wants to start some other kind of dance, maybe tango, so that they can both learn something new. What about salsa or swing? I suggest. Swing, she says, I could maybe see him getting into that. But everyone’s so young there. I agree and tell her I’ve never been to the Fed because I hear everyone is 20 and I don’t want to run into my students, and she says yes, and then there are those 60 year old women dancing with 20 year old men, and then they come ask me and I’m not 60 but it’s the same thing to them. And in salsa there are a lot of creepy dudes. “Like there are no creepy dudes in this scene!” I say incredulously, gesturing toward the dance floor, which is now full. Well, she says, that’s true, we have our creepers, but this is more of a community, it’s like a family, “there may be creepy guys, but they’re our creepy guys, you know?”

While I’ve had this conversation many times over the course of my research, having it here, in the innermost sanctum of the dance scene, made me realize just how central “creepy guys,” and the gender politics that support them, are to the Austin two-step scene. Although compared to Delores I was still very much a newcomer to the dance scene, in my few years’ tenure as a dancer and dance instructor I had already experienced a wide range of “creepy guys:” men who held me too close or “accidentally” brushed my breasts or buttocks with their hands on every turn; men who insisted I do what they asked, often with a threat of violence, either on or off the dance floor; men who told me in no uncertain terms that if I was not dating anyone then I was free for the taking; men who, when I tried to stand up for myself against egregious creepiness, told me that not only was it not my place as a woman to stand up for myself, but that what I had experienced simply hadn’t happened. As a newly single woman, even getting a ticket for the Spring Fling that year had been fraught: I turned down tickets from both a violent drunk and an older man with romantic intentions, and instead accepted one from Harold, a sweet, awkward lawyer who I knew would have no expectations if I accepted his sponsorship. After all, not all of the men in the dance scene are “creepy.” But the creepers exist. And, like Delores, I and other female dancers somehow manage to square our experiences with creepy guys with our desire to belong to the scene, and to navigate, minimize, accept, and even support the actions of these men as integral to our experience of social dancing. We dance with them, laugh at their jokes, invite them to events, accept their compliments and allow them to embrace us, sometimes a bit closer than we’d like, both on and off the floor. In a way, by treating their actions as “normal,” we make them who they are. To the extent that gender is a performance embedded in what Raewyn Connell calls a “system of social relations,” performances of femininity and masculinity in the dance scene are mutually constitutive.78 And in the

78 Raewyn Connell, “Gender, Men, and Masculinities,” Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, accessed July 21, 2015, http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c11/e1-17-02-01.pdf.

heteronormative, socially conservative world of Austin two-step, where masculinity and femininity are performed as discrete categories that are mapped onto particular biological bodies, these performances, and the inequalities that they suggest, are also integral to the way the dance scene operates. In this chapter, I examine new dancers’ understandings of the relationship between clothing and gender roles in dance culture, attempts by both men and women to use dance to create a more progressive culture, and attempts by some male dancers to enforce a submissive femininity both on and off the dance floor. Throughout, I look closely at the relationship between performance and gender in the fluid, embodied, place-bound context of Austin’s two-step dance scene. This chapter answers three related questions. First, why do educated, middle-class women like Delores waltz willingly into the male space of the honkytonk, when it seems like they are required to check their subjectivity at the door? Second, and hopefully a way of answering the first, why does belonging in the Austin two-step scene have to operate along these gender performances? And finally and more broadly, how do these gender performances deepen our understanding of the meaning of the local? How do Austin two-step dancers’ performances of heterosexual gender roles contribute to their construction of local community and a local sense of self?

Gendering the Honkytonk

In order to understand how and why Austin’s two-step dance scene relies on performances of traditional gender roles to create a sense of belonging in place, we first need to situate Austin’s two-step dance scene within its larger cultural and geographical contexts. The late 1980s and early 1990s mark the beginning of Austin’s most recent population boom, which is characterized by an influx of educated, white, middle-class people seeking work in tech, music, and other creative industries; back then, it was accompanied by gentrification in central Austin’s poorer neighborhoods, including Clarksville, Cherrywood, the hotly-contested East

Cesar Chavez area, and South Austin.79 By the mid-1990s, South Congress had been “cleaned up,” its streetwalkers and crack dens replaced with shops selling music equipment, records, vintage clothing, and other accoutrements of the city’s burgeoning alt country scene.80 Separate from, but drawing on, the Texas dance hall tradition at work beyond the city’s borders, Austin alt country set itself up in opposition to Nashville as the “real” country music, made all the more authentic by its reliance on “vintage” recordings of the country greats and its location in the heart of Texas.81 Consequently, Austin has been home to one of the largest “alt country” scenes in the United States for decades, and the city’s unique mix of roots acts, combined with a deeply-entrenched live music culture, has fostered a lively partner dance scene as well. This scene – which is really a shifting set of smaller scenes, each with its own aesthetic preferences for clothing, music, venues, and dance styles, but all sharing an affinity for the “traditional” gender roles on which partner dancing is based – is often interpreted as a simple nostalgic re-enactment of the past. However, the complex, hybrid nature of the scene means that dancers with different skillsets and political orientations can coexist with wildly different interpretations of what it means to “re-enact” – to perform – these “traditional” gender roles. Three of these interpretations of performance are key to understanding how and why “traditional” gender roles operate within the dance scene. While “alt country” is a somewhat dated term, its constitutive tension between ironic nostalgia and “emotional honesty,” combined with the genre’s geographic ties to Austin, provide a useful starting point from which to unpack the dance scene.82 As Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching argue, alt country at its most basic is “the hopeful ‘alternative’ to Nashville’s contemporary country music.”83

79 See Chapter 3 below. 80 Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” 86. 81 Ibid., 85–86. 82 Ching and Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic - Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt country Music,” 8–9.Fox and Ching, Intro, 8-9 83 Ibid., 2.

“Alternative” here has a particular political valence: against the capitalist glitz and glamour of mainstream country, a taste for alternative country is “an expression of a desire to break with the ties that bind human expression and pleasure to the marketplace and an equation, however subconscious, of the cultural mainstream with an ‘illegitimate’ empire over taste.”84 To prefer “alternative” country to “top 40,” then, is to first set up a conflict between commodification and authentic human subjectivity, and then to reject the role of the capitalist profit imperative in the construction of subjective tastes, pleasures, and preferences. But because alt country, despite its claims to be “real” and “authentic” country, is itself a consumer product, and because its fans are usually aware of this, its defining feature, per Fox and Ching, is actually “an ironized conflict between commodification and authenticity.”85 Alt country fans, musicians, and dancers come to Austin to escape from the capitalist system, even though they know that escape is not possible; to paraphrase Sloterdijk, they know exactly what they do, and yet they do it anyway. As Aaron Fox writes, “[a] certain conspicuous and respectfully ironic consumption of Texana came to define the city’s public style and its image as a mecca for music tourism and youth cultural credibility.”86 And on a certain level, many Austin dancers, in their vintage clothes and boots, partner dancing in run-down (and run- down looking) honkytonks to live bands whose own songs blend seamlessly into covers of Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Ray Price, and other country greats, are aware that what they are doing is a construct. Austin is not really this white, this straight, this rustic, this low-tech; not everyone knows (or cares) how to dance this well or can belt out all the words to “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” on command; when we leave the Broken Spoke or the White Horse or the Little Longhorn, our jeans and skirts and broken-in boots will look out of place among the glistening new condos, and men can no longer count on women to follow their leads without question.

84 Ibid., 6. 85 Ibid., 4. 86 Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” 86.

But on another level, there is something genuine and unironic about alt country fans’ love for old school country music, especially as it is enacted in the two- step scene. Two-steppers, like all social dancers, “become a community as a result of the dancing;” they are connected through the shared pleasure of what William McNeill calls “keeping together in time” and a desire to perpetuate and amplify that togetherness.87 To that end, it is possible in Austin to spend one’s entire waking life in a honkytonk, and many people do; for the best dancers, it is practically a necessity. Unlike swing, salsa, competitive two-step and other studio-based social dances, Austin two-step does not have a behind-the-scenes or off-stage practice space, which means that dancers learn through hours and years of dancing together to live music in the city’s honkytonks and bars and dance halls. For this reason, a large part of being a dancer is showing up night after night and participating in the dance scene. Geoff Stahl defines “scene” as an “informal and often temporary arrangement of industries, institutions, audiences and infrastructures which are fundamental determinants affecting how a scene is constructed over time and in a given space;” he argues that “[a] scene, in this sense, can be seen as a spatial product of a social process.”88 Against older notions of subculture and community, which tend to overemphasize fixity, social homogeneity, and the semiotics of style, this concept of “scene” better captures the flexibility, historical contingency, and spatiality of Austin two-step. The dance scene is an assemblage of subtly shifting heterogeneous elements. The current configuration of venues (the Broken Spoke, the White Horse, the Little Longhorn, the ABGB), the bands that are currently popular (Weldon Henson, Mike Stinson, Dale Watson for older dancers; Leo Rondeau, Mayeux and Broussard, Rosie and the Ramblers for the younger crowd), the nights that are currently “good” for dancing, the “best” dancers, the clothes we wear, the moves that are currently popular – these are all different from what they were a year ago, and they will be different a year from now, but they shape and are

87 Malnig, “Introduction,” 4; McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, 2–3. 88 Stahl, “Crisis? What Crisis? Anglophone Musicmaking in Montreal,” 60.

shaped by the scene, which itself is a social process making its mark on the city’s physical landscape. Further, belonging in the scene is earned not just through dance competence but through the cultural competence of knowing which venues, bands, dance moves and dancers are hot. As Thornton explains, this “scene-specific knowledge and embodied forms of ‘clubculture’ competences [is] accorded with individuals’ perceived degree of authenticity in the eyes of their peers.”89 The more dancers know about the scene, the more “authentic” their claims of belonging are. However, while the scene is relatively contingent and informal, developing the depth of knowledge that indicates this authentic belonging requires a significant time commitment, both in the short and long term. Many dancers dance together for hours a night, several nights a week, every week of the year, and in doing so, they use their dancing bodies to bring the scene into existence. As Driver and Bennett argue, music scenes are not just emplaced but embodied, so that “bodies [serve] as the medium of affective exchange in the co-constitution of self and place.”90 In other words, “bodies are not just the ends of doing music scenes – they are also the means by which scenes must be continuously reproduced.”91 Scenes in general are created, sustained, and “continuously reproduced” by embodied co-presence; without regular live, in-person gatherings, a scene would cease to exist. This is particularly true of the two-step scene, and not just because, as Susan Foster writes, the “dancing body” is itself a construct, the product of years of daily labor in which “the body seems constantly to elude one’s efforts to direct it.”92 In two-step, the dancing body is the product of years of not just training the movements of the body, but of creating what Ingold calls “the embodiment of knowledge-in-context,” a “property not of the individual human body as a biophysical entity, a thing-in-itself, but of the

89 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Dicussed in Driver and Bennett, “Music Scenes, Space and the Body,” 106. 90 Driver and Bennett, “Music Scenes, Space and the Body,” 110. 91 Ibid., 100. 92 Susan Leigh Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 236.

total field of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person, indissolubly body and mind, in a richly structured environment.”93 Belonging to the dance scene is a matter of becoming competent in this “total field of relations,” of integrating the dancing body into the “richly structured environment” of the honkytonk so that dancer and context each shape the other. In a scene whose social and aesthetic processes are worked out almost entirely at in-person dance events, developing this “knowledge-in-context” requires an incredible investment of time, money, and self. Hence, for the most hardcore dancers, those who spend nearly every night at the honkytonk, dancing is their only pastime and the dance scene is the entirety of their social world. But the Austin two-step scene is not just about abstract dancing bodies individually engaged in the “co-constitution of self and place.” That this co- constitution takes the form of social dancing suggests that dancing, and the processes of constructing the dancing body, are central not just to the production of the scene but to the meaning-making processes within it. After all, the body of the dancer is intimately involved in cultural processes of meaning-making. Especially in diverse, urban contexts, part of this process of embodied meaning-making includes the construction of social difference, using the dancing body to differentiate between dancers who belong and those who do not. In a pivotal essay that began the move from discourse to affect within dance studies, Jane Desmond argues that dance research is a subset of “human movement studies” that can “further our understandings of how social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movement.”94 For Desmond, dance is “a performance of cultural identity, where movement style is “an important mode of distinction between social

93 Tim Ingold, “Beyond Art and Technology: The Anthropology of Skill,” in Anthropological Perspectives on Technology, ed. M Schiffer (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 21. Cited in Christopher Driver, “Embodying Hardcore: Rethinking ‘Subcultural’ Authenticities,” Journal of Youth Studies 14, no. 8 (December 2011): 981. 94 Jane C. Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 29.

groups” and a “marker for the production of gender, racial, ethnic, class, and national identities.”95 The dancing body, in other words, is the site at which cultural difference is produced and negotiated. Similarly, Tim Cresswell situates the production of cultural difference on the dancing body; in his study of early 20th century British ballroom instructors, he argues that the process of standardizing ballroom dance was a process of differentiating between “appropriate and inappropriate mobility,” so that the “dancing body that emerges at the end of the process is surely one that experiences pleasure, but one that, nonetheless, embodies a complex process of exclusion and othering.”96 Part of this othering process is incorporated into the process of constructing the dancing body itself. As Susan Foster points out, becoming a dancer is not a matter of style but rather what Marcel Mauss calls ‘techniques of the body.’ Per Foster, these are “methods of cultivating the body – whole disciplines through which it is molded, shaped, transformed, and in essence created.”97 Although Foster is writing about the construction of the theatrical dancing body, this cultivation is also a key part of becoming a two- stepper. Like theatrical dancers, two-steppers become dancers through “daily practical participation” in dance, through a repetition of movements that over time “reconfigures” the body so that it conforms with the dance community’s “ideal body.”98 Although the body may resist, eventually, this reconfiguration makes it legible to fellow dancers as that of a “good dancer,” a scene insider, a dancer who belongs. Becoming a good dancer is about training the body in the “correct” movements of the dance and about ridding it of any associations with “inappropriate mobility.” Becoming a good dancer is also a matter of performing gender correctly. Two-steppers dance primarily in the city’s dance halls, dive bars, and honkytonks,

95 Ibid., 31. 96 Tim Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor,” in On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 123, 124. 97 Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” 236. 98 Ibid., 239.

and the dance itself is a partner dance that is based on “traditional” heterosexual gender roles. Belonging to the scene therefore requires scene-specific performances of masculinities and femininities within these male-gendered spaces. Barry Shank characterizes the honkytonk as a carnivalesque site of cultural inversion at the edge of town “where law enforcement was less consistent,” and thus where,

as in all carnival traditions, the rituals, images, and symbols of corporeality, sexuality, and sexual relations formed a ripe field for the negotiation of cultural tensions. The turmoil derived from modernizing a rural culture that had rooted its values in a premodern homosocial utopia was displayed, heightened, critiqued, and lived in the previously hidden area of sexuality.99

For Shank, the honkytonk is a liminal space between modernity and pre-modern culture, its physical location in the underpoliced no-man’s land between town and country making it a key site in the “turmoil” of modernization. Crucial here was the tension between the progressive values of modernity and the more conservative values of a “premodern homosocial utopia,” expressed in “the previously hidden area of sexuality.” While sexuality was policed elsewhere, in the honkytonk (hetero)sexual relations were welcomed, literally, with open arms. However, if the honkytonk is imagined as a free space for the expression of male heterosexual desire, the implications for women are more complex. Fox and Ching argue that

[t]he illicit urban tavern, while the seeming antithesis of the family-oriented, down-home barn dance, became its ironic twin in one important sense: both in fact functioned as a kind of patriarchal locus delimiting women’s participation in their respective communities precisely through nostalgia for an imaginary domesticity that signified a traditional, yet vanishing regional or home culture. The liminal juke joint’s free-flowing alcohol, fevered dancing, and preoccupation with sexuality may have permitted a novel kind

99 Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock “N” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas, 35–36.

of ‘carnivalesque’ abandon for modern country audiences, but it hardly overturned all of rural culture’s deeply entrenched conventions.100 (64-5)

Unlike Shank, who sees the honkytonk as a liminal space that is neither city nor country, Fox and Ching argue that for women, liminality is both city and country, so that what functions as a decontextualized “novel kind of ‘carnivalesque’ abandon” for men is always already contextual for women. To read the honky-tonk as a “patriarchal locus delimiting women’s participation in their respective communities” rather than a space for the open expression of female sexuality is to argue that even in unpoliced, carnivalesque spaces, women are not free from the constraints of the outside world. Fox and Ching are also careful to point out the differences between “modern country audiences” and the romanticized “rural culture” with which the honkytonk is associated, and in doing so they highlight the tension between irony and genuine desire that characterizes contemporary alt country culture generally and Austin’s two-step scene in particular. While members of most of Austin’s alt country and roots scenes - traditional, outlaw, western swing, Texas swing, honkytonk, rockabilly, roots, bluegrass, Americana – openly display their nostalgia for working- class honkytonk culture in the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, the venues and bands they patronize, and the style of dance they do, their relationship with the gender roles of these past eras is more fraught. Fox and Ching argue that alt country fans approach “authentic” country culture both ironically and with a genuine desire to belong to a nostalgically constructed past.101 Certainly, dancers almost exclusively perform “traditional” heterosexuality on the dance floor, with each couple consisting of a male lead and a female follow whose gender performances appear to match their biological sex. And social relations off the dance floor seem largely to operate along the same lines. But as Driver and Bennett point out, a music

100 Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 64–5. 101 Ching and Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic - Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt country Music,” 2.

scene is “a means through which individuals with different relationships to a specific genre of music produced in a particular space articulate a sense of collective identity and belonging.”102 People can, and do, enter the dance scene from multiple generations, political orientations, dance training, education, and other factors, and they use the common denominators of space, musical taste, aesthetic preferences and dance to perform the “collective identity and belonging” that makes the dance scene a coherent entity. The performance of traditional gender roles both on and off the dance floor is crucial to making this sense of belonging happen. For it to work, the meaning of “performance” in the carnivalesque world of the contemporary honkytonk must itself be slippery, multiple, and open. An understanding of performance as multiple, complex, and hybrid is especially important where the scene’s gender relations are concerned. If, as Raewyn Connell argues, masculinities and femininities are co-constitutive, then understanding what we mean when we constitute them can help explain how and why performances of traditional heterosexuality are so foundational to the dance scene.103 Three kinds of gender performance are helpful here. First, some gender performances in Austin’s two-step scene, particularly as they pertain to dance skill and clothing choices, can be read productively using the insights of the Birmingham School on style, particularly in terms of the relationship between commodities, their use-value, and their function as signs of subcultural belonging. But gender performance in the dance scene, particularly in the case of men and women who approach “traditional” gender roles ironically or who make the mask of gender obvious, can also be understood as what Cindy Garcia calls “choreographies of gender,” patterns of gendered behaviors that operates on the level of social interactions within the dance space.104 Yet because the traditional gender performances in the Austin two-step scene operate in opposition to Austin’s otherwise progressive culture, the scene also constitutes a safe space for men who

102 Driver and Bennett, “Music Scenes, Space and the Body,” 100. 103 Connell, “Gender, Men, and Masculinities.” 104 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 95.

are interested in preserving or exploiting the power imbalances that these danced gender roles suggest. Here, gender may be more productively interpreted through a Butlerian conception of performance, where danced gender, as Ben Malbon puts it, “constructs” the gendered self so that the connection between biological sex and gender performance appears seamless.105 Together, all three versions of performance explain how and why a scene composed of people with such different backgrounds and cultural politics can interact with one another in the heterosexual, male-dominated space of the honkytonk. Situated within the protective confines of Austin’s alt country scene, the two- step dance scene relies for cohesion upon the performance of traditional gender roles, both on and off the dance floor. Unlike subcultures or communities, which emphasize social homogeneity, stasis, and equal levels and kinds of participation, the dance scene, like most music scenes, is hybrid and fluid, an assemblage of audiences, venues, bands, dance moves, dancers, and fashions that comes together regularly for the one thing they all have in common: dancing. Yet while dancers often express feelings of collective belonging and utopian equality on the dance floor, their performance of traditional gender roles extends beyond the partnered embrace. Masculinity and femininity are mapped to biological bodies, while in turn perform these gendered identities in the male space of the honkytonk, which allows men to act with carnivalesque abandon while both objectifying and policing the bodies of women. Yet the multiple types of performance in the dance scene allow for multiple interpretations of the meaning of these gender roles within the dance scene. As seen through fashion, female interpretations of the follow role, and male policing and appropriation of female bodies, the how and why of gender performance in the Austin two-step scene reflects the complexity of dancing the local.

105 Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, 27–28.

Of Style and Substance

Are we a country band because we wear pearl snaps and cowboy hats? Or do we wear pearl snaps and cowboy hats because we’re a country band? - John Carbone, keyboardist, Mike and the Moonpies

Don and I leave the Broken Spoke a little later than we intended. Don, an occasional handyman in his 60s with a taste for much younger women, is looking for Holly, a buxom redhead who promised to pay his admission to the Continental Club in exchange for a ride. Don finally locates Holly and we squeeze into the cab of his old rattly handyman truck and drive the few miles north to the Continental Club, Holly sidled up to Don and me by the window. At the door, Holly pays for Don and disappears; I pay for myself. It’s 12:30 on a Thursday night in October and the heavy wooden chairs, lined up in neat rows facing the stage, are all full, as is the narrow galley between the chairs and the bar. The red walls and red stage lights pulsate with the rhythm of the band and the crowd of dancers at the front of the stage. I pause a few feet inside the door to take off my coat but Don grabs my hand and says “I want to dance.” We press up through the crowd and drop our things and as soon as we start dancing I realize that this is the place to be tonight; the Spoke was just a prelude. The smiles, the excited chatter, what my friend Matt calls “the vibe” - people seem to feel like something special is happening, and it is, in a way. The band, Mike and the Moonpies, played every Thursday night at the White Horse for a good year, and it was the best party of the week: packed with people, packed with dancers, a drunken, rowdy midnight show. Now that they’ve signed with a booking agency and spend most of their weekends touring, these Thursdays are rare, and the fact that “Cray Cray Thursday” has moved from the Horse to the Continental, one of the most established, hardest-to-get-into clubs in the city, means they’ve made it: the prodigal sons return. And they’ve dressed up in their standard Austin garb: Mike is in a pearl snap and boots with a cowboy hat over his long, sandy blond hair; Zack, the steel player, is in a pearl snap unbuttoned to his navel,

the sleeves cut off to reveal the tattoos on his hairy arms and chest; Preston, the baby-faced bass player, is in a beige embroidered pearl snap, and Catlin, the lead guitarist, is wearing a maroon blazer and blue boots with white stars on them. Even John Carbone, the Berklee-trained keyboard player, is wearing a cowboy hat, though he doesn’t look pleased about it. This is Austin’s big leagues and the core of their fan base, so it’s as important for them to look like a country band as it is to sound like one. In Austin, fashion is a large part of the stylization process of alt country, and wearing the “right” clothes is important for belonging within the Austin two-step scene. Because much of the two-stepping in Austin is performed in front of non- dancers, style can be interpreted in terms of what Norman Bryson calls “ballet epistemology.”106 Here, style is understood as a structured theatrical event, with separate spaces for performers and audience and an emphasis on the stylized body as an expressive tool or text. Dance style in this context is a way of signifying to non-dancers that dancers belong to the two-step scene. But two-steppers also use style to signify to each other that they belong in the scene and to position themselves within it. Partner dancing and conspicuous consumption are both key components in the performance of masculinities and femininities in the Austin two- step scene, which means that belonging is expressed through scene-specific stylizations of masculinity and femininity. But in dance, the semiotic value of clothing is constantly in tension with its functional value, so that becoming a dancer is a matter of learning how to incorporate the mobility requirements of the dancing body into stylistic expressions of scene identity. While country-western style has been a key site for reworking gender norms in Austin since the rise of the Cosmic Cowboy movement in the 1960s, the attempts of two relatively new dancers, Deirdre and Jorge, to find clothing that is functional for dancing, consistent with the scene’s expectations for gender performance, and expressive of their own position

106 Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 58.

relative to the scene reveals the fundamental tensions of belonging on the dance floor. As a form of communication, style also relies on the relative subject positions of sender and receiver, which in Austin and central Texas are tied to geographic positioning as well. In their discussion of style in postwar youth subcultures, Clarke et al write that while youth subcultures are most often identified from the outside by their clothing and possessions,

despite their visibility, things simply appropriated and worn (or listened to) do not make a style. What makes a style is the activity of stylization – the active organisation of objects with activities and outlooks, which produce an organised group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of ‘being-in-the-world’.107

As it relates to subcultural membership, style, then, is not a matter of “things simply appropriated and worn (or listened to)” – those objects are not important in and of themselves. Rather, objects gain meaning through “stylization,” so that objects become part of a larger worldview, a “distinctive way of ‘being-in-the-world.’” Style only gains semiotic value when it has something of substance to express – which means, to answer Carbone’s question, that the Moonpies wear pearl snaps and cowboy hats because they are a country band, and not the other way around – but also that, paradoxically, not wearing pearl snaps and cowboy hats could mean that they are not a country band. In Austin, they are using style to perform their identities as members of a country band for an audience that expects visual signifiers of an alt country identity. In central Texas, where Austin alt country and traditional Texas country (and their sub-scenes) uncomfortably co-exist, this theatrical event is complicated by competing interpretations of the relationship between authenticity and fashion in country music. For Aaron Fox, the history of country music in and around Austin is

107 John Clarke et al., “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 54.

a “staged encounter of competing class-specific nostalgias,” each believing itself to be more authentic than the other: within Austin, vintage pearl snaps, faded jeans, long hair and cowboy hats – the very stuff of the Moonpies’ stage presence – are part of a larger worldview that considers recordings of the greats to be more “pure,” and thus more authentic, than contemporary musical performance. Outside the city limits, people often claim that Austin country, with its liberal-leaning politics and vintage fashions, isn’t real country, and they sometimes enforce their expectations on Austin bands. In San Angelo, for instance, country fans once scolded Mike for wearing Chuck Taylors instead of cowboy boots: sneakers might be perfectly appropriate for playing alt country in Austin, but they are not appropriate for performing “real” country music in West Texas. And Austin alt country style is as notable for what it excludes as for what it includes. Personal style in Austin two- step – choices in clothing, shoes, hairstyles, accessories – ranges from the kind of “semiotic guerilla warfare” enacted by punks, skins, goths, rockabillies, and other highly visible subcultures, to the quieter alt country normcore of vintage pearl snaps and 50s dresses, to the even quieter dress slacks and floral skirts of older, more conservative dancers.108 This wide variety of fashion choices reflects the wide variety of roots-oriented subcultures and scenes that come together at dance events. The absences also speak volumes: rhinestones, square-toed boots, loose wranglers, short-short cutoffs, ripped jeans, moldable cowboy hats, and other markers of pop country or rural Texas identities are almost entirely missing. To the extent that style is a performance of a particular way of being-in-the-world, the signifying

108 On “semiotic guerilla warfare,” see Stahl, “Crisis? What Crisis? Anglophone Musicmaking in Montreal,” 57. On vintage and alt country, see Jon Smith, “Growing Up and Out of Alt country: On Gen X, Wearing Vintage, and Neko Case,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt country Music, ed. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 51– 82; Colleen Thorndike, “‘The Streets of Where I’m From’: Masculinity and Simulations of the Past in Alt country Music,” Americana: The American Popular Culture Magazine, February 2014, http://www.americanpopularculture.com/archive/music/alt_country.htm. On normcore, see Alex Williams, “The New Normal: Normcore: Fashion Movement or Massive In-Joke?,” The New York Times, April 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/fashion/normcore-fashion-movement- or-massive-in-joke.html?_r=1. On traditional pressed slacks, see Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” 89.

power of Austin alt country style depends as much on the audience as it does on the people performing it. The significance of alt country style is also dependent on its self-conscious references to its own history within the city limits. Because two-step in Austin draws so heavily on alt country performances of cowboy culture within consciously- constructed “honky-tonks,” scene-specific stylizations of gender can partly be explained with reference to the complexities of the cowboy figure and its relationship with gender roles in Austin. In the 1970s, Austin seemed a unique space in which participatory and commercial music cultures could co-exist; Travis Stimeling argues that against “the intense competition in the mainstream music industry of a place like Los Angeles, the cosmic cowboy proposed that Texas offered an alternative space in which competition was not an issue and where people could be as creative as they wished.”109 In particular, as a “nice place to live” with a long history of environmental preservation and progressive activism, Austin allowed for the “invocation of rural romanticism in an American metropolis.”110 This combination of rural and urban is key to the self-construction of country music and to the gender politics within it. In the 1970s, Austin was home to a progressive country music scene whose “cosmic cowboys” and “honky-tonk angels” brought “hippies” and “rednecks” together into a country music scene racked with contradictions.111 Coined – or at least popularized – by Texan singer-songwriter Michael Murphey in 1972, the “Cosmic Cowboy” was in part an attempt to bridge a generational gap between “young, middle-class, liberal Texans and older, working- class, conservative Texans.”112 As both Stimeling and Jason Mellard show, the figure

109 Travis D. Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42. 110 Ibid. On Austin’s political history, see also Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011”; Swearingen, Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. 111 Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, 2. 112 Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene, 41.

of the Cosmic Cowboy, with his long hair, Lone Stars, marijuana, and faded blue jeans and boots, was a hybrid form of masculinity in which numerous oppositions – rural and urban, modern and traditional, and liberal and conservative political agendas – coexisted uncomfortably.113 In the 1970s, men inhabiting this hybrid identity performed a white masculinity threatened by a decade of Civil Rights movements designed to undermine its power. They thus, per Mellard, “echo[ed] the postmodern sense of identities as performative guises that played across glam and punk, but here transferred to the Sunbelt South.”114 In the cosmic cowboy’s pop apotheosis, Urban Cowboy, John Travolta’s character, Bud, embodies the more conservative side of many of these contradictions along with the anxieties that the contradictions cause: as a “real cowboy,” he leaves his home in the country to find work as a “gopher” in a refinery outside of Houston; he wins his bride, Sissy, with his dance skills; he demands that she cook and clean for him but then relies on her income when he breaks his arm and can’t work; he cheats on her with a wealthy woman who treats him as a sex object while she cheats on him with a violent, and therefore more masculine, mechanical bull operator.115 The sense of a loss of masculine power in the wake of both gay rights and women’s rights is palpable in the film’s trajectory, as is the possibility that “the masculine, the authentic, the real, and the natural” might still be reclaimed “in a place like Texas” by retreating into the more “traditional” male-female relationship suggested by the lead-follow organization of country partner dancing.116 A properly curated dance style locates the dancer within local variants of this cultural history. Among the dancers in Austin’s contemporary two-step scene, style is an important component of a dancer’s identity; for Deirdre, creating a scene-specific feminine style has been a big part of the process of becoming a dancer. I first met

113 Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, 2; Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene, 42. 114 Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, 183. 115 Ibid., Chapter 5. 116 Ibid., 187.

Deirdre at Ginny’s Little Longhorn, a legendary honkytonk on Austin’s north side, on a cold Wednesday in February 2014. It was cold enough that there were few people in the bar, but local honkytonk band Two Hoots and a Holler had us all up dancing. Deirdre was dancing song after song with Darren, a sure sign within the scene that they were on a date. Darren was a newer dancer himself whose experiments into complex turns and pretzels were difficult for me to follow, but Deirdre kept up by completely relaxing her body, so that he could twist, turn, and spin her with little to no resistance. At the break, her eyes glowing, she told me that she had only been dancing for two weeks but she was already hooked. She didn’t yet dress like a dancer then: her dress was dark and didn’t flare up, but her boots were a slouchy suede with thin fashion soles, her hair was long and cascading down her back, and she had a long sweep of curls at the front that she constantly pushed out of her face. When I sat down with Deirdre just a few months later in October 2014 to interview her, she was already an integral part of the T-Birds, a group of newer, very flashy dancers at the top of the dance hierarchy at the White Horse, and though she had largely retained her style of movement, her personal style had changed dramatically due to dancing. A manager at a local tech firm, Deirdre has always “had and loved” vintage clothing for its looks, and at first, dancing was an excuse to buy more clothing that looked good:

at a certain point, I realized, I was like Wait a minute. I can buy dresses that look REALLY great specifically when I’m dancing – they might be completely irresponsible and inappropriate to wear for that evening otherwise because of the weather, you know…

Here, wearing vintage clothing while dancing to honkytonk music was about creating a look, about projecting the image of a honkytonk dancer – which, for Deirdre, meant “dresses.” Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching associate alt country’s vintage obsession with both a desire for an “authentic” rural past and an “ironized conflict between commodification and authenticity,” an always-already failed attempt to connect with the past through consumption of fetishized material objects

from the desired era.117 Deirdre’s early purchases reflect this ironized conflict: she knew the dresses were functionally inappropriate, but she bought them anyway because they made her look like an authentic dancer. They allowed her to create a simulacrum of scene-specific femininity. Yet as she got better at dancing, Deirdre realized that vintage clothing and dance could – and should – be functionally linked. “I especially love vintage dresses,” she says,

but really, again, getting more comfortable with more sophisticated turns – clothing can be an extension of this experience. So now when I go out shopping for dresses, I used to just try things on and be like great, it fits. But now I do things, like I’ll turn in it to see how it spins, raise my arms above my head - I go through the movements of dancing to make sure this is a dress I really want to wear dancing. They’re not cheap, so it’s an investment on its own, but also just making sure that it’s appropriate.

Deirdre’s claim that “clothing can be an extension of this experience” reflects a fundamental shift in her thinking. As she became “more comfortable with more sophisticated turns” – as her dancing skills improved – she went from using vintage to project an image of a dancer to choosing the clothes that would both project this image and facilitate her movements while dancing. A good dress for dancing is one that supports “the movements of dancing:” it spins well without revealing too much, it allows a full range of motion in the arms, and it is “appropriate” for the activity. While Deirdre owns clothing from the 50s through the 70s, her favorite dancing dresses are from the 1950s: the full dirndl skirts do not restrict her legs, and unlike early synthetics, cotton breathes well and wicks sweat. As she became more integrated into the scene, fashion became stylization, an expression of belonging to the dance scene and seeing the world from a dancer’s worldview. Deirdre’s style has changed in other ways, too. She loves shoes, but dancing is hard on them: the soles in her beloved slouchy suede boots, the ones she was

117 Ching and Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic - Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt country Music,” 4.

wearing when I met her, cracked through after just a month of dancing, and her collection of vintage heels is rapidly suffering a similar fate as heels crack and already-worn soles wear through. She has a pair of cowboy boots, she says, but they are too loose to dance in without three pairs of socks to hold them on her feet. When she discovered that her vintage heels were giving her shin splints, she finally gave up and bought a pair of character shoes from Movin’ Easy, a local dance supply shop, and has been living in them – the thicker soles and reinforced heels make their slightly goofy appearance worth the sacrifice in fashion. And her hair: Deirdre has always had long hair,

and when I started dancing, like, I would like to do my hair down and curl it. And not too long after dancing for 2-4 hours a night, I was just like I don’t know why I bother dealing with this because I’m sweaty in the first 30 minutes and any curl is completely gone. One thing that really annoyed me was that my bangs were too long and always sticking to my face. I looked like I had a beard and it was terrible! And it actually, like, it’s so funny because dancing drove me to cut bangs because I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. At least I can pull my long hair back and my bangs won’t get stuck in my mouth.

Within just a few months of dancing, Deirdre had her long, romantic curls refashioned into a chic lob with bangs, a stylish nod to that season’s fashionable haircut that was driven by dancing – and, well, a desire not to look like she had a beard anymore. Her personal style had previously not been tailored to any particular physical activity; her new style combines the visual signifiers of vintage clothing with the functional requirements of dancing. Being a dancer had become just as important as looking like one. Deirdre’s skillful integration of vintage style with the functional requirements of the dance positions her at the intersection of two overlapping scenes: the alt country – as opposed to traditional country – scene, and the dance scene. It also highlights the complexities of gender performance as a component of belonging in the dance scene. On the one hand, the physical intensity of dancing

introduces a new set of constraints on the clothing that she can wear, and her choices reflect those constraints. There are other ways, too, that dance constricts personal style: shoe soles must be leather or a slick synthetic so that dancers can glide and spin without slowing their movements or damaging their knees, and shoes are generally closed-toe to protect the feet. Jewelry and hair is generally held close to the body to keep it from hitting other dancers. Also, because dancers hold one another in a ballroom embrace, with the lead’s hand on the follow’s back and the follow’s hand on the lead’s shoulder, leads wear sleeves and follows wear tops with closed backs so that their partners can touch cloth rather than sticky, sweaty skin.118 Many dancers also prefer dark fabrics or colors that don’t show sweat, and many men wear two shirts or bring multiple shirts to dance events. Not everyone makes these choices, certainly. But more importantly, there are many ways to interpret them. Deirdre’s love of a “vintage” aesthetic predates her becoming a dancer and informs her personal style choices as a dancer. When looking for a breathable, wicking fabric, for instance, she chooses vintage 50s cotton over contemporary knits or performance synthetics, both of which are common among dancers and wick better than cotton; only grudgingly does she replace her vintage footwear with dance shoes, despite the fact that dance shoes are specifically designed for the activity at hand. And, of course, she wears dresses, not pants. Her clothing is as symbolic of her position within the roots scenes in Austin’s local cultural milieu as it is functional. Deirdre is not a dancer just for the dancing, but also for the broader worldview in which the dancing operates, where a “respectfully ironic consumption of Texana,” combined with her follow role in the dance partnership, is performed through a stylized nostalgia for traditional femininity. Unlike Deirdre, who embraces vintage clothing as part of the dance experience, Jorge prefers his street clothes over the pearl snaps and cowboy boots worn by many of the men in the dance scene. Yet the relationship between personal

118 These observations are drawn from my experience in the scene, but see also Richard Powers, “Sketchy Guys,” Social Dance at Stanford, accessed March 11, 2015, https://socialdance.stanford.edu/Syllabi/sketchy.htm.

style and dance is vitally important to Jorge in his construction of a scene-specific masculinity. I first met Jorge at the White Horse during SXSW in March 2014 – the bar had opted out of doing official showcases and was instead featuring short sets by local acts. I had taken a break between sets to get some air, and when I came back, Silas Lowe was on stage, but the other dancers were still not back and hardly anyone was on the floor, just a few couples bouncing awkwardly through a two-step. Silas plays bluegrass you can dance to – slower than most bluegrass, though with plenty of polkas thrown in. My friend Sandra waved me over and told me I needed to dance with the guy she just danced with, and she introduced me to Jorge, a rail- thin, brown-skinned guy with his hair shaved on the sides, big and combed over on the top like he’s from the 1920s, but in a hipster tank top with “France” printed on it, skinny jeans and brown workboots, and tattoos across his chest and down both arms, black ink in curly traditional script. He didn’t look like he could dance, or at least he didn’t look like the rest of the dancers – he was younger, and thinner, and stylistically more hipster than rockabilly. But I took his hand and he led me onto the floor and it turned out that he was a great lead: he moved from his hips, led clearly and neatly, and combined basics and turns in ways that showed a connection to the musical phrasing. He only had a few moves, but he mixed them up so that it wasn’t boring. When the song ended, he said “I can’t get enough of Silas Lowe: he’s got that old Kentucky bluegrass voice.” I was startled: at that point, very few men my age knew how to dance that well, and those who did usually signified their skills by wearing something country – cowboy boots, a pearl snap shirt or a t-shirt with a local band on it, sometimes a cowboy hat. Sleeves, at least. Jorge had none of these, and yet he was clearly a dancer and someone who liked country, or at least someone who knew enough about country to speak its language – why else would he remark on Silas’ voice in that way? Over the next few months, Jorge quickly transitioned from dance neophyte to dance prodigy, one of those rare dancers who truly has a gift for the dance. By the time I interviewed him in September 2014, he had become the unofficial head of the

T-Birds, he was teaching private dance lessons, and he and other T-Bird dancers were branching out to other honkytonks beyond the White Horse. Yet he never changed his style of dress. When I asked him about why he dresses the way he does, he answered with a story about the moment he knew he wanted to learn how to dance. He’d danced before, he said – his mother had taught him and his brothers how to dance conjunto when they were young, and as the lead singer in an indie band he was always dancing on stage. But one night, not long after he’d broken up with his long-term girlfriend, he found himself at the White Horse with a few friends, and when the friends went outside to smoke he looked up and saw a guy dressed “in full Texas cowboy suit – he had like the jacket with the nice embroidery on it, bolo tie, cowboy hat, looked the part.” The guy looked like he belonged in the dance scene, had all the visual signifiers. But real cowboys can dance, and according to Jorge, this guy “could NOT dance to save his life.” Jorge hadn’t started dancing yet, but even he could tell it was off: “I knew he was bad. He was terrible. He’s dancing with all these girls and they’re having a great time…. That was the moment where I decided I needed to learn to dance because don’t want to see that.” The guy was a bad dancer, Jorge could tell just by watching him. The girls didn’t know any better, “they were having a great time,” but it just offended Jorge that this guy was basically selling them a bill of goods. He was using clothing to project an image of a dancer, but he didn’t know how to dance, and he was using the ruse to pick up unsuspecting women. I asked Jorge what exactly was so bad about the guy’s dancing, and since it was a while ago, he didn’t have specifics about rhythm or form, but he did distinctly remember his feeling as he watched the guy: “it was just something in me that felt that was so wrong, it was like watching a train wreck and you couldn’t look away.” The guy was dancing wrong, and it was so wrong that it was a “train wreck,” attractive in its horror rather than in its perfection. The guy was “off rhythm, he wasn’t two-stepping – I don’t even know what he was doing. It was just really bad.” It seemed strange to me that Jorge was having such a hard time articulating this

because he’s generally so well-spoken, but even still, his message was clear: what he didn’t like was the dissimulation between how the guy looked and how poorly he danced – the appropriation of style without the substance to back it up. It didn’t matter how the guy was bad so much as that he was bad. In response, Jorge learned to dance and constructed his dance identity against this man: he would become a dancer whose status in the local dance scene was predicated on his dance skill rather than his outward appearance. A few months later, he went to meet his new girlfriend, Dani, at a Leo Rondeau show at the White Horse, and as soon as he walked in he saw the guy and was immediately put off: “I see HIM by the sound booth,” he told me, “and I’m just like UGH.” But he also saw Dani by the stage, and as he watched, the guy, the bad dancer, walked over to Dani and asked her to dance. Dani looked up, saw Jorge, and said “no, I’m waiting for him.” Jorge told me he couldn’t hear the conversation but he could see it: “She points at me and says That guy. He looks at me like REALLY? That guy? But look at my suit! He just gave me a shitty look.” But then the band started playing, Jorge walked up to Dani and asked her to dance, and they “danced and tore it up and he sat down for the rest of the night.” In other words, in Jorge’s eyes, he won. In telling this story, Jorge emphasizes throughout that looking like a dancer means nothing; you’re only a dancer if you can dance, and if you can dance then it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. Clothing can still be an extension of the experience, as Deirdre puts it, but clothes without dance skills or musical knowledge attached are just empty signifiers. Conversely, Jorge’s deliberate rejection of alt country style in favor of Austin hipster style, combined with his dance skills and his rural South Texas childhood, reveal a nuanced positioning within two-step culture: like his fellow Austinites, he is aware of the performative power of style, but like his fellow south Texas transplants, he is also aware that experience, skill, and social competence are the true markers of belonging in the dance scene. As for a man who privileges style over substance – in Jorge’s world view, that man is not really a man.

For both Jorge and Deirdre, stylized performances of scene-specific gender roles are important components of belonging in the Austin two-step scene. For Deirdre, stylization is the process of making her personal expression of femininity – vintage dresses, shoes, hair – functional for dancing, so that she looks good and also is able to move easily and respond quickly on the dance floor. Jorge’s dance style reflects his understanding of dance-scene masculinity as ability-based rather than style-based: he intentionally avoids western, vintage, or showy clothing so that his movements can speak for themselves. Of course, Deirdre and Jorge are younger and far more tech-savvy than most of the established dancers and are also newer to the scene, so their understanding of the relationship between clothing and dance is not representative of the dance scene as a whole. That said, they are fascinated with two-step as an activity, a scene and a theatrical performance. The ways they use clothing to communicate gender within these overlapping contexts points to the constitutive paradox within alt country: that between an ironic, detached association with “traditional” gender roles, and a genuine desire to inhabit those roles. As a kind of performance, personal style in the dance scene thus reveals the centrality of traditional gender roles in two-steppers’ identities as members of their local dance scene.

Choreographies of Gender

Style is useful for understanding the relationship between fashion and gender performance in the dance scene, but the concept is limited. The Birmingham School focuses heavily on semiotics, which reduces style to a form of communication and focuses on performance as the encoding and decoding of messages. Further, style is derived from the concept of subculture, a relatively static, class-based resistant group whose norms are derived from, but different than, those of the dominant culture.119 The dance scene, by contrast, is a complex, hybrid assemblage

119 See Clarke et al., “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview.”

of venues, bands, music, fashion, dance moves and social practices; class and semiotics are included, certainly, but they are hardly totalizing explanatory models. A more holistic approach is to contextualize the dancing body in what Cindy Garcia calls “choreographies of gender.” If, as Jane Desmond argues, the dancing body is the site of the production of social difference, then the bodies of two-steppers, working within the male-female ballroom embrace on the dance floor, are more properly the locus for the development of scene-specific masculinities and femininities. They are also potential sites of resistance. While most two-step dancers conform their bodily movements to the gendered performance of cultural competence to show that they belong in the scene, some use their insider knowledge of gender choreographies to create alternative gender relations. In particular, two experienced dancers, Dan and Kristen, subvert the conventions to create a more progressive gender politics, thus revealing that the danced gender relations that support “traditional” gender roles may be turned to progressive ends. Both historically and contextually, social partner dancing is an important site for understanding the production and reproduction of gender binaries because it is by its nature relational. Crucial here is an understanding of masculinity and femininity as processes that are relational but that do not operate in lockstep. Raewyn Connell argues that gender is a “system of social relations” and that masculinities in particular are the “patterns of social practice associated with the position of men in any society’s set of gender relations.”120 Here, masculinities (and thus, by extension, femininities) are socially constructed and located in “patterns of social practice;” these include both support and sanctions to encourage people to conform to expected gender practices. Further, Connell points out that “[b]odily difference is not a fixed determinant of gender patterns; it is, rather, a point of reference in gender practices.” In other words, social gender performance and biological sex are linked but do not necessarily map onto each other: masculinity

120 Connell, “Gender, Men, and Masculinities,” 1.

“refers to male bodies… but is not determined by male biology.”121 Jane Desmond argues that much can be gleaned about gender relations by examining the relationship between bodies in dance. She writes that

We might ask, for instance, how the concept of pleasure is played out in the kinaesthetic realm. Who moves and who is moved? In what ways do the poses display one body more than another? What skills are demanded of each dancer, and what do they imply about desired attributes ascribed to men or two women? What would a “bad” rendition of a particular dance, like the tango for instance, consist of? An “un-Latin” or “un-American” version? An “improper” one?122

This is not an exhaustive list, but it does point to key elements in the two-step that can highlight gender roles. Historically, as Elizabeth Aldrich argues, the lead-follow form of partner dancing did not evolve until the mid-19th century, when increased flexibility in the form of the waltz, coupled with the Victorian doctrine of the spheres, meant that a) someone had to lead and b) the person best qualified to do so was the man.123 In her ethnography of the LA salsa scene, Cindy Garcia calls these danced gender relations “choreographies of gender.”124 Much of what she describes in L.A. salsa is also at work in the Austin two-step scene. Garcia argues that climbing the salsa hierarchy in LA salsa clubs requires the performance of exaggerated heterosexual masculinities and femininities, so that the lead/ follow organization of the dance translates into a male-dominated, heterosexual desire-based nightlife economy, or what Garcia calls the “libidinal economy.”125 Because the scene is driven by (the exaggerated performance of) male heterosexual desire, women “become the bodies around which the economy revolves, although without the same

121 Ibid., 2. 122 Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” 32. 123 Elizabeth Aldrich, “The Civilizing of America’s Ballrooms: The Revolutionary War to 1890,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 49. 124 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 95. 125 Ibid., 99.

kinds of gains as men.”126 To belong to this economy, women must tailor their hair, clothes, makeup, and movements to attract male attention and desire: beautiful, but not intimidating, skilled but not too skilled. Men, for their part, demonstrate their masculinity by dancing with women who become more desirable through their exchange with other men. To a large extent, they also control the movements of these women. Some men in the LA salsa scene lead not only the traditionally-led movements of the dance, but also those few moments that other leads leave open for interpretation, so that there is no room in the dance for female “authorship.”127 Further, while dancing well with skilled female dancers ups a man’s social status in this economy, so does teaching attractive beginning dancers; Garcia documents the success of a new dancer, Sabrina, who manages to stay on the floor all night by telling her leads that she is a beginner and would welcome their feedback. Backleading – leading from the follow position – is forbidden to women, but over- leading and taking the role of “teacher” is an acceptable thing for men to do. Much of this desire-based social dance economy is a contemporary variation of American courting customs developed between the turn of the century and World War II, when social partner dancing was a key component of popular culture and thus also of the sexual economy of dating. Kathy Peiss locates the origins of this economy in turn-of-the-century working class dance hall culture, which she calls the “embodiment of sexual ideology and gender relations.”128 In commercial dance halls, working class teenagers could escape the regulating eyes of family and use dance to develop their own social norms. Here, young women could arrive at a dance “unescorted” and smoke, flirt, kiss, and dance with their “ladyfriends” or with men; at the same time, male customs of “picking up” women, “breaking” or cutting in on a dancing couple became naturalized. The dancing in these halls horrified Jane Addams and other reformers with its overt sexuality; “tough dancing,” which

126 Ibid., 108. 127 Ibid., 104. 128 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 90.

included African-American-based moves like the slow drag, the lovers’ two-step, the turkey trot, and the bunny hug, was intentionally sexual. As Peiss puts it, “the essence of the tough dance was its suggestion of sexual intercourse.”129 By the 1910s, numerous reform organizations were working to make these partner dances “safe” for middle class sensibilities – to decouple partner dancing and sexuality. The most prominent of these were Vernon and Irene Castle, a young couple who toured cabarets and ballrooms across the United States to demonstrate their “Castle Walk,” a smoothed-out ballroom version of what would eventually become the foxtrot.130 The Castles, with other reformers, aimed specifically to codify acceptable dance floor movements so as to “reduce the sexual symbolism and individual expression inherent in the dance.”131 By the 1920s, many of the customs developed in these working class dance halls had been filtered through dance reformers and made their way into middle and upper-class courtship practices. In particular, the “rating and dating” system of these decades specifically incorporated social dance into courtship.132 Unlike the post-war custom of “going steady,” where teenagers engaged in “practice marriages” by remaining faithful to a single partner, rating and dating was a system where a girl’s popularity was determined by the number of dates she had, and the more, the better. On the dance floor, girls strove to be ‘once-arounders,’ which, according to a 1936 advice manual, meant that they should “never be left with the same partner for

129 Ibid., 102. On the African-American roots of these dances, see Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Nadine George-Graves, “‘Just Like Being at the Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 55–71; Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor.” 130 Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, 103. See also Julie Malnig, “Two-Stepping to Glory: Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility,” in Moving History/ Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 271–87; Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor.” 131 Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, 103. 132 Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 26.

more than one turn around the dance floor. Spending all your dances with the same man… was in poor taste unless you were engaged to him.”133 As in earlier working class dance halls, dancing with many men indicated sociality and popularity, while dancing with just one indicated sexual, rather than social, connections. Further, the practice of breaking, now called “cutting in,” was a requirement of the dance floor; for a man, getting cut in on meant that his female partner was highly desirable, while not getting cut meant she had a low rating and the two had a risk of “getting stuck” together on the dance floor.134 While this system celebrated a heightened sociality among men and women, however, it still operated within the rubric of male desire: men, not women, determined a woman’s popularity by asking her on dates or to dance and by cutting in on her partner. Historian Beth Bailey calls these dating/dance-floor rules “conventions,” and many of them still apply on two-step dance floors in contemporary Austin. Bailey defines conventions as the

public codes of behavior and systems of meaning that are both culturally constructed and historically specific. While convention may not determine actions, or exist in a one-to-one relationship with individual experience, it does structure experience. Convention supplies a frame of reference; it is a public system that lends meaning to private acts.135

For Bailey, convention is the set of rules that governs, explains, and/or provides interpretive context for private acts. Dance scenes, like other social organizations, operate by a set of locally determined conventions; particularly in highly social scenes, internalizing and performing these rules correctly indicates what Tim Wall, drawing on Ben Malbon, calls “competence.”136 Many of these conventions apply within the dance scene today: partners should only dance at most two dances together, or else they risk being seen as “on a date” and no one will ask them to

133 Ibid., 31. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 6. 136 Wall, “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965,” 189.

dance; women who stay on the floor and dance with many different dancers are more popular and thus more desirable than those who stay on the edges and only dance with a few; women may arrive unescorted and flirt with men, though kissing and overt sexual expression are discouraged. Within this context, choosing to dance with a woman whose rating seems low – who doesn’t know how to dance, who hasn’t been on the floor with other men all night – seems counterproductive. But flouting convention has its benefits, especially for men and women who have no interest in decoupling dance and sexuality. Intentionally under-leading, as Dan does, allows his follows to co-author the dance with him, in the same way that he expects a romantic partner to co-author their relationship; intentionally backleading, as Kristen does with new leads, affords her a kind of teaching/ touching that allows her to meet and dance with men who aren’t yet in the dance scene. Kelly, a dance instructor who teaches beginning two-step classes with me, often says that “the job of the lead is to LEAD,” but not all leads are interested in having this level of control over their follows. Dan, a long-time swing dancer and former dance instructor, began two-stepping in the early 2000s as a way, he tells me bluntly, to meet women. He can’t imagine dating someone he didn’t also dance well with, nor is he interested in having all the control in any relationship; accordingly, Dan rarely dances with new dancers, preferring to dance with experienced follows so that the dance is more give-and-take. This preference is directly related to his experiences with teaching dance. After a few years of teaching swing dance at the height of the swing craze in the late 1990s, Dan decided to stop teaching partly because he was burning out on having two jobs, but also because he didn’t like controlling others’ bodies. He says he was uncomfortable saying “HEY everybody, I’m much better than you at dancing, and let me show you how to move your body…. So, stop doing it the way you do it and just LOOK AT ME.” Dan finds this imbalance of power antithetical to his conception of dancing. He particularly does not like controlling others’ movements when romantic relationships and dancing intersect.

When I ask him whether he’s ever had to teach someone he was romantically involved with to dance and whether he was able to negotiate that dynamic well, Dan says

No, I haven’t personally, because… you know, I don’t feel comfortable, like I said earlier, that sometimes it’s uncomfortable to tell total strangers what to do with their bodies. And to tell someone I’m dating, how to dance, or how to perform, or how to act - is awkward. It’s weird.

Here, Dan connects “what to do with their bodies” with dancing, performance, acting – all embodied ways of navigating the world and making sense of it for yourself and others, and all, for him, the right of both men and women as embodied subjects. And, in my many dances with him, Dan does seem truly interested in a conversation: he appreciates improvisation, intentionally uses ambiguous leads to encourage his follows to move their bodies as they see fit, and enjoys responding to his follows’ suggestions. He is also careful in choosing his follows: women who require strong leads and who don’t improvise on the floor have difficulty following him. Yet Dan’s aversion to bodily control is an anomaly in the two-step scene, and as such it reveals the embodied patterns of gender inequality on the honky-tonk dance floor. In particular, the construction of a dyad of active masculinity/ passive femininity is evident throughout the learning process, as leads and follows learn to shape their bodily movements to their respective roles. New follows learn to take smaller steps, to keep their arms bent and close to their bodies, to keep their hands at about waist-level and open, to pay close attention to their leads for direction, and, perhaps most difficult, to make themselves seem “light,” weightless, and responsive by keeping their weight centered over the balls of their feet as they whirl through their turns. New leads learn to take smaller steps and to keep their arms bent as well, certainly, as these strategies keep them on time with the music and create space for other dancers on a crowded dance floor. They also need to be responsive, to pay attention to their follows’ weight shifts and time directional changes to take advantage of them. But where follows learn to be small and light, leads learn how to

take up and manage space: they learn to keep their elbows out when dancing in closed position, to keep other couples from getting too close by bumping up against other leads, and to push, pull, and rotate their follows in a way that takes advantage of both the follow’s skills and the available space. They also learn to protect their follows, to turn their bodies and tailor their moves so that blows from other couples hit the lead, not the follow. Many follows learn to dance on the floor, when male leads pull them out of the crowd. But this style of teaching and learning on the floor, even when it is not aimed at picking up and/ or controlling a potential sexual partner, is still predominantly the domain of men. Women may, when explicitly asked, provide feedback to their male partners, but pulling partners out of the crowd, teaching on the floor, or initiating the feedback process are all considered an inversion of gender roles. Thus, when Kristen does it, she is intentionally subverting the conventions of the dance scene by disrupting the usual gender choreography. At a Mayeux and Broussard show at the White Horse in April 2014, I was dancing with Jorge, who was complaining that there were no good follows to dance with, so I suggested that he dance with Kristen next. But when I pointed her out to him, Jorge said oh, well, “she looks a little busy.” I looked over and Kristen was standing in a thick crowd of people by the sound booth, visibly flirting with a guy in his thirties: smiling, laughing, touching his arm. Jorge and I both chuckled, and since Jorge now knew who she was, I went off to dance with other people. But I kept my eye on Kristen and got glimpses of her throughout the set: now she’s teaching this guy how to dance, and now another guy of about the same age, and both guys have shaved heads; she’s holding each in an exaggerated ballroom form, looking straight into their eyes, counting the beat for them, nodding as they stumble through it. Usually, it’s guys doing this with women, using teaching as a kind of flirtation, not women using dance to flirt with men. It was a direct inversion of the usual gender roles on the dance floor, a direct expression of female sexuality and an assertiveness that was markedly different from the kind of femininity expected of a follow.

Kristen is also an excellent lead, and she’s not shy about divorcing herself from the submissive female role expected of follows. Once, at a Chuck Mead show at the Dogwood during SXSW, I asked her to dance and halfway through the song she switched hands and made me lead her, saying “You’ll never learn if you don’t practice!” Much later, when I asked her about dancing with new dancers, she said

well, new dancers I love…. When I was at the Spoke for a long time, I got to the point where it was like, every time I went I would try and dance with somebody that I had never seen before. Like, just a completely random person…. I do that still, even like at the White Horse sometimes. You know, I usually try to find someone who looks like they want to dance. You know, they’re not sitting with their girlfriend, like you know, and they’re not… or, you know, they’re standing by the thing, like tapping their toes, like doing this, and you’d think Oh, c’mon out and dance! So my favorite thing is I’ll walk up and say ‘Hey, would you like to go dance?’ And the most common response is ‘I don’t know how.’ Right? So I always say ‘That wasn’t the question…. I asked if you want to dance, not do you know how. So if you want to dance, I can show you how.’

Kristen looks for people whose body language suggests that they might want to dance: they’re sitting alone, without a girlfriend; they’re standing close to the floor, tapping their toes, “doing this” – moving to the music – all of these suggest that they feel the music and would like to get on the dance floor. And rather than wait to be asked, Kristen asks potential partners if they want to learn on the floor with her: “if you want to dance, I can show you how.” She also insists that she never forces anyone to dance who truly doesn’t want to – “I see guys do that,” she tells me, but “that’s not… nice, you know. You really don’t want to dance, you shouldn’t have to, whatever the reason is.” Kristen may sometimes have underlying sexual motivations, but she is also genuinely interested in helping people learn how to do the thing she loves. But pulling new dancers out of the crowd is difficult for a woman to do well: teaching a man how to lead on the floor means that the woman has to hold the position of the follow while taking a dominant role over the dance partnership;

without a properly submissive attitude, this is “backleading,” trying to control the movements of the dance partnership from the submissive follow position. An attempt at picking someone up – or teaching them to dance – based on this inversion of danced gender roles is viewed negatively in the dance scene; the dancer is too overtly sexual, perhaps, or too domineering; she doesn’t let the lead LEAD. Perhaps because of this stigma, many women choose to teach in other formats. When a lead has a question about a move, for instance, a follow may introduce him to a more experienced lead, and then recruit another follow, so that the experienced lead can use one follow to model the move and the new lead can imitate it with the other, and neither man has to touch the other man. Or a woman may bring a new lead to a dance class, so that he can learn through formal instruction; as a dance teacher, I often hear from women that “I want him to learn how to dance, and I can follow but I don’t know how to lead.” Backleading, or presuming to take the lead role in the dance partnership, or even presuming to know about leading at all, can be read as a usurpation of the male role in the dance and is generally frowned up within the dance scene. But rather than be forced into a submissive role, Kristen uses the lead/ follow format to flirt with men by teaching them to dance. She thus, like Dan, reconfigures the gender expectations of the dance scene to better suit an alternative view of heterosexual relations. As long-time members of the two-step scene, Kristen and Dan are both well- versed in the conventions of dance culture, and they work within these conventions to reshape gender roles on the dance floor. Dan uses intentionally ambiguous leads and quick reflexes so that his follows can share in the authorship of the dance, while Kristen uses “backleading” to pick up men, thus upsetting the dominant-male, submissive-female roles usually performed on the dance floor. In both cases, they use the dancing body to subvert scene-specific gender roles on the dance floor and thus to suggest a new way for men and women to interact off the floor as well. In this sense, they approach the scene’s gender politics ironically and with enough critical distance to create relationships that feel more genuine to them. However,

Kristen and Dan are in the minority; most of the dancers I spoke with told me that they had no interest in upending the dance scene’s gender constructs. Many women, in particular, told me they danced because the follow role allowed them to relax and abdicate responsibility for their actions, if only for a little while. Further, several interactions I’ve had with prominent male members of the scene suggest that the male lead/ female follow relationship acts as a guiding metaphor for two- step culture more generally. For this reason, learning exaggerated versions of both roles, rather than learning about partnering as an egalitarian relationship, is an important part of a dancer’s early career.

Teaching Girls to Dance

It’s Tuesday during South By Southwest, the massive music festival that takes over Austin every March. The White Horse has chosen to feature their house bands rather than allow the festival to take over their venue, so it’s crowded, but not packed, and the regular dancers are powering through hour after hour of great dance bands: the Stargazers, the Governors, Rosie and the Ramblers, Silas Lowe. James has been at the Horse most of the night, same as me, and I dance a polka with him, during which he decides it’s time to teach me how to do turns in step, but it’s close to 11 o’clock and I’ve been dancing since 6 and I tell him I’m not sure my brain can handle any new information right now. And he says my dad – did I tell you my dad died? Oh no, I say, when? A month ago, he says. And I hug him and say I’m so, so sorry, and the band starts another song and we dance, and then we dance another, and he tells me that he misses being able to call his dad and ask him piano questions. “D# half-diminished, he knew all the chords for all the songs in the keys I sing them in,” he says. I tell him I can only speak from my personal experience from losing one dad one time, but: it sucks. It just sucks. And I’m so sorry. And when the song ends I hug him and we go on to dance with other people.

At the end of the night, when I’m walking out to unlock my bike to go home, and I’m so tired and it’s 1:15 in the morning and I want to get home before the bars start letting out, James comes out and finds me; he needs to talk. He tells me the whole thing: his dad “bled out,” he says, there was blood everywhere; he thinks he may have had cancer and not told anyone, but there was so much blood all over the house that the coroners called the Miami homicide detectives and told James that it might have been a murder – signs of struggle, pools of blood, blood smeared on the walls. But James says he didn’t ask for an autopsy because his dad wanted to go, there was blood smeared around the phone… Oh no, he was trying to call for help, I said, but he says no, the blood was around the phone, not on it at all. And my dad was a yogi, he says: depression era orphan, raised in an orphanage in Britain, then sent to India, where for three years he worked in a factory and ate bug bread and slept side by side with Hindu men, and India was the first place he felt safe, and he learned yoga; and at the end of every yoga practice they do the shivasana, the death corpse pose, and he would do yoga for 20 minutes every day no matter where we were, even if we were in Venezuela, he would excuse himself and find a corner and do yoga, and that’s how they found him, on the floor, surrounded in blood, in the death corpse pose. He was ready, calm, ready for death, James says. June 26th was the last time he saw him; he says his dad had looked at him and said “Denny, this is just a box, it’s the thing I inhabit while I’m on earth, and I’ve lived a long life, I’ve done and seen a lot and it’s time for me to go. And I don’t care what happens to any of this stuff after I die, do whatever you want with it.” James asks me if the ups and downs are normal, and I say yes, one minute you’re having a great time and the next you’re crying your eyes out, and he says yes, I don’t understand what’s happening with my body, and I say it’ll probably be like that for a while, just let it happen: the body has an amazing ability to heal itself. And he says the Saturday after the funeral, he was staying with an old friend, and they had gotten some cognac, some Courvoisier in honor of his dad because it had been his favorite drink, and they had all had a shot of it. But that Saturday, everyone was

out of the house for a few hours and he was all alone, and he felt so bad that he took a shot, and then another and another, and it just made him feel worse and worse but he couldn’t stop, and it was 10 in the morning and he must have had 18 shots and when his friend’s wife came home he was leaning and could barely speak and she said Denny, are you ok? And he said I’m drunk and I want another shot and she said you should have one then. And this must be how alcoholics feel, he says to me: you drink to kill the pain and every shot just makes you feel worse and worse inside but you can’t stop, and I was worried that this was going to be my new life: an alcoholic. But I went to bed and woke up the next morning and didn’t want a drink. Thank god, I say. And then he says I taught a girl to dance just now: I saw her standing at the edge of the dance floor, holding all of her stuff, just in from Louisiana, leaning in – and he imitates her body language, leaning her head toward the dance floor, longing to dance – just wanting to dance. So I went up to her and asked her to dance, and she says “I can’t – I don’t, I just – I can’t.” And I said “Yes. You can.” And we put down her stuff and I led her out onto the floor and I held her and taught her how to dance. Those blue eyes – I told her what are you, Polish or Czech or Danish or whatever – somewhere back there your ancestors knew how to polka. It’s in you. It’s in our blood? I ask. Don’t you think dancing is in our blood? James says. We need to dance, he says. We need to move; it’s what makes us human. And there are so many girls – you can tell by their body language that they want to dance but don’t know how. I taught her. Rick was standing right there. (He gestures to Rick Watson, who is standing chatting 10 feet behind us.) Rick was standing right there when she came outside with her friends and she said “that man taught me how to dance.” And I pull three girls out a night and teach them how to dance. Dancing is in our blood. It’s human – we need to move, to dance. Our bodies were made to move, not to sit still all day.

For James, “teaching girls to dance” seems to be a way to regain control over himself, a way to make sense of the world. While James has been teaching women to dance on the sidelines of the dance floor for years, losing his father in such a sudden and violent way lends the practice a special importance and allows him to open up about why he does it. James occupies an unusual but highly visible position in the dance scene in that he is both a long-time participant and a relative outsider, a peripheral member who prefers to spend his time instructing new dancers on the edges of the dance floor rather than dancing with more experienced follows in the middle of the crowd or up close to the band. He and other peripheral male dancers are often shunned by the larger dance community and especially by more experienced female dancers, who resent their over-dominant style and their tendency to focus on very young, very pretty women. But because many new female dancers, including myself, enter the dance scene by learning from one of these men, they serve the important function of introducing women to the hypergendered world of the two-step scene, and the “traditional” feminine role that women must play in order to belong within it. They are thus an important component of gendering the local scene. While some dancers, like Dan and Kristen, subvert the two-step scene’s choreographies of gender to enact a more egalitarian gender politics, peripheral male dancers like James take danced gender relations to the opposite extreme. For many of these dancers, blurring the boundary between teaching and touching allows them to derive power and sexual pleasure from dancing with their female “students.” While more experienced dancers often view partner dancing as a conversation between partners, for these dancers, the imbalance of skills between the teaching man and the learning woman allows the man – the “lead” – to have complete control over the woman, the “follow.” By selecting women from the crowd, teaching them to dance, and blurring teaching and touching, these men shape the dance partnership to reflect their own sexual desires. They teach women that partner dancing is reliant upon male dominance and female

submissiveness, and that dancing Austin’s local variant of two-step – dancing right – is predicated upon this imbalance of power. Teaching “girls” to dance “right” is based on blurring the boundaries between danced gender performance and biological sex. As Pamela Fox argues, the tension between seeing heteronormative masculinities and femininities as natural and right and acknowledging country as a performance separate from everyday life has been constitutive of country music culture since the “golden era” of 1950s honkytonk. Fox, following Eric Lott, calls this tension “minstrelsy” because the fact of performance is always visible, the mask is always obviously a mask and performed as such.137 It is especially visible in contemporary alt country revival cultures focused on outlaw country and honky-tonk, which may explain the patterns of male dominance in the Austin two-step scene. Yet the blurring of these same boundaries is equally constitutive of these cultures, especially where dance is concerned. This is because gender performance is not just expressive, nor is it just a set of rules governing the movements of the dancing body. Gender performance is also constructive. Drawing on Judith Butler, Berger et al underscore the disconnect between performance and biology while tightening the focus from social practice to the processes of self-construction. Like Connell, they argue that the gender binary includes “false stabilizations of gender” and that gender identities are fluid and contingent.138 But while gender norms operate socially, gender itself is a self- created performance, a process that is “continually unfolding as a complex enactment of self-representation and self-definition.”139 Ben Malbon somewhat combines these two understandings of the performative, the social and the individual, into a definition of performativity that includes both the expression and the construction of the self, so that people are both actors and audience in the

137 Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music, 11. 138 Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, “Introduction,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 4. 139 Ibid.

construction of their identities.140 But Malbon is talking about solo dancers, not necessarily gender. Sedgwick, writing from a femm dyke perspective, more usefully problematizes the link between biological bodies, social performance and the performativity of self-construction. She argues that in performances of masculinity and femininity, “a dynamic of self-recognition mediates between essentialism and free play;” this is

the process that mediates between, on the one hand, the biological absolutes of what we always are (more or less) and, on the other hand, the notional free play that we constructivists are always imagined to be attributing to our own and other people’s sex-and-gender self-presentation.”141

It’s important to Sedgwick that masculinity and femininity be separate from the bodies that serve as reference points, so that the hegemonic processes of naturalization can more easily be seen. But, following Connell, she points out that neither extreme – that of reducing gender to biology or that of completely decoupling gender performance from biology – makes sense. Gender as “what we always are (more or less)” is oddly transcendent for a construct that varies historically and geographically, while pure “notional free play” without any embodied referent exists only on the level of attributions and discourse. A “dynamic of self-recognition,” at once biological and performative, locates the mid-point on the spectrum. Masculinity and femininity, then, are processes that integrate both “patterns of social practice” and a “dynamic of self-recognition.” At once both highly social and highly individual, these gender performances are connected but do not move in lockstep. In the Austin two-step scene, dancers like James often exploit the slippages between them, so that “teaching girls to dance” is really a matter of teaching them how to be “girls.”

140 Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, 27–29. 141 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 18.

I have known James for many years in a variety of capacities: he’s taught me the cha-cha, stopped by to see me at the grocery store where I work, talked with me about his business ideas and his colorful upbringing. Since I’ve became a better dancer, I’ve watched him in action, pulling attractive young women out of the crowd and dancing with them. He has always been distant in conversation and dramatic in his dancing, with throws, slides, and shaking movements that disrupt the flow of the floor. But tonight, though he is dressed in his usual crisp white dress shirt and dark slacks and boots, he is visibly shaken, his usual poise replaced with a desperate need to connect. So when he tells me that he is dancing tonight because his father died, and then later, when he follows me outside and tells me the gory details of his father’s death, I listen. I remember thinking at the time that telling me, a near stranger, this story in this way was an attempt to make sense of his dad’s death. It sure sounded like a murder, a macabre ending to a helpless man: all the blood, blood everywhere, they wanted to do an investigation, bloody fingertips circling the phone but never calling for help, maybe because he was too weak – Miami homicide, signs of struggle, pools of blood, and he lost, he was too weak even to pick up the phone, and then at last he resigned himself to death, got in the death pose, and died. This is what it sounded like to me, an old man overwhelmed by intruders, a man too weak to save himself, a man whose only strength lay in physical acceptance of the inevitable. To my mind, James’ father used the composed stillness of the death corpse pose to give meaning to the uncomposed stillness of death, just as he had used it many times to retreat from and make sense of life. Or perhaps James imagined this detail, drawing on his early memories of his father’s coping strategies: even in Venezuela, James says, his father would sneak away and find a corner in which to do yoga, always ending it with the death corpse pose, flat on his back with arms and legs spread, neutral and open. In some ways, James uses dance much like his father used yoga: to create order in chaos, to make sense of life. But where his father was passive, he is active, dominant. Creating order for others by introducing them to a structured movement

system is a way of creating order for himself. Immediately after telling me the story of his father’s death and his own grief, he says “I taught a girl to dance just now,” and he tells the story of choosing the girl from Louisiana, of coaxing her out onto the floor, of dancing with despite her insistence that she does not dance. The teaching experience that James describes contrasts sharply with the stillness and passivity of his father. He says that the girl asks him to teach her to dance with her body: she leans her head toward the dance floor and looks longingly out at the dancers, and her blue eyes, “Polish or Czech or Danish or whatever,” suggest to James that the polka is in her blood, a form of knowledge passed down from her ancestors. He asks her to dance and does not take no for an answer, choosing to read her body over her words: when she says “I can’t – I don’t, I just – I can’t,” he says “Yes. You can.” He does this with many girls, three a night, because he sees that, like this girl, they want to dance but don’t know how. James also insists, in contrast to the stillness of death that he’s trying so hard to forget, that “We need to dance…. We need to move; it’s what makes us human…. Dancing is in our blood. It’s human – we need to move, to dance.” For James, teaching these girls to dance is a way of awakening them to their own humanity, their own history, the ancient knowledges they carry within themselves. It is a way to stave off the stillness of death. But “teaching girls to dance” is also a way for him to exercise his own dominance. Two-step is a lead/follow partner dance, so teaching dancing, for him, is teaching his students how to follow his lead. Hence he teaches “girls,” not women: he says the “girl” from Louisiana, “so many girls” who want to dance but don’t know how, “I pull three girls out a night.” In my observations, the women he teaches are usually very young and very pretty, fashionably-dressed women with long legs and big, sweet eyes – as close as he can get to the young, passive child that the word “girl” implies while still being old enough to enter the bar.142 And he, not the “girl,” decides whether she wants to learn to dance or not: when she says “I can’t,” he says

142 Carmen Rios, “Calling Grown Women ‘Girls’ Is Sexist as Hell - Here Are 4 Reasons Why,” Everyday Feminism, June 30, 2015, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/grown-women-are-not-girls/.

“Yes. You can.” What sounds empowering is thus actually quite controlling. Further, he chooses young women who are isolated or who do not belong to the scene. The “girl from Louisiana” was carrying all of her belongings on her back, so he could tell that she did not live in Austin and maybe didn’t even know anyone at the bar. When he says “I pull three girls out a night,” he means that he chooses his dance partners from the crowd of non-dancers rather than from the women in the dance scene; isolated from both her friends and the other women on the floor, his partner only knows what he tells her about dance, she has no frame of reference. And, perhaps most importantly, he shows the girls that teaching is touching, and that learning to dance is learning to submit to his touch: despite the protestations of the girl from Louisiana, he tells me that “we put down her stuff and I led her out onto the floor and I held her and taught her how to dance” (italics mine). “Girls” want to be led, to be held, to be taught to move to the music, to join in the fun on the dance floor; he can see this desire, and he can help them access it. Controlling these girls is a way for James to regain control over the disorder in the rest of his life; he takes advantage of their desire to belong and uses it for his own ends. James is not the only man to combine teaching with touching, though many other men who regularly pull inexperienced female dancers onto the dance floor combine this need for control with more explicitly sexual motives. Don, who once told me that he likes to hold women close so that he can feel their nipples through his shirt, targets young, beautiful, drunk women; on a quiet night in November 2013, I walked into the White Horse to find him slow dancing with a very young, very drunk blonde on an otherwise empty dance floor. He’s been dancing with her all night, the daughter of the bar owner told me in disgust, and she just keeps getting drunker. Darren, an Art PhD in his mid-30s, uses a different strategy to make the connection between teaching and touching even more explicit. Rather than pick up random women at shows, he brings his dance partners with him as dates. He began dancing in 2013 and picked it up quickly, and by November of that year I began seeing him with new female dancers who danced only with him – in a scene where

dancing with someone more than twice in a row elicits gossip, dancing with the same partner all night is a clear signal that the two partners are on a date. At Ginny’s in January of 2014, I met one of his dates, Emily, a sweet pretty blonde who had a hard time keeping up with him. Just a week later, Emily had been replaced with Deirdre, who later became a member of the T-Birds. A month after that, at the White Horse, Deirdre and Darren had broken up, and Darren brought another woman, Jessica, to a Jim Stringer show. She was tall, with a broad smile, and wore a skin-tight pink and blue spandex dress and strappy high heels that contrasted brightly with the more conservative, vintage aesthetic of many of the women in the scene. Darren introduced her and we chatted about dance lessons because she, like Deirdre and Emily before her, was new to dancing, and Darren’s leads were still complex and difficult to follow. A few other dancers and I watched as he dragged her across the dance floor, whirling her through quick directional shifts and complex pretzels. “He’s always doing way too complicated stuff with girls who can’t keep up, and then they just get thrown around,” the woman beside me said with frustration. “They don’t become good dancers.” But like James, whose “teaching” often includes lifting his follows high off the ground, sliding across the floor with them, and – especially around his father’s death – shaking them violently as if they were rag dolls, Darren’s style seems to have little to do with actually teaching dance technique/ what might be best for the women. Both men, and others with them, seem more interested in recruiting passive women who will allow them full control over their bodies, and thus allow them to express their ideas or emotions with little resistance. Dancing becomes more an expression of male dominance over a passive female follow than about communication between partners. Despite his predilection for young, nubile women and the obvious grief he is dealing with, James argues that he teaches “girls” to dance as a way of helping them become more “human.” From his perspective, teaching dancing is humanitarian. But there is still the issue of the way he teaches, and what he is teaching. Assuming that young women who do not know how to dance are somehow not in their bodies,

assuming that “no” means “yes” and that they want to learn, despite their protestations, and teaching dancing as if it were simply a matter of footwork and form and connection to a single partner rather than a community and an entire worldview, when his long presence in the scene suggests that he knows otherwise – all of these hamper his ability to fully teach dancing. Other leads, those whose teaching strategies suggest that they are truly invested in bringing new dancers into the dance scene, take a very different approach. Martin, a newer dancer who began dancing in 2013, confided to me that he dances with both experienced and inexperienced follows as part of his own learning process. In March 2014, I danced with him several times over the course of the night, and he told me he had stopped counting for a while, but had recently started again so that he can tell where he is in the turns. Before, if something happened that he wasn’t expecting, he would freak out, but now he can tell where he is in the music and can add a rock-step or two to get back into the beat if he needs to. I have a strong sense of rhythm, he said, so dancing with me helps him develop his own. But Martin also said that he is learning more about leading by dancing with newer dancers: with good follows, he doesn’t have to try to make us move, but with newer dancers he really has to lead to make a turn happen. Good follows are light, he tells me, while new dancers are heavy: he has to hold up their arms, and it’s like holding up dead weight. Here, the women he dances with are not sex objects to control, but teaching aids, opportunities to learn while leading and to teach new follows how to read cues and move across the floor. Similarly, Bob, a ballroom-trained dancer in his 70s, decided to teach me the rhumba on a slow night at the Rattle Inn. Brennen Leigh played a song with a cha- cha beat, and a few measures into the song, I realized that Bob wasn’t doing the cha- cha-cha, the quick 1-2-3 weight change with the feet in neutral position that marks the dance as the cha-cha. I asked him about it, and he told me that he was doing the rhumba, which is like the cha-cha but without the cha-cha-cha, so I tried it and realized that it has the same footwork as the salsa. Bob led me through simpler moves, which I followed by paying close attention to his weight shifts, but when he

tried to explain more complicated moves, I had a hard time picking them up on the floor. The next song, he said, was a triple-two, which has the same footwork as East Coast swing but with a smooth, gliding aesthetic: tri-ple-step, tri-ple-step, step-step. But the turns, Bob told me, are on the 1-2, not in the triples like they would be in swing, and you never change the count, so double turns are just twice as fast as singles. I’m a slow turner, I said lamely. While I am the “good” follow when I dance with Martin, with Bob, I am the student rather than the teacher. And Bob, unlike James, followed dance floor protocols: he did not attempt to instruct until I asked a question, he built on my existing dance knowledge, he both did the moves and explained the logic behind them, and he went from simple to complex moves and was willing to repeat moves if I asked (which I did). He also did not monopolize me as a dance partner: we only danced two dances together, and we danced with other people for the rest of the night. While Martin was interested in building his own skills and, to some extent, those of his follows, Bob was interested in building mine. Teaching and learning is integral to the social dance community, and the way it happens, as well as the reasons behind it, are governed by conventions that grow preserve the community as a whole, rather than bringing in a few new partners for a dance or two who might never dance again. Men like Darren, James, Don, and others may seem like peripheral figures within the dance scene, pulling young, attractive women out of the crowd of spectators and teaching them to dance. However, their actions are really just exaggerations of patterns of male-domination within the scene as a whole. By equating teaching and touching, over-exaggerating the dominance of the lead in the lead-follow relationship, and using their objectified, inexperienced follows to express their own emotions, desires, and interpretations of the music while denying them any possibility of co-authorship, these men “teach” the lead/ follow organization of the dance as an introduction into a male-dominated, heterosexual desire-based nightlife economy. And in Austin’s two-step scene, which is constituted by the tension between ironic gender performance and genuine desire

to belong in the golden era of honkytonk, these men are successful because they blur the lines between local, scene-specific gender performance and biological sex. In the male-gendered space of the honkytonk, they make following seem like a natural expression of femininity and female sexual desire. And since they teach so many women to dance, James and other peripheral men are influential in shaping the gender politics of the scene so that they reflect their own sexual desires.

Conclusion

In Austin, the two-step scene is characterized by traditional gender performances at multiple levels. At the semiotic level of fashion and theatrical performance, gender is a matter of signifying the roles in the dance through clothing; like Deirdre, many women wear vintage dresses, shoes, and hairstyles carefully tailored to dance movements, and like Jorge, many men dress somewhat conservatively, so that their skills as leads/ subjects speak louder than their fashion sense. But the dance scene is more than just a show. Reading two-step in terms of Cindy Garcia’s “choreographies of gender” reveals that gender in the dance scene is embodied, relational, and socially produced. Choreographies of gender are tied to the nostalgic spaces in which dancers dance and to the conventions that guide interactions – social, sexual, aesthetic – among dancers in these spaces. Yet within Austin’s alt country scene, of which the two-step scene is a subset, the relationships dancers have with these spaces and conventions reflect both an ironically nostalgic pleasure in the commodities of the past and a genuine desire to belong in the golden era of the honkytonk. Some dancers, like Kristen and Dan, take advantage of these slippages and work within dance conventions to create a more egalitarian gender politics. But these dancers are in the minority. Far more common, though equally peripheral, are male dancers who take advantage of these same slippages to shape new dancers to wildly unequal gender roles. These dancers blur the lines between ironic nostalgia and genuine desire so that when they teach women to dance on the

edges of the dance floor, they teach not just an exaggerated version of the follow role in the dance, but an exaggerated version of the submissive femininity that the follow role suggests. While many dancers certainly approach the scene with a sense of ironic detachment, the continued presence and influence of these men suggests that the dance scene is also a safe space for those who truly believe in and desire gender inequality. Although the local has the potential to support a progressive politics, the cultural conservatism within Austin’s two-step scene suggests that local subcultures, even when they are constructed in direct opposition to popular culture, are not inherently progressive. While the two-step scene is heterogeneous enough to support a range of masculinities and femininities, and its alt-country allegiances allow for an ironic approach to traditional gender roles, performances of gender that are associated with the heterosexual couple do still structure the scene. Further, just like dancers use placemaking practices to mark the dance floor as a local space in an increasingly unfamiliar, deterritorialized city, they use these gender performances to distinguish themselves from the hipsters and creative types they blame for this deterritorialization. Gender performance is thus both a way to show other dancers that they belong on the dance floor and a means of differentiating themselves from those who don’t. In the next chapter, I examine the role of place in the production of the local; by situating the discussion in three venues that are central to the dance scene, I show how local cultures integrate placemaking into their self-definition.

Chapter 2: Two-Step Turf Wars

It’s lunchtime, and Irene and I are chatting awkwardly at one of the rickety metal tables on the patio at Bennu, a coffee shop and café on the East Side. Irene is a tall woman with a commanding presence and a penchant for short skirts and cowboy boots when she’s dancing, though today she’s dressed for her day job as a mortgage broker: a black and red A-line and black Mary Jane pumps, her long dark curly hair tumbling down her back, her light brown eyes clear and impassive. Unlike most of my interviewees, she has spent the past hour rejecting all of my attempts to build rapport, insisting instead on the differences between us: she is Mexican, I am white; she is from a small town in South Texas, I am from a suburb of Washington, DC; she is a hard-working single mother while I am a childless grad student. Yet despite my discomfort, I am thankful for this interview and surprised that she agreed to do it. A year ago, when I had just started teaching two-step lessons at the White Horse in East Austin, Irene messaged me on Facebook and then approached me in person to tell me that I was teaching two-step WRONG, and that “we,” the dancers, were upset about it. At the time, since I felt that I was teaching the dance that I had learned on the dance floor from these same dancers, I thought that maybe this was just a generational fear of change, or frustration that a new venue and a new dance teacher were purporting to speak for the entire dance community without consulting them. In response, I invited her to come to my classes and give me feedback, but she declined, saying that she was just a representative of the community and was not personally invested in the issue. I still find this puzzling, and I’m glad to have a chance to revisit the issue today. The problem with my lessons, Irene tells me between swigs of her coffee, is that “you’re teaching them to swing” and calling it two-step. I take a sip of Topo and protest that I learned to dance from Terry White, the daughter of Broken Spoke owner James White, at the Broken Spoke – surely she’s a reputable source, right? But Irene says “Yes, and all of us have been up in arms about Terry’s dancing. But

it’s only been going on for seven years now.” Before that, Peter Turner, “our dancer that’s gone through brain cancer,” taught the Broken Spoke lessons, and he’s an “excellent dancer,” she says. But when Terry White took over, she “decided that she was gonna add an extra step to make it easier for them to learn.” “She added an extra step?” I ask, incredulous. “What step did she add?” “She’s –“ Irene pauses. “Instead of doing quick-quick slow, which is what it should be - ” “Quick, quick slow…” I say. There’s not an extra slow?” “No,” Irene says. She turned it –“ I interrupt her: “Did she turn it into Texas swing?” “Yeah,” Irene says. “So that’s where, and – and – you know, none of us that have been dancing longer than that shit’s been around do that, and it drives us…!” As our discussion suggests, Irene’s frustration with my teaching stems at least partly from old wounds, from the perception, shared by many long-time dancers in my study, that Terry stole the lessons from Peter Turner, “our dancer,” and changed the dance to suit the tourists in her classes without any regard for the local dance scene. But it also stems from an understanding of place as fixed and deeply embedded in a community and the social relations that formed it. For Irene, dancing in place is about the preservation and expression of tradition, about the re- membering of a particular configuration of social relations. This is particularly true in her native South Texas, where the indigenous population has been colonized by different nations over hundreds of years. There, she asks that we

look at the styles in place because the people aren’t moving, the borders are moving. So, like, obviously the styles of dance are going to be very reflective of this early German and Mexican heritage, not very reflective of any later influx of settlement. so - they’re not going to bring - they’re going to bring SOME dance, but it’s not going to take foot as well as the existing styles. it might influence them slightly, but… obviously it’s not going to replace it.

In other words, while the context may change over time, the core connection between a people, their culture, and the place in which that culture first developed does not – or should not. From Irene’s perspective, Terry’s dance lessons, and by extension my own, represent the misguided interpretations of outsiders that, by changing the form of the dance, interrupt the social, cultural, and geographic throughlines connecting today’s dancers with the earliest two-steppers. We disrupt the placemaking practices that shape the local two-step community and, in doing so, we change the meaning of the dance. Irene’s understanding of dancing in place as a form of cultural preservation is common in the two-step scene, and over the course of this study it has informed many of the debates over placemaking, place ownership, and the role of dancers – cultural, social, and economic – in country music venues across town. As new venues open and old venues close or change ownership in response to Austin’s dramatic growth, dancers like Irene provide an important counterpoint to the city’s embrace of growth and progress. But this is only one of many ways dancers use two-step to make sense of place. While the association between two-step and “old Texas” can easily feed into an association between two-step and “old Austin,” many dancers, especially those who dance for the pleasure of movement, eschew the focus on history and memory and instead understand two-step in terms of flexibility, process, and the pleasure of unexpected interpersonal connections. For these dancers, two-step is part of the city’s growth machine and a way to navigate the “new Austin” landscape. And still others both value the long memory of a place within the dance community and are open to new faces, new movements, and new kinds of social relations that reflect the broader culture and economy in which they dance. From this perspective, place is not something that can be made overnight, nor is it the property of a closed, exclusive dance community. Instead, like the city as a whole, individual places develop over time, as generations of dancers interpret the world around them and inscribe these interpretations into the venues where they dance. In each case, two-stepping in Austin is a placemaking process: as

dancers dance, the choices they make, including who they dance with, where they choose to dance, how they move on the dance floor, and how they interact with non- dancers, drinkers, and tourists all shape and are shaped by the places in which they dance. Examining these places from the dancers’ perspective reveals how place works and how dancing in place is central to constructing the local in Austin. In this chapter, I look closely at the Broken Spoke, the White Horse, and (Ginny’s) Little Longhorn, three venues central to Austin dancers, in order to examine the role of place in constructing – dancing – local identities, local communities, and local venues within Austin’s two-step dance scene. At the Broken Spoke, Austin’s only “true” Texas dance hall and the oldest dance venue in the scene, I examine the ways dancing in place builds and maintains a place where roots are preserved, while making those roots legible for tourists and locals alike. By contrast, at the White Horse, dancers’ placemaking practices often foster inclusivity, creativity, flexibility, and individual agency; where the Broken Spoke emphasizes dancing “the way WE dance,” two-stepping at the White Horse involves a wide range of dance styles, skill levels, and sobriety levels, and dancers have adapted their dancing accordingly. Finally, at (Ginny’s) Little Longhorn, I examine dancing in place at the grand (re)-opening in Fall of 2013. Faced with rising property taxes and costly repairs to the building, Ginny sold the bar to local musician Dale Watson earlier that summer, and dancers’ reactions to the substantial renovations to the venue raised important questions about what makes a place, who owns it, and how dance might be used to reclaim a space thought to be lost. Throughout this chapter, I investigate how two-step contributes to the formation of unique local identities, local communities, and local dance practices at each venue, and – by extension – how these local placemaking practices contribute to an understanding of the role of place in constructing the local itself.

The Pull of Place

Two-step is a uniquely local form of placemaking. Unlike swing, salsa, and other dances with long studio histories and national dance conferences, two-step is largely unstandardized and uncodified, so that the local variant is intimately connected to the place and culture in which it is danced. In Austin, two-step is produced by three different groups with three competing senses of place. While the dance scene constitutes a welcome respite for longtime dancers threatened by the city’s massive growth spurt, two-step also appeals to a new crop of transplants eager to put down roots, and the tensions between the two groups are central to both the structure of the dance and to the kinds of places dancers make. Some dancers, especially those who dance primarily at the Broken Spoke, approach two- step as a folk dance, and they construct places that offer the warmth and rootedness of home, but only to those who are invested in preserving traditional country music culture. Other dancers dance not to preserve traditions but to experience the sheer joy of dancing with others; concentrated at the White Horse, these dancers approach two-step as a social dance, and they construct places that value practices over roots and pleasure over preservation. A third group approaches two-step as a hybrid dance in which dancers constantly negotiate tradition and innovation on the dance floor; at most dance venues, but especially at Ginny’s Little Longhorn, place becomes both the stuff of folk fantasies and a site for making sense of the changes in Austin. While these approaches are more prevalent at some venues than at others, together they represent the ways in which dancers make place in a changing Austin. Where two-step operates as a folk dance, placemaking is primarily concerned with preserving the knowledges and places of the past, both real and imagined, against the encroachments and corruptions of capitalist development. This emphasis is a constitutive element of folk dance, which has provided generations of urban, middle-class people with an embodied, emplaced escape from a world that seems beyond their control. Folk dances, as Julie Malnig writes, are a subset of vernacular dance; they “spring from the lifeblood of communities and subcultures and are generally learned informally,” and they usually involve “like-minded or

homogeneous communities of dancers interested primarily in the preservation of heritage and group traditions.”143 Cultural studies scholar John Storey argues that by the late 19th century, middle-class intellectuals had “invented” popular culture as both a “quasi-mythical rural ‘folk culture’” and the “degraded ‘mass culture’ of the new urban-industrial working class.”144 The working masses were too well integrated into the capitalist machine to serve as romantic figures, but the rural “folk,” imaginatively construed as ethnically homogenous, technologically primitive, rooted in place and isolated from industrial capitalism by space and time, provided ample fodder for a middle class escape from an increasingly spectacular, alienating, and mechanized world.145 Folk dance, from the maypole dance performances at Jane Addams’ Hull House to hula dance classes taught at contemporary upscale gyms, provided direct access to the embodied knowledges of this imagined pre- capitalist world and was therefore central to realizing these escapist fantasies. As Sharon Mahealani Rowe argues, folk dance is dance that stems from, and is embedded in, the culture that produces it; it is a “vital, creative art form and a lived experience that preserves a culture’s values, continually forming and reforming identity in and through movement.”146 For Rowe, folk dance is not merely a set of movements but a form of embodied knowledge that is deeply embedded in a culture that both shapes and is shaped by it, and as such it constitutes a sharp epistemological break from capitalist logics. Folk dance cannot be reduced to movements that can be bought and sold in dance lessons, nor can it be abstracted from its “creator community;” it is a meaning-making process, not a commodity. Folk dance is also integral to the realization of middle-class folk fantasies because it is both embodied and intimately connected to place. Every time the members of a creator community gather and dance, they are engaged in what

143 Malnig, “Introduction,” 4. 144 Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, 1. 145 Malnig, “Introduction,” 4. 146 Sharon Mahealani Rowe, “We Dance for Knowledge,” Dance Research Journal 40, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 31–32.

Anne-Marie Fortier calls “re-membering,” which is an embodied, emplaced “creative process that constructs and locates an historical environment, adding substance to the immediate, lived experience of the present.”147 As they dance, dancers embody and emplace the history of their community, inscribe that history into the places where they dance, and insert themselves and the broader dance community into the narrative. Through re-membering, past, present, self and community all coexist simultaneously on the dance floor, and the folk fantasies of the dancers come to life. As an integral part of the folk fantasy, place becomes rooted and deep; in contrast to the alienating outside world, the place of folk dance is the stuff of memory, home, and long-sedimented human experience. Accordingly, two-steppers often treat their favorite dance venues as sites to be cared for rather than moved through. They inscribe their presence on the dance floor, at the tables, at the bar, in their musical preferences and in their interactions with other dancers, and in doing so they realize the deep connections between self, community, and place that they so ardently seek. In Heidegger’s terms, they dwell there, so that their continual presence shapes the venue and it, in turn, shapes them.148 As Lucy Lippard writes, this need to belong in a place – the “pull of place” – is

the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation….[It] is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting.149

For these dancers, place is attractive because, like folk dance, it promises togetherness, belonging, an “antidote to a prevailing alienation;” to be rooted in a physical location is to be rooted in a close-knit community as well. Place is also attractive because it makes the chaos of “modern life” more controllable by creating throughlines between “the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly

147 Anne-Marie Fortier, “Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 46. 148 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” 149 Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 7.

concocting.” As Yi-Fu Tuan argues, place comfortingly rearranges time and space around human experience, the self, and the community.150 From the perspective of folk dance, place is thus not the product of a vast, alienating economic system, nor can it be made by enterprising city planners engaged in placemaking practices; it is intentionally made by a dance community, for that dance community. Place becomes home.151 And because that dance community is invested in keeping the past alive in the present, place is also a warm contrast to the undifferentiated and constantly changing space of the outside world: in David Harvey’s terms, it is an “entity or ‘permanence’ occurring within and transformative of the construction of space-time.”152 The rest of the world – or, in the case of Austin’s two-step scene, the rest of the city – may be growing and changing according to global capitalist logics, but those dancers who experience two-step as a folk dance dance the same steps with the same people to the same music in the same venues as much as they can. For these dancers, this repetitive re-membering and the permanences it creates constitute welcoming nodes of stability in the city’s rapidly changing landscape. However, while folk dance and the places that folk dancers create can provide the warmth and belonging that dancers seek, dance communities based around folk fantasies can, and often do, espouse a regressive, exclusionary politics of place. Folk culture is not inherently exclusive: in her history of the American folk revival, for instance, Rachel Donaldson shows that Carl Sandburg, John Lomax, and Phillips Barry, and other 1930s folklorists integrated the American folk into a pluralist vision of democracy, where “cultural diversity and the inclusion of all citizens in the political process was the essence of the kind of democracy that lay at the core of American identity.”153 But folk culture and folk dance have far more often been implicated in the preservation of what Theresa Buckland calls “racial and

150 Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. 151 Ibid.; Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction. 152 Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 294. 153 Rachel Clare Donaldson, “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 3.

rural unity.”154 This is especially true in two-step, where the traditional country music culture that informs it has long been engaged in preserving the myth of the “plain white folk,” the poor, rural, Southern whites presumed to be at the heart of the genre.155 Dancers who are particularly invested in keeping two-step true to its origins are often equally invested in stamping out any ethnic, racial, or sexual diversity that might threaten it. For them, two-step is a European-derived dance whose aesthetics are uncorrupted by African-American or Mexican-American movement grammars. This investment in whiteness has repercussions not just within the dance community but in their interactions with other dancers on the dance floor, where they police bodies and actions that do not fit their folkloric fantasies; as Tim Cresswell puts it, “[i]n the search for ‘essence’ – ‘difference’ has no place.”156 While place is a site of warmth and belonging for dancers in the in-group, it is cold and unwelcoming for those they deem “out of place.”157 The placemaking done in the service of folk fantasies is thus often all too similar to placemaking practices that, as Karen Halttunen warns, lead to nationalism and xenophobia, gated neo-traditional communities in the US and ethnic cleansing abroad.158 With its strong emphasis on deep roots and close ties, tradition and preservation, the placemaking done in the service of folk fantasies creates a warm, close-knit, embodied and emplaced community with a strong sense of history and cultural identity. While this closeness does often provide the “antidote to a prevailing alienation” that dancers seek, it does so at the expense of those deemed different or “out of place,” and thus runs the risk of becoming obsolete.

154 Theresa Buckland, “Definitions of Folk Dance: Some Explorations,” Folk Music Journal 4, no. 4 (1983): 316. 155 For a detailed, if uncritical, account of this myth and its role in country music culture and history, see Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. For a more critical account that situates the “plain white folk” in the history of Folklore Studies, see Jeffrey T. Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins,’” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 4 (October 2008): 417–31. 156 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 25. 157 Ibid., 27. 158 Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” 7.

Folk dance is not the only framework for interpreting two-step and placemaking, however. Approaching the dance scene and its placemaking practices from a social dance framework shifts the focus from the dancers to the dancing, so that both place and dance become more closely linked to practices than to essential traits – not who people are, but what they do. This orientation allows for cultural hybridity and change within the dance community, as people, movements, and meanings from a variety of sources all interact and produce the community on the dance floor. Dancers who approach two-step as a social dance welcome “outside” influences, and they incorporate movements from a wide range of dances, including many that originated with people of color, into their dancing. Malnig argues that in social dance, “it is often the sheer physicality of the dancing itself, the energy of the surroundings, and the eclectic mix of individuals that bring diffuse groups of individuals together in a collective social bond” rather than some racial or ethnic characteristic that they all share.159 Social dancers dance together not because they are intent on realizing a collective social vision but because they derive pleasure from the situational contingencies of dancing together. As a social dance, two-step is thus what Thomas Turino calls a “participatory” dance culture, in which

the etiquette and quality of sociality is granted priority over the quality of the sound per se. Put another way, participatory music and dance is more about the social relations being realized through the performance than about producing art that can somehow be abstracted from those social relations.160

Turino emphasizes the social aspect of these events, about the “social relations being realized” over the course of the event; for social dancers, the experience of

159 Malnig, “Introduction,” 4–5. 160 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 35. As defined by Andriy Nahachewsky, dance exists on a spectrum between “presentational” forms, or dances that are rehearsed, choreographed, and performed on formal stages for an audience, and “participatory” forms, where there is no choreography or rehearsal, and everyone participates; see Andriy Nahachewsky, “Participatory and Presentational Dance as Ethnochoreological Categories,” Dance Research Journal 27, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1–15.

participating is more important than the end product. Further, because participants often have a wide variety of skill levels, a good event is judged from within, by the “degree and intensity of participation,” not by some external standard applied from without.161 And at a really good dance event, this embodied participation contributes to a feeling of togetherness for the majority of the participants. Historian William McNeill attributes these feelings of togetherness to “muscular bonding,” or “keeping together in time,” which he defines as “the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscle movement arouses among nearly all participants in such exercises.”162 Unlike folk dancers, who derive pleasure through re-membering an imagined past, social dancers derive pleasure through the physical movements of the dance. The “prolonged and rhythmic muscle movement” at each dance event, performed differently but to the same rhythm, is what binds people together. In social dance, the rhythm is often the only thing that keeps dancers together, and the pleasure that comes from keeping together in time connects the dance community on and off the floor. With its emphasis on shared practices at dance events rather than rootedness and re-membering, social dance constructs place as open, contingent, socially constructed and processual. The places folk dancers make share many of these characteristics, but the emphasis on preserving the folk fantasy of a pre- or extra-capitalist past often obscures their inner workings. By contrast, the process of placemaking is part of the pleasure of social dance, so that, as David Harvey argues, “[p]lace, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct.”163 The social construction of dance means that dancers construct the meaning of a place, which is shaped as much by the interactions of dancers on the dance floor as by “a social milieu dominated by Western cultural values and the forces of capitalism.”164 Dancers dance in context, so that their own interactions – what Cindy Garcia calls

161 Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, 31–33. 162 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, 2. 163 Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 293. 164 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 30.

“crossings” – are always already embedded in both their own social and cultural networks and in broader cultural and economic processes, and they bring all of these layers and connections to the dance floor.165 In Doreen Massey’s terms, this means that place is “extraverted,” so that “’places’ are criss-crossings in the wider power-geometries which constitute both themselves and ‘the global.’”166 Unlike the rooted, homelike place of folk dance, the place of social dance is the site of so many “criss-crossings;” it is open and contingent and thoroughly interpenetrated with “power-geometries” from other scales. But the social construction of place is not only the site of criss-crossings; as the product of dancers, it is also a real, embodied, physical and cultural location. Using Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a metaphor for place, David Harvey writes that

The ‘concrete whole’ of the novel (analogous to place) is shaped by a fusion of ‘spatial and temporal indicators’ so that ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’ while ‘spaces become charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ This is the way that places are constructed in human historical geography.”167

For Harvey, the human body and place are mutually constitutive. As social dancers dance, their moving bodies bring the abstract concepts of space and time into corporeal, lived reality: time “thickens, takes on flesh,” becomes inseparable from the dancing; space gains meaning as it both shapes and is shaped by the dance. Place for social dancers is not a natural or given reality but a becoming, an embodied process by which dancers create and make sense of the multiple social and spatial contexts in which they dance. In contrast to the closed, often homogeneous places created through folk dance, social dance places are usually more open to innovation and change; while social dancers can, and do, enact a conservative politics, the emphasis on practices offers the possibility of a progressive politics as well. Two-step, as it is danced in

165 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 7. 166 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 11. 167 Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 294.

Austin, is constituted by the tension between the basic steps, form, and choreography that allow dancers to keep together in time, and the new moves, new bands, multiple partners and varying individual styles that keep the dance interesting for longtime practitioners. This tension informs dance more generally. As Ann Cooper Albright argues,

bodies, while inscribed by social practices, are rarely passive receptacles of these structures. Lived bodies strain at the seams of a culture’s ideological fabric. Inherently unstable, the body is always in the process of becoming – and becoming undone.168

For Albright, the dancing body is always becoming, always remaking itself, always straining to break free of the “ideological fabric” that binds it, always wanting to try something new; dance itself is characterized by the tension between this becoming and the “social practices” that constrain it. Where the dancing is entirely contingent upon practices, dancers are free to develop their own moves and incorporate movements from other dances; they can also dance for themselves rather than in the service of an exclusive folk fantasy. This production of difference on the dance floor also extends to the dancers themselves: with an emphasis on the pleasure of dancing rather than on the dancers, social dance communities often celebrate social difference rather than excluding it. Yet while an overt emphasis on traditional social practices can stifle the difference and creativity that allows the dance to grow and change, too much emphasis on the “inherently unstable” body also has a conservative politics. Social dancers remake the dance floor and re-establish its norms every night, sometimes with every song, so that dancing is as much about setting boundaries around places as it is about keeping together in time. And although two-step as a social dance is a participatory dance culture, dancers still develop hierarchies within it. For the best dancers, the pleasures of keeping

168 Ann Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 13. Quoted in Sheila Bock and Katherine Borland, “Exotic Identities: Dance, Difference, and Self-Fashioning,” Journal of Folklore Research 48, no. 1 (April 2011): 22–23.

together in time are predicated not just on the desire to participate, but on what Tim Wall calls “competence,” where competent dancers must be able to execute the steps well, but also to use their dance performance, the relationships between themselves and other dancers on the floor, and their knowledge of social norms and cultural references to construct themselves on the right side of the in-group/ out- group binary. 169 Despite the radical potential of practice-based forms of placemaking, the social dance places created by two-steppers can often become exclusive as well. Many dancers, venues, and subsets of the larger dance scene do operate along either the folk dance or the social dance binary. However, for a third group, and for the scene as a whole, two-step is a hybrid of folk and social dance, an ongoing negotiation between preserving and re-membering the plain white folk at the heart of country music culture and adapting to new dancers, new movement styles, and new geographies. As they dance, two-steppers simultaneously interpret this constitutive tension, situate themselves in it, and communicate these positionings to others. Dancing becomes a performance that is as much about shaping the self as it is about expressing it. As Ben Malbon writes, “[d]ancing can be about becoming part of and submitting to the dancing crowd, yet also individualizing the self through the bodily practices of dancing within that crowd.”170 For Malbon, dancing blurs the boundaries between self and crowd, so that “individualizing the self” can only occur while dancing with other dancers on the dance floor. With such tight interconnections between the self, other dancers, place, and the competing ideologies within the dance scene, dancing only to remember or only to create new moves becomes almost impossible. Many dancers attempt both, and in doing so they create places that are both processual and rooted, both externally and internally focused. Even among the most innovative dancers and in the most touristy bars, dancers find ways to shape place around themselves;

169 Wall, “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965,” 189. 170 Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, 91.

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as Arturo Escobar writes, “[p]eople continue to construct some sort of boundaries around their places, however permeable, and to be grounded in local socio-natural practices, no matter how changing and hybridized those grounds and practices might turn out to be.”171 The rootedness becomes processual, a becoming orchestrated by the bodies on the dance floor and their presence there over time. In this context, place is neither wholly folk nor wholly social dance, neither natural nor socially constructed; as Cresswell writes, place is “a construction of humanity but a necessary one – one that human life is impossible to conceive of without.”172 While the politics of the dance scene tend toward what David Harvey calls an “isolationist communitarian politics,” this roots/ practices hybrid can serve as a model for placemaking practices that takes longstanding traditions, social difference, and cultural and geographical changes into account. Within Austin’s two-step dance scene, placemaking is integral to dance culture, and dancing place has a complex politics. As a folk dance, two-step is often implicated in preserving and re-membering the plain white folk at the heart of country music. Folk dancers create places that reinforce their fantasies of a white, pre- or extra-capitalist community in which dance is inseparable from the shared traditions and lived experiences of a homogeneous group of people. Accordingly, folk dance places are rooted and deep, and while they provide the warmth and togetherness that dancers find lacking in the outside world, they are exclusive, with little tolerance for social difference. By contrast, social dancers emphasize practices instead of preservation or tradition, and they take pleasure in innovation and the production of difference on the dance floor. Unlike folk dancers, social dancers create places that are open and contingent, where the pleasures of keeping together in time unite dancers on the floor. While this extraverted sense of place has progressive political potential, however, social dancers often create exclusive communities as well; the criteria for inclusion may be different, but the exclusions

171 Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” 147. Cited in Tomaney, “Parochialism - A Defence,” 661 172 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 33.

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still exist. Yet while dancers can, and do, occupy these two opposite poles, most dancers, and most placemaking practices, fall somewhere in the middle, where the relationship between tradition and innovation is under constant negotiation. At the Broken Spoke, where “Old Texas, real Texas” often serves as a metaphor for re- membering a homogeneous folk community, at the White Horse, where an unregulated dance floor opens the dance to new moves and new bodies, and at the Little Longhorn, where recent renovations suggest new possibilities, dancers from all three perspectives shape and make sense of the places in which they dance. In doing so, they also make sense of a rapidly growing, changing Austin as a local place.

Old Texas, Real Texas I figure it’s like going to the Alamo. You see all these big buildings and chain stores all around it, but when you go inside, it’s still the Alamo. - James White, owner of the Broken Spoke173

When Rob and I finally get to the Broken Spoke, it’s close to 9 and Weldon has already been playing for an hour. The dance hall is nearly empty, its smooth concrete dance floor and sagging drop-tile ceilings more visible tonight than when it’s packed, the warm glow of dozens of neon beer signs bathing the red and white checked tablecloths at the empty tables in softly buzzing light. On stage, Weldon’s hat grazes the ceiling. Rob doesn’t have any money (“and I drove you here,” he reminds me) so I reach into my bag and pull out a wad of cash, Saturday’s take from my dance lessons at the White Horse. I peel off a $20 and the woman at the door, a pretty, made-up blonde woman in a white sweater with the top of her hair teased high and pulled back in a half-ponytail, points at both of us. I nod, and she inks her stamp and points to my left hand. I let her stamp it; Rob holds out both hands so she can see that they’re both tattooed so no one will be able to see the stamp, and she

173 James White quoted in Michael Corcoran, “If It Ain’t Broken: Austin’s Legendary Broken Spoke Honky-Tonk Turns 50,” Texas Highways: The Travel Magazine of Texas, November 2014, http://www.texashighways.com/culture-lifestyle/item/7629-if-it-aint-broken-austin-broken-spoke- honky-tonk.

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laughs and stamps his left hand anyway and hands me a ten in change. The wooden floors of the seating area, dark and worn smooth, are strangely silent without the stomp of boots. But the band strikes up a Dwight Yoakam song and it’s upbeat, so Rob takes my hand and we step out onto the floor. Usually on Thursdays it’s impossibly slippery, but tonight it’s perfect: I can spin easily but I don’t feel like I’m ice skating. We take a few turns and Rob is grinning. We’re travelling loosely counterclockwise, but not at a breakneck speed; as we dance past Ricky Davis, the steel player, he grins and makes a goofy face and Rob clowns a little and I smile. Out of the corner of my eye I see Alyssa and Eric across the floor in a dip, one of her legs up and bent at a perfect right angle. There are only a few other couples dancing, maybe 20 or so, but like most of the people here, Rob and I have been dancing to Weldon Henson every Tuesday for over a year. After the chaos of the White Horse the Saturday before, this is a welcome relief – not only is the floor relatively open, we are all travelling in the same direction, and no one runs into us for the entire song. Here, there are rules, and dancing is a matter of following them. At the Broken Spoke, the “last of the true Texas dance halls,” placemaking enforces a particularly local cultural conservatism that operates in direct response to both Austin’s liberal politics and to the loss of “local” places as a consequence of the city’s growth.174 Built in 1964 as a roadside honkytonk on the outskirts of Austin, the Spoke is now surrounded by one of the fastest-growing areas in the city, but as Annetta White, wife of Broken Spoke owner James White, points out, “When people come to Texas, they wanna see Texas…[b]ut you can’t find it anymore in Austin. Maybe in West Texas or Fort Worth, but not in Austin. That old Texas, real Texas, is gone, except when you come to the Broken Spoke.”175 This conservative nostalgia for “old Texas, real Texas” permeates the venue. The building, which has retained the same vernacular architecture and working class honkytonk aesthetic

174 James White quoted on “Broken Spoke,” Broken Spoke, accessed December 11, 2015, http://www.brokenspokeaustintx.net/. 175 Annetta White quoted in Corcoran, “If It Ain’t Broken: Austin’s Legendary Broken Spoke Honky- Tonk Turns 50.”

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since the dance hall was added in 1965, both privileges the two-step and situates it in “traditional” country culture, so that dancers “re-member” those who went before with each step. The structure of the dance and the folk dance values of its practitioners also suggest a yearning for a simpler time: while two-stepping at other Austin venues tends to be more of a spot dance, at the Spoke the two-step is danced in the round, with aesthetics derived from Euro-American, rather than African- American, dance practices. The conservative nostalgia embedded in the building and the dance is also enacted by many of the regular dancers, whose investment in dancing two-step RIGHT includes policing race, gender, clothing, geographic origin, and the ways people move through space. Non-dancers and tourists constitute an important part of the Spoke’s income and are thus invited to preserve and remember traditional country music culture along with the regular dancers. However, for the regulars, their presence means that the Broken Spoke is a site of ongoing contestation, a place where Texas culture is constantly being commodified and where the Texas two-step must be preserved and protected at all costs. Much of the appeal of the Broken Spoke for both tourists and regular dancers is the nostalgia for “that old Texas, real Texas” that is embedded in the vernacular construction and aesthetics of the Spoke. Placemaking in the non-dance spaces of the Spoke is largely centered around re-membering the cultural production and economic contingencies, real and imagined, of what Jeffrey Manuel calls the “plain white folk,” the Southern, working-class whites credited with the origins of country music.176 The venue’s broad, nearly windowless façade is dominated, at night, by the words “BROKEN SPOKE” and two blinking wagon wheels, each with a broken spoke, in orange neon across the top. The dirt parking lot was paved when the land the Spoke sits on was bought by Transwestern, the developer who built those new neighbors, but the narrow front porch, with its benches for smokers, wagon-wheel wrought iron railings, and ATM – the kind with the $5 surcharge – are intact, as are the legal warnings and handwritten signs plastering the door and the walls around

176 Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins.’”

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it.177 Though the original building was constructed in 1964, James White says he built it “to look like the ‘40s and the ‘50s” in memory of the honkytonks his parents took him to as a child; even in the venue’s earliest days it already had one foot in nostalgia for an idyllic past.178 Inside, the restaurant, with its white tile floors, mirrored walls, and tired furniture, is slowly being engulfed by glass cases of knickknacks and memorabilia, heavily decorated saddles and western wear, all evidence of famous musicians who have played at the Spoke or just passed through. Though the Spoke brags about their chicken fried steak, the restaurant – especially when there’s a good band playing – serves more as a showcase for White’s collections than a place to sit and stay a while. The “Tourist Trap,” two tiny, low- ceilinged rooms wedged between the restaurant and the dance hall, is overflowing with hats, plates, records, old menus, and photos of James White with country stars from Bob Wills to Dolly Parton – testimony to the famous people who’ve played here and to the importance of preserving and presenting their presence in this place. While the Whites have long since left the working-class and their role in traditional country music culture is relatively peripheral, the venue retains, even celebrates, their working-class roots and cultural connections within the genre’s history and culture. But the Spoke is not just a site for the consumption of nostalgia; by structurally privileging the two-step, the venue offers the opportunity for dancers and visitors to re-member traditional country music culture themselves. Though they provide important contextual information, the restaurant and the Tourist Trap, both small, cluttered, and dimly lit, are usually sparsely populated once the band starts, merely foyers for the dance hall out back. Here, the dance floor, a massive slab of smooth, polished concrete that stretches nearly a hundred feet from the

177 Michael Hall, “Saving the Broken Spoke,” Texas Monthly, January 13, 2013, http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/saving-the-broken-spoke/. 178 Donna Marie Miller, “Honky-Tonk Haven: 50 Years of the Broken Spoke,” Austin Monthly, November 2014, http://www.austinmonthly.com/AM/November-2014/Honky-Tonk-Haven/.

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door to the back of the building, forms the center of the room.179 The dance hall is dominated by the dance floor, which in turn informs its structure: as in many older dance halls, support beams are buried in the wings to keep the dance floor open and free of obstacles. The lighting is bright but warm, the drop-tile ceilings high enough for even the tallest dancers to raise their arms comfortably. By contrast, the seating areas are shunted off to the wooden risers flanking the dance floor, the plywood tables with their checkerboard tablecloths and cheap folding chairs lit only by the warm red glow of neon beer signs. The ceilings are low on the first tier and even lower on the second, and the floors on the second tier are slanted up toward the outer wall. Six inches from the floor, made of uneven wood beams rather than smooth concrete, and separated from the floor by wooden railings, the seating areas are almost an afterthought, as though the builders were far more interested in creating a good dance floor than in providing space to sit in a dance hall and not dance. The wooden floors are patched with plywood; the drop-tile ceilings are low in places, moldy and in various states of disrepair; much of the signage is handmade; and the bathrooms, to the chagrin of many regular dancers, have never been renovated, their tiny stalls and barely functioning plumbing serving as relics from an earlier era. Structurally, the dance floor is a privileged area and dancing is a privileged activity at the Broken Spoke. In the context of the venue’s working-class aesthetic and vernacular construction, two-step dancing, and specifically two-step dancers, are central, literally, to the construction of the Broken Spoke as a place where “old Texas, real Texas” is preserved in Austin. While centering dance as a privileged form of placemaking could lead to an open, welcoming, practice-based place, the dancing at the Spoke is focused on preserving and re-membering an imagined past in which, in Cresswell’s terms, “difference has no place.”180 At the Broken Spoke, two-step is danced “in the round,” and the aesthetics and spatial politics of this choice are central to dancers’ efforts to

179 Ibid. 180 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 25.

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re-member the plain white folk at the heart of country music. Historically, the round dance was a break from European group dance forms of the 18th and early 19th centuries, in which men and women danced with multiple partners over the course of a dance; with its atomized male-female couples all moving as one around the dance floor, men leading, women following, it offered a modern 19th-century vision of the ideal society in which the heterosexual couple, with the support of the group, constituted the social and economic engine.181 Round dancing also was, and still is, largely devoid of African-American aesthetics and spatial management techniques. While African-American-based dances tend to be competitive and emphasize bent knees, a low center of gravity, and disarticulation of major muscle groups to allow for polyrhythmic response to complex musical rhythms, the European roots of round dances require a high center of gravity, smooth, graceful movements, and homologous movements of couples through space.182 This last characteristic, the near-identical movement of dancers around the floor, requires control over a large space and the tacit agreement that certain kinds of individual expression, like dancing in place or going against the line of dance, will not be tolerated. In de Certeau’s terms, round dancing is “strategic:” it “assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serves as the basis for generating relations.”183 In late 19th-century Texas, many working-class Anglos associated round dancing with the power and prestige of upper-class white society,

181 Elizabeth Aldrich, From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 19. See also Aldrich, “The Civilizing of America’s Ballrooms: The Revolutionary War to 1890.” 182 The differences (and relationships) between African-American dances and European dances in the 19th century are well-documented; see, for instance, Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994); George-Graves, “‘Just Like Being at the Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance”; Jurretta Jordan Hecksher, “Our National Poetry: The Afro-Chesapeake Inventions of American Dance,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 19–35. 183 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xix.

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and round dancing academies promised a membership in that society that was based as much on skin color as it was on correct bodily deportment.184 The round dancing practiced at the Broken Spoke today dates to the conservative backlash of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and many Spoke regulars today dance the two-step for similar reasons. In the early 1980s, round dancing was fueled by a national movement to return to roots and “traditional” values after the social upheavals of the 1960s, a country music culture engaged in salvaging an embattled white working-class masculinity, and the tragicomic romance of Urban Cowboy.185 A few years earlier, the hustle, a partner dance based on East Coast swing, had made discos “safe” for legions of heterosexual white men and women threatened by the gay male practice of “dancing with the crowd.”186 Similarly, the two-step, with its emphasis on a male lead, a female follow, upright European aesthetics, and a single line of dance, provided a vision of the ideal community that was a welcome relief, for the white men and women who participated in it, from the complex multivocality of the post-Civil Rights era. At the Broken Spoke at that time, round dancing was a welcome return to “family values” after a decade of the “hippy hop.”187 Today, many dancers at the Broken Spoke integrate round dancing into a broader conservative worldview. They like not having to watch for potential collisions coming from all directions; they like the smooth, upright flow of the dance on the Spoke’s smooth concrete floor; and many – though certainly not all – express conservative political positions regarding guns, gay marriage, “real” country music, and the proper role of women both on and off the dance floor. Round dancing is, for

184 Cory Lock, “‘Especial Attention Paid to Deportment’: The Round Dance, Social Identity, and Mollie Davis’s Under the Man-Fig,” American Transcendental Quarterly 16, no. 3 (2002): 213–31. 185 For an in-depth study of the conservative politics of country music at this time, see Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On masculinity and Urban Cowboy, see Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, Chapter 5. 186 See Tim Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle: 1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture, and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 199–214. 187 Corcoran, “If It Ain’t Broken: Austin’s Legendary Broken Spoke Honky-Tonk Turns 50.”

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them, a way of re-membering and emplacing a cultural world in which they are strategic actors and in which difference, social or otherwise, is unwelcome. Dancers at the Broken Spoke do not just dance their nostalgia for themselves; they also enforce the folk fantasies of traditional country music by policing the bodies and movements of non-dancers. Some of this policing is structural. While the Spoke is a site of preserving “old Texas, real Texas” for regulars, the venue is also an internationally known tourist destination, and dancers often find themselves in conflicts with non-dancers, tourists, and other outsiders who don’t know, or don’t care, about their efforts to re-member a conservative nostalgia on the dance floor. The difficulties of preserving their worldview are particularly evident in the way the physical space of the hall is constructed to enforce round dancing. In round dancing, travelling smoothly around the dance floor is key to re-membering the ideal society of couples all travelling together. Maintaining the line of dance when tourists and non-dancers cannot be counted on to know or follow the rules, however, is difficult, especially when a lack of personal connections between dancers and non-dancers makes social sanctions largely ineffective. Thus many of the same structural elements that support round dancing also serve to police non-dancers’ actions. Most nights, the floor, waxed to ease the smooth, gliding aesthetic of round dancers, is far too slick for the counterbalance and quick directional changes of spot dancing, too slick even for two-steppers who do not regularly dance on its smooth surface. Similarly, while the railings along the floor’s edges support the roof while indicating a clear separation between dancing and non-dancing activities, they are also functional in that they prevent dancers ignorant of the line of dance from wandering onto the dance floor except at a few select points, so that regular dancers can plan for interruptions. And, lest outsiders and non-regulars be unable to discern the order of things from these structural signals, handwritten signs near the entrance from the bar announce the rules: no line dancing, no tank tops for women, and, as a sign over the dance floor instructs in

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thick black and red Sharpie, “Please DO NOT!!!! Stand on the dance floor.”188 While tourists – and valuable tourist dollars – are welcome in the dance hall, their use of the dance floor is controlled by structural elements that privilege round dancing and protect local round dancers as the true and proper inheritors of traditional country at the Broken Spoke. This policing is also interpersonal. Sometimes it is expressed as an affirmation of belonging. When Teresa, then new to the dance scene, finally executed a spin gracefully while travelling, Rob complimented her and told her she was getting “smoother,” closer to the European aesthetics of round dancing. Similarly, every time I dance with Dave, a Spoke regular and a graceful, elegant dancer, he comments first on the floor – what feels “good” to him feels like ice to me – and then on my dance style: “I like dancing with you because you’re so smoooth.” But cultural preservation at the Spoke is more often expressed as recognition of what Tim Cresswell calls “anachorism,” or bodies out-of-place, on the dance floor.189 Many dancers openly grumble about James, for instance, when he takes advantage of the slick surface to slide his partners the full length of the floor. Similarly, failing to travel along the perimeter of the floor – or even just failing to travel quickly enough – inspires nasty looks and gentle pushes, followed by stronger pushes or elbowing or not-so-inadvertent kicks. Experienced leads often grumble about leads like Jeff, who does dips and spins and takes up so much space on the dance floor that other couples have a hard time passing him. Since the outside of the dance floor is typically the property of the fastest travellers, standing along the edge of the floor inside the rails can result in a head-on collision. And travelling against the direction of dance, as Andy once did with me, is like driving the wrong direction down the highway, with unsuspecting dancers scattering in all directions to avoid the errant couple. These dancers’ movements and their use of space disrupt the flow of dance,

188 Photo from Weldon Henson’s FB page, November 2015. 189 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction.

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and by making it difficult for regulars to achieve their conservative cultural vision they show that they do not belong at the Spoke. Dancers may also be considered anachoristic if their bodies do not conform to the raced and gendered expectations of the venue. One of my earliest memories of dancing at the Broken Spoke is of two young men, teenagers, attempting to dance together, and of other male dancers reaching out to slap them until the couple left the dance floor.190 Similarly, Irene, who calls two-stepping “my ode to white culture,” tells me that she has experienced a lot of racism at the Spoke, mostly from “guys that are like ‘well, if you didn’t dance with the cook maybe we’d dance with you.” She has also been asked to leave the Spoke by both Annetta and Terry White for wearing dresses that violated the “no halter top” rule; once, as she was leaving the bar to change, James White grinned and said “Who gotcha, my wife or my daughter?” Jorge, who rarely goes to the Spoke because it makes him feel uncomfortable, calls it “super macho,” “old school,” and “traditional;” he says he “got the meanest looks” when he took off his denim overshirt and danced a song in a tank top with his tattoos showing. The old people there are really conservative, he says; the Spoke is “strict.” And one Tuesday at the Spoke, Teresa tells me that it’s hard to date because men find her intimidating; she is an attorney, and she and I have had many conversations about trying to date as educated women. At this point in our conversation Rob interrupts, saying “Yeah, I bet – counselor.” Teresa looks Rob in the eye and says “Yeah, when I walk in with my hair and my bright red lips – you know how Mexicans do,” and Rob, joking, asks her if she does the lipliner too, drawing a circle around his mouth like a clown as he talks. Teresa half laughs and says “no, I’m not a chola, but I do carry a knife in my bag” and looks at me and I smile uncomfortably. “You need to carry it in your bra,” Rob says. “It is the kind with the

190 Similarly, when Annetta White asked two women to leave after she “caught” them kissing at one of the tables in June of 2015, the incident received enough local press that Annetta apologized, but, as one of my dance partners whispered in my ear a few months later, she only did it because she had to. See Peter Blackstock, “Controversy Arises over Couple’s Kiss at Broken Spoke,” Austin360, June 17, 2015, http://music.blog.austin360.com/2015/06/17/controversy-arises-over-couples-kiss-at- broken-spoke/.

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clips on it, so I could,” Teresa says, looking down her top. “Ok, I guess I’m a chola.” She and Rob laugh, though the message is clear: in the space of this exchange, the strength of “my hair and my bright red lips – you know how Mexicans do” has become the oddly disempowered body of a “chola” who lets a man tell her she should keep her knife in her bra. While many dancers are Mexican or Mexican- American, and a few – but not many – same sex couples make it out onto the dance floor, the dominant culture is very white and very heteronormative. The policing of difference indicates the extent to which dancers are invested in re-membering a country music culture that is based on a white, male-dominant, group-oriented past. Insofar as dance is a way of re-membering a conservative nostalgia for the past, interactions both on and off the dance floor constitute placemaking practices that align the Broken Spoke with the “plain white folk” at the heart of traditional country music culture. As James White says, “We ain’t fancy, but we’re damn sure country.”191 Five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, the dance floor of the Broken Spoke is at the center of this re-membering ritual. The venue, with its working-class honkytonk aesthetic and its functional, vernacular construction, privileges round dancing as the dance form that best embodies the conservative nostalgia of traditional country. The difficulty of preserving and promoting this cultural politics in a rapidly growing city that is long-known for its liberal politics is inscribed in the structure of the dance hall, where railings, signage, and a little too much floor wax protect the “counterclockwise swirl of bodies”192 from invasions by the uninitiated. The dancers also work to protect and preserve the community re- membered through round dancing by policing bodies both on and off the dance floor. Though not everyone at the Spoke subscribes to the conservative cultural politics of round dancing, dancing in this place requires that we perform it as part of “that old Texas, real Texas.” Yet while preserving and presenting the norms and values of traditional country music culture in a changing Austin has kept the Spoke

191 “Broken Spoke.” 192 Corcoran, “If It Ain’t Broken: Austin’s Legendary Broken Spoke Honky-Tonk Turns 50.”

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alive for decades, competition from new country music venues like the White Horse reveals that this version of dancing in place is increasingly becoming unsustainable.

There is No Dance Floor at the White Horse It’s close to midnight, a few minutes before Rick Broussard’s set, and the dancers – identifiable in the fray by their rockabilly hair, cowboy hats, petticoats – are losing ground to groups of high-heeled girls and lurching, drunken guys in ironic t-shirts and polos. Jeff, a longtime dancer with wild grey hair and a Topo Chico in his hand, jumps up on stage, grabs the mic, and asks the crowd not to bring their drinks on the dance floor, but his plea falls on deaf ears: some laugh sheepishly, others shrug, no one moves. He steps down and the band starts. All hell breaks loose. Cody takes Sandra’s hand; I try to grab Jeff but he’s beelining for a tall, pretty woman with a pixie cut; I head over toward the bathrooms and spot Darren just in time to see him to pull an unfamiliar blonde out of the crowd; and I end up in front of the men’s room just in time for Tomas, one of the regulars, to appear beside me. “Would you like to dance?” I ask, offering my hand. He takes a hurried swing of his beer, grabs my hand, puts his beer on top of the speaker by the stage, and pulls me onto the floor. It’s a madhouse. There are several couples two-stepping, but several more are free-styling, just moving to the music with beers in hand. Tomas keeps trying to turn me only to find that a non-dancer on the floor is occupying the space he was trying to put me in, and in his frustration he pulls me over to the back corner of the floor by the sound booth. The space here is mostly clear and we get a few more turns in. Dancing with Tomas makes me think about how there may be a White Horse style of two-step: he has a smooth, ballroom carriage, with a straight spine and head thrown back, that is unique to him, but unlike most dancers at the Spoke, he steps on all of the beats: quick quick slow-tap slow-tap. He also pulls out turns that I recognize from Don, another White Horse regular: a casual over-the-shoulder throw, a turn that ends in a behind-the-back wrap-around, the beginnings of the

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behind-the-back flick that is Don’s signature move. We finish the dance with an awkward dip and he says “were you at Continental for the Moonpies on Thursday?” I say I was and ask if he was there and he says yes, and he actually danced so much that he was a sweaty mess by the end of it; he hasn’t danced like that in a long time. But “this is a waste,” he says, gesturing toward the crowds of people. We’re at the back of the dance floor, standing by the bar near dancer’s corner, so I have a full view of the crowd, and it’s clear to both of us that this is not a dance crowd. People are standing in clumps, a small group of girls up by where Cody and Sandra had been standing, a line of people leading from the center of the floor to the men’s room, beers in hand, and some people standing on the edge of the floor but with their backs or sides to it, engaged in conversation and not watching the dancing. I hedge: I’m glad people are here enjoying the music, but this configuration with so many static people on the floor is making it hard to dance because huge swaths of the floor are off-limits, and the couples who are dancing but who aren’t two- stepping are moving unpredictably, making it difficult to hazard turns and also hard to keep from getting stomped. Two-stepping at the Horse feels less like a controlled form of conservative nostalgia and a whole lot more like a Saturday night free-for- all. Opened in 2011, the White Horse is a relative newcomer to the dance scene. It is also a honkytonk, not a dance hall, and its promise of Texas-tinged illicit activity in a liminal space – both the bar itself and the rapidly gentrifying East Austin neighborhood in which it is located – attracts a hipper, younger, more urban and more cosmopolitan crowd than does the Spoke.193 The White Horse does have a small core of regular dancers, but here, without a separate dance floor, a long

193 In 2014, reporters from The New York Times travelled the length of I-35 and stopped in dozens of cities to examine immigration issues in the United States. In Austin, they stopped at the White Horse and spoke with owner Nathan Hill at length about the venue’s role in gentrifying Mexican-American East Austin. Hill talked not about displacing people but about cleaning up the neighborhood and changing the clientele; when asked about the racial politics, he said “I hate calling it a white bar or a Mexican bar, but that’s how it is.” See Damien Cave and Todd Heisler, “The Way North: Day 7: An Uneasy Cultural Peace,” The New York Times, May 24, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/us/the-way-north.html?_r=0#p/7.

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tradition of dancing, or a long-memoried country music culture invested in maintaining clear throughlines to the past, two-step is a social dance, and placemaking is more a matter of contingency, flexibility, and pragmatism, as “crossings” among dancers and drinkers shape both the dancing and the dance space. Nathan and Denis, two of the owners, argue that some of this contingency and flexibility is embedded in the structure of the venue itself, where the broad, easily accessible bar, wide-open interior, and smaller outdoor spaces invite patrons to take ownership of the venue and shape it around their chosen activities. But it is also evident in the spot dance practices of White Horse regulars, who use a range of tactics to navigate and claim a crowded, drunken dance floor. In contrast to the Broken Spoke, where a well-policed two-step is a privileged way to preserve “real Texas” as a re-membered past, dancing at the White Horse is an accessible way for a new generation of dancers, drinkers, and tourists to participate in the production of Texas culture now, as it is imagined in contemporary Austin. Rather than creating a rooted, re-membered sense of place, dancers at the White Horse use dance to create what Doreen Massey calls the “event of place.”194 As an event, two-step at the White Horse both shapes and is shaped by an understanding of place as hybrid, contingent, and growth-oriented. Where traditional country at the Broken Spoke has a rural, working-class politics that is invested in preserving the “plain white folk” at the heart of country music, the alt country at the White Horse is largely the country music culture of the mobile creative class, for whom tasteful consumption often stands in for long-rooted experience.195 Here, visual and danced references to “that old Texas, real Texas” serve less to root the venue in place than to differentiate it from other venues in its entertainment district and in entertainment districts in other creative class cities. This alt country orientation is evident in the Horse’s carefully curated jukebox, where local acts mingle with country greats like Merle Haggard and George Jones,

194 Massey, For Space. 195 Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” 89– 90; Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins.’”

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and on its stage, where young, less-established bands like Mayeux and Broussard, Leo Rondeau and Rosie and the Ramblers mix original material with off-beat classic country covers that show their knowledge of the genre. It is also evident in the venue’s clientele, who are generally younger than those at the Spoke, more heterogeneous, and more hip and urban. For these patrons, country music is not a long-established form of conservative nostalgia but a slightly Texified variation of the hipster haunts on East 6th or the wild party atmosphere of dirty 6th downtown. To attract them, the Horse offers a warm, friendly atmosphere with cheap drinks, heavy pours, and no covers; their hope is that people will come in out of curiosity and make the place their own. In this context, where mobility and consumption are largely unregulated by roots and tradition, placemaking reflects both the wide range of influences and dance knowledges that shape the two-step at the White Horse and the contingencies to which dancers must respond on the venue’s crowded dance floor. Two-stepping is still central to making place, but here it is a “respectfully ironic” performance of “Texana” that is based on practices rather than roots. Despite the bar’s reliance on two-stepping and country music to differentiate itself from other venues, dancing is not a privileged, protected activity here – at least not in the same way as it is at the Spoke. Nathan, one of the owners of the White Horse, claims that there is no dance floor at the White Horse. Soon after formally beginning this study, I met up with Nathan at the Hole in the Wall, the long-running dive bar near the UT campus that he managed before opening the White Horse with Denis, the Hole’s head bartender. In a booth in the dingy front room, Nathan tells me that dancers always complain to him about there not being enough room on the dance floor. But you know what? he says. We’re a business, and we have to cater to young people who drink to make our money. We want both crowds, he tells me, but we can either have two or four old school dance couples on the floor or lots of younger couples. And – he looks pointedly at me over his drink with a twinkle in his eye – where does the dance floor really stop and start at the White Horse? Structurally, this is a fair point: unlike at the Spoke, where the dance floor is clearly

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demarcated and protected by different levels, different surfaces, and railings, the White Horse is a wide open space, a broad rectangle with a door in the corner of one long wall, a long bar along the length of the back wall, and the small, red-lit stage tucked into the far front corner. The porch, with its pool table, piano, photobooth and boot-shining station, flanks the front of the building and constitutes an indoor/outdoor space for smokers; beyond this, the fenced-in patio covers the entire front of the building and provides outdoor seating and access to the Bomb Taco truck. But aside from the pool table by the entrance and a few tables and chairs in the center, the indoor space is clear, ambiguous, wide open. When the barbacks and security guys pull the tables into the parking lot to make way for weekend crowds, it is really just a big, empty box, available for whatever people want to make of it. Arguably, without any structural guides, people dance here because they want to, however they want to, and they could dance anywhere; the size, shape and location of the dance floor depends on the crowd, the dancers, and the band. Yet dancing is central to the venue. A few months after I met with Nathan, Denis, the other owner, told me that this particular spatial configuration was what sold him on the property.196 The space, previously occupied by a tejano bar called La Trampa, was mostly empty when they acquired it: Howdy, the White Horse booking manager, later told me that the old tenants had built a bar along the back wall out of sawhorses and plywood, with handwritten signs advertising beer prices, and the rest of the space was wide open. But for Denis, the space had the “flow” that would boost sales and generate the right kind of energy and circulation, and the renovated venue reflects his vision. Patrons enter the bar through the front door and walk directly back to the heavy wooden bar, which spans the length of the venue and is always well-staffed by friendly, efficient bartenders, so that drinks – and drink sales – are easily accessible. The music and dancing are less accessible,

196 There is a third owner, Marshall, who supplied the capital to open the bar but who does not participate in daily operations.

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and that is by design. While the music is audible from the front door, the tiny stage is at the far side of the venue, and the dancers, who always want to be as close to the music as possible, are right in front of the band. On a crowded night, this means that after they get their drinks, people have to head deeper into the venue to get to the main attraction – the two-stepping and country music that differentiates this bar from other bars on East Sixth – rather than clogging up the bar and the entryway. If the music is too loud and the crowd too wild for conversation, people can keep going, keep exploring: a narrow hallway next to the stage leads out to the porch, and wide open doors and a few steps lead down to the patio, where they can sit and smoke and drink and eat tacos and talk. And if they need another drink, another narrow hallway connects the other side of the porch with the main building near the front entrance, so that they can repeat the pattern again. Thus, at the furthest point from the door, lit only by white string lights and the glowing red lights of the stage, the “nonexistent” dance floor becomes the inner sanctum, the heart of the venue, the place where dancers and non-dancers alike can share in the energy and the “sheer physicality” of dancing. As Nathan says, there is no dance floor at the White Horse, no officially sanctioned and protected space for dancing “the way WE dance.” Yet, as Denis points out, and as the use of the venue reveals, not only is there a dance floor, but the location of that dance floor and the way it operates is crucial to the success of the venue.197 At the Spoke, the owners, the regular dancers, and the space of the dance hall all structure and police the dancing and present it up front as the living embodiment of Texas culture, so that little is left for a newcomer or tourist to create or discover. By contrast, the dance floor at the White Horse is created anew every night by dancers with a wide range of skills, dance backgrounds, and interpretations

197 In his study of “Creative Class” cities, for which Austin served as a model, Richard Florida argues that Creative Class consumers “prefer more active, authentic, and participatory experiences, which they can have a hand in structuring.” See Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, 167. Florida is problematic, but this particular point helps situate the White Horse in broader economic and cultural shifts.

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of what two-step is or should be. Two-step is also, especially on busy nights, not immediately evident, nor even the dominant use of the bar’s space; rather than be presented up front with “real Texas,” would-be dancers have to find it, to dig through the crowd and the normal East Sixth bar spaces to get to it. Thus, on the White Horse’s non-existent dance floor, dancers create a place where dancing is experiential, participatory, new, contingent; in Thomas Turino’s terms, two-step becomes “more about the social relations being realized through the performance than about producing art that can somehow be abstracted from those social relations.”198 Rather than re-membering place, dancers create it anew with each dance event. The contingency and openness of the dance floor at the White Horse suggests that while two-step can be used to shore up a conservative politics of place, two- step is not necessarily exclusive, nor is a place-based dance scene inherently insular and regressive. At the Horse, two-step is not a folk dance but a social dance, and two-steppers also use their dancing to construct place as open, flexible, relational, and contingent, rather than closed or slowly sedimented over long periods of time. From this perspective, placemaking is more about the pleasure of dancing than it is about staking out territory for re-membering the past. The emphasis on the pleasure of dancing as a component of placemaking is reflected in the spot dance style that many dancers adopt to deal with the chaos. Spot dancing developed in African-American honkytonks and jook joints in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There, dancers refined dance practices and aesthetics, including bent knees, a low center of gravity, weight suspended between the feet to allow for quick directional changes, and close heterosexual partnering (in the early 20th century) to take advantage of the often-cramped “shoddy confines” in which they danced.199

198 Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, 35. The spectrum between presentational and participatory was originally developed by Nahachewsky; see Nahachewsky, “Participatory and Presentational Dance as Ethnochoreological Categories.” 199 See Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture, Chapter 2. Similarly, in the 1910s and 1920s, when conservative middle class whites attempted to curb the national dance craze by prohibiting African-American dances like the Charleston, the Black

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Unlike round dances, in which the entire group moves as a unit around the floor, spot dances, especially swing, lindy hop, jive and rock ‘n’ roll, allow dancers to stay in place on the dance floor so that each couple can respond independently to one another and to the music. Writing about Lindy hop in the Machine Age, Joel Dinerstein argues that spot dancing combined the hallmarks of black vernacular dance – improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response, self- expression, elegance, and control – with a new machine aesthetic, so that the “lindy hop integrated the relentless power of machines by mixing speed, precision, and flow with human stamina and self-expression to display the partnered expression of dynamic control.”200 In other words, while round dancing requires place to conform to it, spot dancing is tactical, especially on a crowded floor; without the ability to control space, spot dancers are, as de Certeau writes, “always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’”201 Without the structural supports of the Spoke, regular White Horse dancers adopt a similarly tactical approach to dancing. On a busy Saturday night, without any formal structures to police it, the dance floor is thus literally contingent upon the movements of dancers and their ability to claim enough space to dance. Sometimes, claiming space to dance involves overt measures bordering on violence. Roger Wallace, a rockabilly musician who plays the White Horse every other Friday at midnight, once stopped in the middle of a song to admonish two young men in shorts who had pushed through the crowd to stand directly in front of the stage, saying “Hey boys, grab yourself a purdy lady and dance!” One of the guys gestured toward the other, so Roger said “He’s purdy enough, dance with him!” and

Bottom, the Bunny Hug and the Grizzly Bear on crowded dance floors, white dancers responded by developing the Balboa, an upright dance whose small steps, close hold, and bouncing aesthetic retained the function, if not the form, of the prohibited dances. See Dan Guest, “Balboa History,” The Lindy Circle, October 17, 2005, http://www.lindycircle.com/history/balboa/. The responsiveness and adaptability of spot dancing informs a range of contemporary African-American dance practices; see, for instance, Schloss, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, 101–102. 200 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 255. 201 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix.

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they paired up and danced their way back off the dance floor. But as Jeff’s attempt above suggests, overt attempts to get people to move off the dance floor are often unsuccessful. More often, dancers instead resort to what several dancers call “elbows out:” dancing in ways that make it difficult for people to run into you without getting hurt. On an elbows out night at the White Horse, dancers employ tactics that most experienced dancers at the Spoke would consider “bad dancing.” Jeff exaggerates the size of his steps and employs big, dramatic moves, like his signature suicide dip, with no regard for people he or his partner might run into; while dancers at the Spoke grumble that these moves makes him “unpredictable,” here that unpredictability is an asset. Similarly, Don openly uses his follows – including me – to push other people out of the way by throwing us directly into them. Hiro uses a similar strategy, but more gently; he spins his follows closer and closer to the edge of the dance floor until people move back – to protect their drinks, he says. As a follow, I literally dance with my elbows out, so that the point of my elbow or the side of my forearm redirects drunk couples before they get close enough to stomp on my or my partner’s feet. And once, at the beginning of a set, several couples, including Martin and I, agreed to use these tactics to “clear the floor” for dancing; by getting between the drinkers and the stage and then moving outward toward the crowd, we forced people standing in the middle of the floor to step back to avoid getting hit. But the best dancers, those who spend nearly every night dancing at the White Horse, treat the crowded, drunken, often violent space of the dance floor as a fresh challenge every night; for them, dancing in place is a matter of recreating the dance floor anew in three-minute intervals. Because they dance two-step as a spot dance rather than a round dance, they need less space – and less cooperation from others – to dance; they can also use spot dance tools borrowed from swing, like the rockstep and the use of “dynamic control,” or counterbalance, to quickly change directions as the need arises. Rather than force the floor to conform to them, these dancers actually take pleasure in navigating the crowd. Al, for instance, draws on

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his training in Hungarian folk dance to keep his partners close and grounded, even when they are not experienced dancers. Mike, a tall thin salsa dancer-turned-two- stepper, once told me that his favorite part of dancing at the White Horse is meeting new people and making up new moves, which he can’t do at other venues. And once, at a crowded Roger Wallace show, I danced with Aaron, a newer dancer whose wild, exuberant, Lindy-based dancing style usually requires a lot of energy to follow. But that night he was more on beat than he had been in the past, and he was so, so happy to be dancing; the wide smile on his face just got bigger with every successful turn. And unlike dancers who become frustrated with their inability to clear the floor, Aaron treated the crowded dance floor and the drunk couples swaying with bottles in their hands as fun obstacles to be danced around, not as obnoxious people screwing up his good time. When he saw an opening, he took it, and for once I found myself flying not into someone’s back or arm but into a slot here, a little open space there, close in when we were surrounded and dramatic when we were not. While Aaron also uses policing tactics when necessary, he and other dancers who dance regularly at the White Horse adapt the dance to suit the space, rather than trying to make the space conform to them. At the White Horse, placemaking largely relies not on conforming to pre-set expectations, but on the ability to create something new and beautiful while navigating a crowded, unpredictable dance floor. Here, dancing is tactical rather than strategic; like de Certeau’s walkers, dancers “insinuate” themselves “into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”202 The dance event, like the event of place itself, is shaped by these tactical maneuverings and by the different skill and sobriety levels the regulars use them to navigate. While placemaking at the Broken Spoke is a matter of re-membering a conservative nostalgia for the past, the way that two-step is preserved and protected at the Spoke leaves little room for newcomers and tourists to form their own personal attachments to place. Against this controlled version of

202 Ibid.

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preservation, the White Horse – where there is no dance floor – arguably creates a more accessible version of Texas dance culture by shifting the focus from roots to practices and thus from dancers to dancing. This shift reimagines place as an event, a temporally and spatially contingent intersection of flows. It also allows Texas dance culture to evolve: largely free from the constraints of tradition, dancers at the White Horse combine dance practices from a range of dances into a set of tactics for artfully navigating a crowded, drunken dance floor. Yet while this reimagining of two-step leads to both new moves and a dance community bound together by the pleasure of keeping together in time, it is not entirely without roots or memory. After all, the regulars develop their tactics and their bonds by dancing together every night. And on nights when the dancers are elsewhere, the linoleum dance floor, worn through to the concrete below in spots, bears witness to this process of dancing in place.

The Honkiest Tonkiest Beer Joint in Town People are super duper important, a place does not matter without them, but there are HUGE intangible, ethereal reasons that some places are successful, while others are not. And many of those are reasons WHY people are going to a certain place, why they take it as their own and why they will continue to go. - Jordan, two-stepper203

By the time I arrived at the grand re-opening in November 2013, The Little Longhorn was densely packed. Ginny, the venue’s owner since the mid-1990s, had sold the venue to local honkytonk artist Dale Watson over the summer, and after three months of renovations, hundreds of people were eager to see what their old haunt had become. Classic cars occupied the spots directly in front of the bar, and well-polished cruisers flanked both sides of the small building in the neat rows favored by motorcycle clubs. The parking lot was blocked off, and from the street I

203 Jordan, comment on a fellow dancer’s Facebook post: “Me: ‘What's wrong, baby?’ Baby: ‘Ginny's isn't the same.’ Me: ‘Oh, I'm sorry. At least you still have Poodle Dog.’ Baby: ‘Waaaaaaaaaa!!!’”, accessed November 6, 2013 at 11:36am, https://www.facebook.com/motleyclown. Poodle Dog, another North Austin dive, closed the same week that Ginny’s reopened.

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could see tents and tables set up out back and bikers, rockabillies, and families with small children hanging out beneath them. Despite rumors of dramatic changes, the building looked the same from the outside - but when I stepped inside, everything was different. So different. The walls had been stripped of decades of posters and signed headshots and covered instead with clean white sheetrock, a fresh crop of neon beer signs, and two flat-screen TVs. Behind the bar, taps had been installed and commercial coolers replaced the old fridge, but the cracked mirrors and rickety shelves and layers of dusty memorabilia were gone, replaced by a smooth white wall with a large black-and-white photograph of Ginny holding one of her chickens, a larger poster of Dale, and, looking dirty and out of place in its new, sterile surroundings, a small, handwritten sign from the old bar tacked precariously above Ginny’s portrait: “No cussin’, no fussin’, no hasslin’, no wrasslin’.” The only other familiar element in the room was Dale’s old 8-track, perched with its cassettes on a sleek brushed metal shelf in a place of honor over the new stage, its thin black cord neatly tacked to the white wall behind it. Ginny, who used to survey the crowd from the back corner behind the bar, was seated on a barstool up front, facing the front door and the stage, her freshly coiffed silver hair barely visible through the crowd. She saw me and smiled and waved but then looked off into the distance. I wanted to ask her what she thought but decided to save it for another day, because here, seated outside the bar in a place of honor that felt more objectifying than powerful, she seemed effectively shut out of it, a relic as out of place in this fresh, unfamiliar room as the 8-track and the old handwritten sign above her portrait. The dancers I talked to were glad that the bar was still there but unsure what to say about this new, bright, clean place or the selective memorializing of their old haunt. Later, Jordan, a dancer and Ginny’s regular, wrote pointedly on Facebook that “there are HUGE intangible, ethereal reasons that some places are successful, while others are not.” Her thoughts reverberated down the thread, echoed in the comments of other dancers. But on that first afternoon, Ericka, another dancer, captured more of what I heard and saw that day: she misses the old Ginny’s, she told

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me, it was so “dark, warm, and earthy,” but it will feel like home once we track a little dirt in on our boots. I stayed late that night, and as the sun set and the early crowds left, someone turned off the neon beer signs and turned on the stage and bar lights so that the bar was darker and felt closer, still clean and foreign but a bit more familiar. By 9, a few dancers started trickling in; at 10, when Wyldwood Four started up with Bobby Marlar at the mic, Cody and Jane floated a spirited Austin two-step onto the new floor, and a half-dozen couples joined them. The floor filled up as the dancers tested it out, feeling for its smooth spots and rough patches, and the air was dusty – you could see it swirling under the stage lights, and it was tacky, like chalk or maybe dust from the sheetrock. After a while I could feel the dust granular under my boots, and somehow it made it easier to dance, and our boots all got so dusty that you couldn’t even tell what color they were; it settled into all the little crooks and crevices and stitches, making everything white. The bar was still white, too, but somehow it felt darker, more intimate – all the good dancers on the floor, the high energy, the dust, Bobby singing his heart out, the band thumping through one good dance song after another. Ericka was long gone by then, but here we were, tracking dust in on our boots, feeling out this new place, making it our own and getting to know it as home: perhaps this was what she meant? Was this new, white, renovated place still Ginny’s? Among dancers, this question was the subject of many emotional conversations in the weeks after the grand re-opening, as the two-step community shifted to integrate the new Little Longhorn into the larger dance landscape. I raise it here because, asked from the perspective of the local dance scene, the question of whether Ginny’s is “still Ginny’s” situates a host of larger concerns about the role of two-step in Austin’s changing local landscape – and, crucially, its ability to guide and interpret those changes – in a real place, in real time, among a community of people for whom interactions between physical space, social relations, memory, and bodily practice are integral to their sense of who they are. If dancing at the Broken Spoke is a process of re-membering “old Texas” and dancing at the White Horse is one of

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continually (re)creating Texas dance culture anew, dancing at the Ginny’s grand re- opening suggests one possibility for creating a hybrid of the two. Housed in a tiny orange and white cinderblock church on Burnet Road in North Austin, the “old” Ginny’s was, much like the Broken Spoke, a cluttered, vernacular memorial to decades of dancers and drinkers and a uniquely “Austin” watering hole for locals and tourists alike. When country musician Dale Watson purchased the bar from Ginny and renovated it in summer 2013, the space seemed to many to be stripped of its memories and detached from the dance community that had supported it for many years. But to others, this new, clean Ginny’s was just another iteration of a beloved venue, and there was just enough left of the old Ginny’s for dancers to reinscribe the space, to create social and aesthetic throughlines linking old and new together. The ways dancers make sense of this venue suggests that dancing place is neither about protecting roots nor about rejecting them entirely, but about finding ways to balance dancers’ experiential pleasure and embodied memories with tourists’ and drinkers’ desire to watch the dancing as a spectacle of local culture. When I first started dancing in 2010, Ginny Kalmbach had been working at the Little Longhorn for nearly 30 years, and though she and her husband inherited it from its previous owner, Dick Setliff, in 1993, the place hadn’t been renovated since Dick opened it in the 1960s.204 By 2010, the venue was the product of both roots and practices, at once a living building and a repository for decades of memories. The windows on either side of the front door were covered over with plywood and painted white, the one on the left sporting a small portable air conditioner. The old pool table was at the front, directly under the air conditioner, with a jukebox and an ATM squeezed between it and the bar – Ginny only dealt in cash. The bar was along the left wall as well, with wobbly black stools and a sticky wood laminate surface, and the shelves behind the bar were filled with knickknacks and beer cans and old photographs and what looked like decades of dust. Since Ginny didn’t have – or

204 Allandale Neighborhood Association, “Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon,” The Allandale Reporter: Web Site of the Allandale Neighborhood Association, accessed November 9, 2013, http://allandale.typepad.com/allandale/ginnys-little-longhorn-sa.html.

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couldn’t afford, or never bothered to get – a liquor license, beer came in cans and sodas were served warm with a cup of ice. The rest of the room was filled with cheap lacquered tables, their plastic tops bubbling up, and chairs like you’d find in an old VA hall. The tiny bathrooms were in the back left corner, and the women’s room had a hole at the bottom of the door but no lock, so you had to stick your foot out to hold the door closed. The back right corner (or the front, if you were dancing) was where the bands played, squeezed into a tiny space whose walls were covered with old photos of various artists who’d played there, including several of Dale Watson, and an 8-track on a shelf with dozens of tapes that bands put on between sets. The dance floor was just big enough for a few couples, its cracked concrete smoothish and uneven from years of dancers and indifferent patch jobs. And since the air conditioner barely worked, in the summer – which is how I always remember it, Mike Stinson singing his heart out and sweat pouring down his face, the six or eight couples on the dance floor all so sweaty that we slid off each other – the plywood doors at front and back stood open to catch what little breeze they could. Old posters and framed images cover the paneled walls – benefits, thank yous, event announcements – so it was hard to realize at first that the posters closest to the band, which were often just handwritten in multicolored magic marker, were usually current, or at least they advertised events that were still going on. Like the Spoke, the old Ginny’s was a building that reflected decades of country music culture and working-class pragmatism. But unlike the Spoke, the building was still very much alive, still being created by the people who hung out, danced, and drank there. For many of those people, and especially for many dancers, Ginny’s felt like home. Tuan writes that home is

an intimate place. We think of the house as home and place, but enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can

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only be seen, as by its components and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well.205

Making a house a home, so to speak, is a matter of getting to know all its cracks and crevices and quirks, of dwelling in it long enough and intimately enough that the building and your experience of it become inseparable. As Lippard writes, “it is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political.”206 Home is a kind of place that has depth as well as breadth, both objective and subjective elements. For dancers, who create home places through their dancing, home is also a product of the mobile dancing body, moving together with or alongside other mobile dancing bodies and creating the “euphoric fellow-feeling” that binds the dance scene together.207 It is not a product of just one person but of a whole group of people and of the “social relations being realized” through the dance event.208 But while home for dancers is the product of practices, it is not only the product of practices. Making home is also about making that home legible, about inscribing the presence of the dance community in the venue for all to see. A home that is based on a mobile, ephemeral set of practices into the landscape is difficult, but not impossible, to create, and it is visible to those who know how to look: at Ginny’s, the smooth, well-worn spot in front of the band, the stacks of honky-tonk 8-tracks, and the handwritten posters advertising dance bands all pointed to the long-term presence of dancers, even when the dancers were elsewhere. Like the White Horse, Ginny’s was not designed to be a dance venue; it was a sports bar before Ginny took it over and started booking country acts, and it was tiny and poorly ventilated. Yet as these subtle imprints of dancers over months and years of dancing there reflected, the Kalmbachs allowed the dancers to make the place their own, and in return, dancers embraced this improbable space as part of the broader dance community, many returning nightly to dance, drink, and

205 Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, 144. 206 Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 7. 207 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, 2–3. 208 Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, 35.

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mingle with friends, tourists, and locals. Dancing in place at the old Ginny’s thus had elements of both the historically rooted re-membering at the Broken Spoke and the event-based placemaking at the White Horse. Because the old Ginny’s felt and looked like home to so many dancers, the fresh new space of the new Little Longhorn Saloon seemed to many dancers to both privilege dancing and erase its memory from the venue. The renovations dramatically altered the interior of the building. The music and dancing are now in the front, rather than the back: the pool table, which, dancers chuckled, had emitted hundreds of rats when they first tried to move it, is now gone from the front of the venue, and in its place is a stage, raised a bit and big enough for a four-piece to fit comfortably. The supply closet to the right of the front door is gone too, replaced with more floor space for dancing, a small bar with a bench behind it, and a massive new jukebox standing just to the right of the front door. The air conditioner has been moved from the front window to the center of the side wall, and the window, long covered with plywood, is now a big, open expanse of glass so that passersby, or people drinking at the new Little Woodrow’s across Burnet, can see the action from outside. With more dance space comes more visibility, a nod to the many people who come to watch the dancing rather than to participate in it. The experience of dancing is also subtly erased in other ways: in addition to peeling the layers of dust and photos and memorabilia off the walls, Dale resurfaced the floor, replacing the cracked, ill-repaired concrete, and therefore also the marks of decades of turns and shuffles, with a smooth surface that stretched from front to back. Yet while it appears even, the new dance floor up front is composed of two different surfaces, a smooth polished concrete toward the bar and a rougher, unpolished surface toward the front door, so that dancers have to be wary of the seam. And the lighting, once dim and indifferent, is now bright, perhaps too bright for a honky-tonk, with spotlights over the bar, the stage, and the dance floor. Dancers are still welcome, but the space is no longer shaped by dancers, for dancers.

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When first confronted with this new arrangement, many dancers were concerned not just about the loss of a treasured home place, but about the balance of power the renovations suggested. Most of the people I talked to on that first afternoon seemed to be trying to make sense of the changes. Some, like Joe, a dancer I only ever see at Ginny’s, hugged me and cheerfully said not to worry, we’ll make Ginny’s our own again. But Lise, a tall thin dancer, told me “I couldn’t speak for the first ten minutes I was here.” “It’s so different,” I managed. She agreed, and added “it’s very bright.” Harold, another dancer, said only that “it’s very different.” And Larry Watson, Dale’s brother, a grizzled-looking man in a trucker hat with a Miller High Life in one hand and a cigarette in the other, took a long look at me before answering my questions about the changes. In a slow Texas drawl that said he’d had this conversation a lot today, he said “Wellll we didn’t change it all that much. We just got a lot of the hair out of it. A lot of people didn’t think we should have, but they said we had to so we did.” Although Dale Watson is a local musician and his career has long dovetailed with Ginny’s Little Longhorn – sensing the appeal of the old Ginny’s, he started chickenshit bingo when he moved to Austin in the mid- 1990s – his failure to take the needs of the bar’s patrons into account when planning the renovations rubbed many people the wrong way. Further, while many dancers believed, or seemed to believe, that the Health Inspector or the Fire Inspector or some other City official had mandated at least some of the changes, some still suspected that these changes were designed to shift ownership of the venue away from the dancers. On Facebook the following day, Rob wrote that Ginny’s is “just a shell of what it once was,” as though the only thing left of the old bar was its cinderblock hull. Ann wrote that the “’new and improved’” Ginny’s looks less like a honky-tonk and “more like a mini-sports bar with the neon signs and extra TVs.” And “[a]s for relocating the band to the front door,” she wrote, “that does give more space to dance, but now you can’t see the band from the tables (need to move the band to other corner). Worse still, people entering the front door

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ram into people dancing. That’s not safe.”209 Henry agreed, writing “I don’t get having the people enter through the middle of the dance floor.” Even Carlos, who wrote that “people will get the picture and start walking about the outside,” joked that “[w]e’ll put up a sign on the busy days: ‘walk around to the back, n00bs.’”210 This new place was not just “bright” and “different.” The old Ginny’s, a working building, had protected the dancers from “n00bs” by locating the band, and thus the dance floor, in the back. By putting dancers on display in the front, these dancers argued, the new Ginny’s put them in direct conflict with unsuspecting tourists walking right through the dancing. Though tourists have long been a part of two- step at Ginny’s and at other Austin country music venues, making a home of the dance floor relies on dancers being able to privilege their dancing over others’ watching, whether by making room for themselves on the floor during the dance event or by somehow inscribing their presence on the physical space. Erasing the physical traces of dancing from the venue and moving the dancers to the front, where they could be more easily watched and interrupted, disrupted their sense of home and made them question whether the venue was still theirs. Despite these critiques, some elements of the grand re-opening suggest that the new Ginny’s is not as divorced from the old Ginny’s as many dancers believe. At the beginning of the grand-reopening, Dale Watson made the connection between dancing and the new Little Longhorn explicit. In a video of the opening ceremonies – the first song and first dance in the new space – Dale Watson and his band are packed onto the tiny stage, the light from the front window and the blank white wall behind them making everything bright.211 The bar is packed, with just a small space in front of the stage still open for dancing, and people are, in fact, streaming into the bar through the front door and walking right through the dance floor. Dale, in a

209 Ann’s Facebook page, November 3, 2013, accessed December 20, 2015. 210 Carlos and Henry are both comments on Ann’s Facebook post on November 3, 2013, accessed December 20, 2015. 211 Tim Owen’s vid, posted 11/9/2013 in the Facebook event for the Grand Re-Opening, accessed 12/18/15, https://www.facebook.com/events/384918978306731/?source=1

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black t-shirt and jeans, kicks things off with a list of things that have stayed the same and improvements they’ve made to the venue, and the crowd cheers as the bass player and drummer punctuate each new item with a few beats: “free hot dogs, not just any dogs, Ginny Dogs! Big hand for Ginny there right at the end of the bar there! You’ll notice we made a lot of changes: ladies, you now have a bathroom that you can’t even get into sometimes, it’s locked! We do take credit cards now! We got draft beer now! There’s lot’s of new faces working behind the bar: Aesop! Amanda! And of course, [some old faces:] fantastic Sharon [Ginny’s daughter] is back there! And William! And here we are: I’m Dale Watson, glad to be back at the HONKIEST, TONKIEST, BEER JOINT IN TOWN!” With this, the band launches into a country song Dale has written about Ginny’s long history as a honkytonk where the jukebox, appropriately, is filled with songs both “old and new.” The crowd cheers, and by the end of the second verse, two dancers have taken to the floor: Ginny is dancing with Terry Gaona, the new bar manager, Terry leading, Ginny following, both with smiles on their faces, as if Ginny is giving Terry her blessing. A large man jumps out of the crowd to take pictures of the two. The renovations may have shifted the balance of power, but here, dance is the medium used to transfer ownership of the bar from one generation to another. At once symbolic and experiential, perhaps dancing still retains some of the power it held at the old venue? And later on that night, the venue seemed to revert to the dancers. By 9, the bar was still crowded, but it was thinning out inside, and despite the white walls it was a little darker: the TVs were still on, but someone had turned most of the beer signs off, and the new stage and bar lights were on, the track lighting above the bar making it look clean and fresh, almost as if we were at someone’s house and not at an old dive. Dancers started arriving, and though there were far fewer people in the bar at 9 than there had been at four in the afternoon, there were more familiar faces. We danced, kicking up dust as we learned the new space and tried to find the old one. Dale, his set over and his gear packed up, switched roles from entertainer to bar owner, picking up glasses and wiping down tables, a white bar towel tucked in

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his back pocket where most rockabillies keep a red handkerchief. And like a good host, he worked his way through the dancers over the course of the evening, shaking hands with the leads and dancing with the follows. When my turn came, he was a bit awkward but threw together a lot of moves based on the cuddle, and we were on the edge of the floor and managed not to hit anyone, though he did elbow me in the face. This brought him back into character: he immediately said, in a low, deep voice with a pronounced Texas drawl, “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean that.” I laughed and said don’t worry about it, and we danced through to the end of the song, when we thanked each other for the dance, and I said, teasing, “I’ve got my eye on you now,” and he said “just don’t sue me!” and then “the first one’s free!” and walked off toward the bar. While Dale retreated into his entertainer persona, I found myself surprised by how small he was, and how human he had appeared for a moment, when he was in the dancers’ world rather than us being in his. Halfway through the Marlars’ set, when the band took a break, Will, one of the bartenders, brought out huge Tupperware bins full of chocolate chip cookies and started passing them out, a homey and very welcome sugar rush after two hours of dancing. Every song the band played was danceable, but there were so few leads that I danced every song, and by 11:30 my legs felt like lead. I sat out a song and watched Bobby Marlar’s face under the new spotlight; he’s a tattoo artist with such a sweet face that I’d never noticed his tattoos before, though tonight I saw that his neck says “MAMA” on the front, and there’s a kind of half moon and a devil on one side that says “LATE”, and he has little spiderwebs filling in either side of his widow’s peak. A function of the lighting, perhaps. And even though I was tired, the music was so electrifying, and having danced on the floor all night, and seeing the swirls and footprints we all left in the dust on the dance floor, and having seen and talked to so many people I knew from the dance scene and elsewhere, I didn’t want to leave. What had seemed an unfamiliar place at the beginning of the afternoon was now filled with friends, and the more time we spent dancing together the better we knew what this new space was and what we could do with it. While the old

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Ginny’s was gone, this new Ginny’s seemed to have the potential to become home again. Like the Broken Spoke and the White Horse, Ginny’s Little Longhorn – now the Little Longhorn Saloon – is a site where two-step is used to make place in Austin’s changing landscape. While dancers at the Broken Spoke use dance to remember roots at the expense of contemporary culture, and dancers at the White Horse eschew roots in favor of practices, dancers at the new Ginny’s attempt to both preserve roots and adapt as the city changes by making the dance floor their home. As the grand re-opening shows, a version of placemaking that emphasizes both roots and practices, where each shapes the other, is a kind of home-making that is difficult to do well: many dancers felt excluded by the renovation process, and the renovated venue itself suggests that the balance of power between dancers and tourists is tipping toward the tourists. But while dance does appear to be more commodified in the new venue, this commodification occurs in tandem with conscious efforts to integrate dancers into the new space. And, once the crowds were gone, dancers were able to start the process of creating a home out of the dance floor: together, they learned the new space and started to shape it around themselves. Since the re-opening, the new owners of the Little Longhorn Saloon have filled in the blank walls with photographs and posters and Texas flags and strung pickle lights across the ceiling beams, and the venue feels far less empty. And not every night is a dance night anymore, but when they book a good dance band, dancers still come out and dance.

Conclusion

At the Broken Spoke, the White Horse, and (Ginny’s) Little Longhorn Saloon, two-step is form of placemaking that has important implications for Austin’s changing urban landscape. Of course, these are not the only venues important to two-steppers, nor have they always been the most important. Nor, for that matter, are the politics of dance at these venues as homogeneous and static as they may

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seem here. On crowded nights at the Broken Spoke, round dancing gives way to spot dancing as couples jockey for space, and dancing at Ginny’s ranges from complicated semi-theatrical solo performances to a floor more crowded and chaotic than the White Horse on a Saturday night. Yet countless examples of the forms of placemaking I describe here occurred over the course of my study. The Broken Spoke, dwarfed by a massive multi-use building on either side, is a last holdout of “old Texas, real Texas” within the city limits, and though the weekends are filled with tourists, on weeknights your skirts should be long and your two-step round. The dance floor at the White Horse is unrestrained, and the dancing there is often a combination of highly-skilled spot dancing and drunken lurching, as dancers and drinkers all seek the “euphoric fellow feeling” of “keeping together in time.” And the dance floor at Ginny’s, while often surrounded by tourists with cell phones out, is, I think, one site where dancers might still be able to make, and keep, a place for themselves as the multi-use buildings and condo units rise all around them. While many dancers frequent all three venues, these three venues represent different ways of using dance to make places, and the regulars at each venue work to shape their home base around their particular understanding of dance and place. More broadly, these ongoing efforts to make and claim space for dancing in Austin’s changing landscape suggest that the local is constructed as much in response to a felt loss of place as it is in pursuit of the warmth and togetherness of the dance floor. Two-step has long been an attraction for cultural tourists seeking a bit of Texas in Austin, and interactions between insiders and outsiders have long shaped, and financially supported, Austin’s dance culture. But for many of the two- steppers in this study, placemaking is increasingly a matter of forcibly inscribing their presence on the landscape, of continually reconfiguring dance spaces to support the scene’s practices, norms, and values. Through their dancing, dancers reassert the power of place and the power of human communities to create place, whether at a long-established venue like the Broken Spoke or in the chaos and unpredictability of a dance event at the White Horse. Further, threatened by new

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faces populating the dance floor, new multi-use buildings dwarfing older vernacular architecture, new business practices threatening older models, and venue renovations erasing all trace of dancers, this embodied, emplaced local scene is often – but not exclusively – a conservative response to the globalization that these changes represent, a nostalgic way of holding on to what is rightfully theirs. I examine the complexities of dancers’ positioning more fully in the next chapter, where conflicts over race, ethnicity, and belonging at the White Horse show that local culture is shaped as much by global economical and cultural shifts as it is by the interaction of bodies on the dance floor.

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Chapter 3: Dancing Belonging on Austin’s East Side

It’s close to midnight on a Saturday night in the spring of 2012, just a few months after the White Horse opened across the street from Plaza Saltillo in Austin’s East Cesar Chavez neighborhood, and the venue is packed. I’ve been dancing since ten and am dripping with sweat, so I’ve come outside to chat with Rob and Graham, two of the bar’s black-clad, heavily tattooed doorguys. Both men are in their mid- 30s and, though they grew up in different parts of the country, they have enough in common that they’ve become fast friends: both come from working-class families and discovered punk rock at an early age, both are musicians, they’ve both suffered through bouts of homelessness and addiction, and they’ve both long identified as skinheads, but not – as Rob is quick to point out – the neo-Nazi kind. When I arrived at ten, just a couple of hours into their shift, they were already in high spirits, and now, a couple of hours and several shots later, their energy is infectious. They’ve been discussing Skrewdriver, a neo-Nazi band that they both listen to, and Rob is trying to convince Graham to do a Skrewdriver cover band as a joke, since, as he says, neither Graham nor Rob is racist. Graham, meanwhile, is trying to get Rob to do secret Nazi salutes: one hand raised in a tiny heil at the waist, an arm held straight out for just a moment too long before turning into a wave. The fact that most of this is lost on the much-younger tattooed hipsters and the older, more straight-laced dancers that make up the bar’s clientele tonight tickles them to no end. Rob and Graham are in the midst of a high-arm salute when two young men with dark skin and smooth Mayan features step up out of the dark and into the buzzing lights at the door. They are both dressed neatly, in faded jeans and square- toed boots and tight t-shirts with large lettering on the front, and both are doused in strong, clean-smelling cologne, and they both sport sheepish grins, like they are excited but know they shouldn’t be here. Rob asks to see their IDs, and after a moment of confusion, as neither speaks much English and Rob and Graham don’t

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speak Spanish, the guys pull out Mexican driver’s licenses and Graham waves them in. The smile is gone from his face. As soon as the door closes, I ask Rob what that was all about, and he says this happens a lot; they probably thought it was still La Trampa, the working-class Mexican bar that occupied this space before the White Horse, and they’re probably looking for whores. They’ll be back out in a minute. And sure enough, a few moments later the door opens and the two men emerge with perplexed looks on their faces. Not La Trampa? One asks. No, Rob says, Not La Trampa. It’s the White Horse now. The two men confer quizzically. White Horse, Graham says, a little louder, and he points up to the sign on the pole at the front of the building, where “The White Horse” is printed in a white western font and surrounded by blinking white lights like an old movie marquee. To my eyes, the similarity between this gesture and the ones he and Rob were practicing in jest a moment before is unmistakable. The men nod and walk off toward Sixth Street, phones in hand. As I watch them go, I realize that the word “white” in the bar’s new name marks not just a new venue, but a change in the race and ethnicity of its clientele as well. In East Cesar Chavez, a rapidly gentrifying, historically Mexican-American neighborhood on Austin’s East Side, social dance is an important site for constructing, communicating, and contesting belonging within gentrification. Although the East Side is home to many social dance communities, including those formed around salsa, cumbia, b-boying, hula hooping, burlesque, and free-form solo dancing, I focus here on those based on two-step and “Mexican” polka or conjunto as they are practiced at the White Horse, a honkytonk at the Northeast corner of the neighborhood under study. Unlike many social dances practiced on the East Side, two-step and polka are closely bound up with the construction of both a Texan identity and an East Austin one, so that to belong to one of these communities is to dance not just Texanness, but an East Austin variant of Texanness: to reveal through a kick of the foot or a rotation of the hips a deep, long-practiced knowledge of local socio-spatial politics. Further, as with many “folk” dances, two-step and polka

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dancers continually navigate the tension between social dance community and cultural commodity. In East Austin, where tense relations between gentrifiers and gentrified increasingly resemble those under settler colonialism, dancing these tensions means incorporating commodification and resistance into the embodied aesthetics of the dance.212 While white, middle-class two-steppers dance to alt- country honkytonk, and working-class, Tejano polka dancers dance to traditional conjunto, dancers from both groups intersperse their traditional movement repertoire with contemporary commentary on the class and racial politics of the changing East Austin landscape. Caught between these two camps, young, hip Texas Mexicans carve out a space for themselves at the White Horse that both feels like home and reveals the difficulties of belonging in a racially-charged gentrifying landscape.213 In dancing belonging, dancers from all three groups use embodied cultural practices to construct and reveal the complexities of gentrification in East Austin. The chapter begins with a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of dancing belonging and then traces it through three different manifestations of social dance in East Austin’s East Cesar Chavez neighborhood. As a concept that draws primarily on cultural geography, cultural studies, and social dance, dancing belonging has three major components: it is both embodied and emplaced; it is performative, so that aesthetics matter; and it is differential, and thus heavily dependent on fantasy for its construction. As a constitutive element of gentrification, dancing belonging has had a complex history in East Austin. First, an official attempt to use dancing belonging as a form of resistance is evident at Plaza

212 On settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism, see Lorenzo Veracini, “Introduction,” in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–15. 213 As I hope the chapter will make clear, these “hip” folks occupy complex terrain: born and raised in South Texas, they are proudly Texan AND proudly Mexican. In Austin’s cultural milieu, they differentiate themselves from working-class Tejanos by espousing the aesthetics, tastes, and lifestyles of the mobile creative class. They are also, unlike the two men in the intro to this chapter, American, not Mexican nationals. But in contrast to the influx of white, creative-class non-Texans, they claim a Texan or Texas-Mexican identity. These multiple identities highlight the racial politics of belonging in the two-step scene.

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Saltillo, a Mexican-style plaza whose designers attempted, but failed, to assert Mexican-American Austinites’ right to belong on the East Side by etching dancing Mexican-American bodies permanently into the landscape. Similarly, dancing belonging on a Wednesday night, when the White Horse’s hipster crowd two-steps drunkenly to the Cajun country sounds of Mayeaux and Broussard, is an exercise in co-optation. Dancing belonging in this case involves both appropriating Mexican- American cultural signifiers (to show allegiance to the “Original” East Side) and competently navigating the dance floor (to show a deep understanding of both two- step and the White Horse itself.) However, not everyone dancing at the White Horse is white. Unlike the Broken Spoke, where dancing is integrated into a re-membering of the plain white folk, the White Horse constitutes a safe space for a group of young, hip Texas Mexican dancers, many of whom hail from small towns near Corpus Christi in South Texas. These dancers integrate movements from the cumbia, conjunto, and two-step they learned as teens into their dancing, and they talk about the White Horse as home. For them, dancing belonging is a matter of integrating their South Texas roots and their identities as Texas Mexicans with their lives in Austin, and it is only possible at a new honkytonk on the historically Mexican- American East Side. Together, these three instances of dancing belonging on Austin’s East Side reveal that gentrification operates by a lopsided logic by which resistance by the gentrified is met with co-optation by the gentrifiers. At the level of the dancing body, gentrification enacts a politics of settler colonialism, but not one of erasure: through dance, Mexican-Americans and Texas-Mexicans provide the embodied performance of authenticity that makes the East Side so desirable to middle-class whites seeking “diversity” and “grit, “as well as an example of dancing belonging for the colonizers.

The Embodied Aesthetics of Gentrification Dancing belonging is a performative process that integrates felt personal attachments to place and community with the political boundary maintenance that

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separates “us” from “them.” Like other conceptions of terrestrial belonging, it links the affective human body with the social and geographic processes of inclusion and exclusion, so that the relationship between the individual and the community is foregrounded.214 Dancing belonging also relies heavily what Carrillo Rowe calls “differential belonging,” where belonging may be experienced and communicated differently by different people within the same sociospatial milieu.215 But the concept also adds to the study of belonging the unique characteristics of social dance, which include the attention to and politicization of embodied aesthetics; the understanding of performance as both a construction and a presentation of the competence of the self in the norms and techniques of the dance community; and the use of “muscular bonding” as a social glue that excludes as much as it includes. Dancing belonging has three main components. First, dancing belonging is both embodied and emplaced: it operates at the level of the affective human body, interacting with other affective bodies, in a socially-structured, relational, physical environment. Second, dancing belonging is performative in both the Butlerian and the Goffmanian sense, so that it concerns both the construction and the presentation of the self; to do it well requires both competence by the performer and acceptance by the group. And third, dancing belonging is differential and thus heavily dependent on fantasy: inclusions, exclusions, desires, projections, and erasures are all crucial to its construction. Dancing belonging thus draws attention to the micropolitical shifts and embodied resistances in the struggles over gentrification by taking aesthetics, performativity, and the mobile, dancing body into account. Because gentrification is a geographic process, dancing belonging focuses on the ways that affective, dancing bodies dance in place to create meaning. Within cultural geography, belonging is heavily dependent on both place and the body:

214 See especially Nira Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3 (2006): 197–214; Marco Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging - An Analytical Framework” (manuscript for article in Geography Compass, 2010); Tomaney, “Region and Place 2: Belonging.” 215 Aimee Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation.,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 15–37.

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Mike Savage locates its origins in “the embodied nature of our dispositions and the necessity of their territorial location.”216 Similarly, Nira Yuval-Davis and Marco Antonsich both divide belonging into two analytical categories, “place-belonging” and “politics of belonging,” where the first concerns “a personal, intimate feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place” and the second is “a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion.”217 To claim that ‘I belong here’ thus has both an embodied, affective component and a social, boundary-making component, and both are connected to place.218 Further, as Trudeau argues, “the politics of belonging (and exclusion)…play a significant role in the production of social spaces such as landscapes and place.”219 To belong in a place or to construct a landscape is to participate in ordering it, to determine which bodies belong and which do not – but not necessarily to actually exclude people, practices, or other worldviews: landscape can be a “method of exclusion due to its ability to be a text within which a variety of meanings can be scripted, maintained, or even hidden.”220 Thus Tim Cresswell’s “anachorism,” or being “out of place,” paradoxically shapes and strengthens what it means for a body to be “in place,” to belong there.221 In social dance communities, the act of dancing this belonging further refines the politics of the body-in-place. According to Julie Malnig, social dance communities are differentiated from other kinds of vernacular dance communities in that “[i]n social dancing, a sense of community often derives less from preexisting groups brought together by shared social and cultural interests than from a community created as a result of the dancing. Whether in cabarets of the 1910s or

216 Mike Savage, quoted in Tomaney, “Region and Place 2: Belonging,” 1–2. 217 Antonsich builds on Yuval-Davis’ original categories of “belonging” and “politics of belonging” by grounding them in place; see Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging - An Analytical Framework,” 1; Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” 197. 218 Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging - An Analytical Framework,” 1. 219 Daniel Trudeau, “Politics of Belonging in the Construction of Landscapes: Place-Making, Boundary-Drawing and Exclusion,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 3 (July 2006): 423. 220 Ibid., 437–438. 221 Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 102–104.

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house clubs of the 1990s, it is often the sheer physicality of the dancing itself, the energy of the surroundings, and the eclectic mix of individuals that bring diffuse groups of individuals together into a collective, social bond.”222 In other words, dancing together creates affective connections among dancers: dancing is a way of “doing belonging.”223 William McNeill’s concept of “muscular bonding,” which is “the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among nearly all participants in such exercises,” is similar in that it is the physical movement to music, not heritage or kinship, that brings people together and gives them that warm feeling of belonging.224 But dancing belonging is also about the social and geographic politics of aesthetics, about using the dancing body to create place or to claim the landscape for a particular group. Tim Cresswell argues that dancing, as a form of mobility, is about physical movement through space and about representations of that movement, but it is also “practiced, it is experienced, it is embodied;” it is “a way of being in the world.”225 Similarly, Norman Bryson argues that dance, like mobility, is “socially-structured movement,” where “although meaning arises through mobility, that mobility operates under close constraints” – individuals move their bodies through space, they dance, in ways that simultaneously reveal their own individual agency and the social norms and power structures in which they operate.226 In his study of the dance practices of working-class Mexican-Americans from South San Antonio, Jose Limon shows that the answer to the question of “Why do my people dance?” is not racial primitivity, but an embodied, community-oriented response to

222 Malnig, “Introduction,” 4–5. 223 Skrbis et al. credit Elspeth Probyn with turning belonging into a process; see Zlatko Skrbis, Loretta Baldassar, and Scott Poynting, “Introduction - Negotiating Belonging: Migrations and Generations,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2007): 261–69; Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). 224 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, 2. 225 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 3. 226 Bryson, “Cultural Studies and Dance History,” 58–59.

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the alienations of working-class life.227 Dancing belonging is thus just as much about dancing one’s sociospatial location as it is about forming affective connections. As Cresswell demonstrates in his study of mobility in early 20th century British Ballroom instructors’ attempts to eliminate “freak steps,” attempts to manage dancing belonging can often reveal precisely what they try to conceal – in this case, a desire to stamp out any suggestion of African-American spaces or bodies.228 Dancing belonging, then, constructs the dancing body-in-place as a site where differential belongings are constructed, communicated, and contested. In addition to being both embodied and emplaced, dancing belonging is performative, a process by which differential identities and social positions are enacted on the gentrifying landscape. Belonging can take many forms, ranging from the formal, abstract, seemingly stable forms of citizenship or church membership to the contingent, embodied politics of everyday life; but, as Yuval-Davis points out, “[e]ven in its most stable ‘primordial’ forms… belonging is always a dynamic process, not a reified fixity, which is only a naturalized construction of a particular hegemonic form of power relations.”229 Belonging can thus be interpreted as performative in the Butlerian sense, where belonging, like gender, is “performatively produced,” so that “the performativity of belonging ‘cites’ the norms that constitute or make present the ‘community or group as such. The repetition, sometimes ritualistic repetition, of these normalized codes makes material the belongings they purport to simply describe.”230 In other words, those who belong do not necessarily share some essential quality; instead, they are “doing belonging,”

227 Jose Limon, “The Native Dances,” in Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican- American South Texas (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 155. 228 Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor.” 229 Tovi Fenster, “Gender and the City: The Different Formations of Belonging,” in A Companion to Feminist Geography, ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, Blackwell Companions to Geography 6 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 242; Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” 199. 230 Vikki Bell, “Performativity and Belonging - An Introduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 3. Belonging via performative repetition is also investigated in Fortier, “Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging.” McNeill’s muscular bonding, discussed below, is also a form of bonding created through physical repetition; see McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.

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embodying and enacting the belonging self as they go.231 In social dance, belonging is also performative in the Goffmanian sense. Ben Malbon argues that belonging to a social dance community can best be understood “through fusing Goffman’s recognition of the role for territorializations and regionalizations with Butler’s notion of social identity and self being performed concurrently;” dancing belonging is thus as much about managing “the timings and spacings of bodies within social encounters,” or expressing the self in the dance floor dramaturgy of everyday life, as it is about constructing the self.232 Following Malbon, Tim Wall develops performance further into “competence,” which connects identity and belonging through dance practices; like Malbon, he examines “how dancing produces a construction of self around the oppositions of in-crowd/out-crowd, in the relations of the individual to the dance space and to other dancers, and to the performance of the dance itself.”233 Competence is not just about knowing the dance moves; it’s also about knowing the norms, references, and social practices of one’s own dance community, when and how to produce them, and what particular references mean. In a sense, to perform competence is to dance belonging. But in the complicated politics of a gentrifying landscape, performing competence is tricky business, and the performativity of dancing belonging is further complicated by the hybrid nature and geographic contingency of social dance itself. Building on the tension Bryson identifies between mobility and social structure in dance, Sherril Dodds locates social dance within the contemporary capitalist milieu, where popular culture is so pervasive that “it is almost impossible to see the ‘social’ and the ‘popular’ as discrete practices.”234 Dodds folds social dance into “popular dance” and uses the term to refer to “live participatory forms that

231 Skrbis et al. credit Elspeth Probyn with turning belonging into a process; see Skrbis, Baldassar, and Poynting, “Introduction - Negotiating Belonging: Migrations and Generations”; Probyn, Outside Belongings. 232 Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, 29. 233 Wall, “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965,” 189. 234 Sherril Dodds, Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 50.

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exist in mutual exchange with mediated and staged productions of dance.”235 While the political implication of this move – that social dancing is dominated by the popular – de-emphasizes both the sociality and the internal logics of local communities, the hybridity that Dodds identifies reveals social dance as a complex process with ties to a variety of external factors. Yet as Tim Wall argues, geographic contingency also shapes dance practices: in his study of teen dance practices in the 1950s, he shows that an integrated pop music culture did not translate to an integrated dance culture: teens still danced in segregated spaces, and black and white dance cultures developed somewhat independently until the early 1960s.236 Belonging is shaped as much by what happens off the dance floor as by what happens on it. Further, these complex external factors have internal corollaries within the dance community. As Cindy Garcia explains in her study of the “sequined and unsequined corporealities” in LA’s salsa communities, belonging is bound up in raced and classed expectations for dancing bodies: those who are high up in the salsa social hierarchy combine “studio” movement grammars with light skin and expensive sequined dance clothes, while working-class Latin American dancers, with their “street” moves and “street” clothes, are near the bottom; no sequined dancer in her study wants to be caught dancing “like a Mexican.”237 This understanding of social dance communities is similar to Doreen Massey’s understanding of place as an ongoing relational process where politics and power and being produced through interactions, particularly when hybridity (of dance) and multiplicity (of place) are read as interactions between unequal elements. As Massey argues, “the issue is one of power politics as refracted through and often actively manipulating space and place, not one of general ‘rules’ of space and place. For there are no such rules…. Rather, there are spatialised social practices and

235 Ibid. 236 Wall, “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965.” 237 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles.

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relations, and social power.”238 Social dance, by embodying these “spatialised social practices and relations” through performance, both constructs and reflects social difference, the power to determine who belongs and who does not. Finally, dancing belonging is differential, and thus it is supported by both fantasy and ideology; inclusions, exclusions, desires, projections, and erasures are all crucial to its construction. In the context of gentrification, where wealthier, middle class “gentrifiers” transform lower-class neighborhoods through an injection of capital, a change in demographics, and the importation of middle-class aesthetics, norms, behaviors, and uses of space, dancing belonging manifests as dancing different conceptions of the local. As discussed above, belonging is as much about exclusion as inclusion: Elspeth Probyn argues that belonging is constituted through “be-longing,” a longing to belong, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe argues that belonging is always “differential,” always political, and closely aligned with “the bounds of power.”239 In his analysis of the “network society,” Castells formulated differential belonging in terms of what Cresswell would later call the “politics of mobility” or a “kinetic hierarchy” between the upper and lower classes of society: the “[a]rticulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies….elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people’s life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history.”240 The “people,” in other words, are less mobile than the “elites” but also less abstract: they are “rooted in places,” tied to the memories and dwellings and experiential sensations of “home.” Both groups belong in the world in the sense that one class supports the other, but that belonging is clearly differential.

238 Massey, For Space, 166. 239 Probyn, Outside Belongings, 5; Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation.” 240 Tim Cresswell, “The Production of Mobilities at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam,” in On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 219–58; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 446. For a review of recent work on a related concept, “critical mobilities,” see Tim Cresswell, “Mobilities III: Moving On,” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 5 (2014): 712–21.

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In this formulation, the people are also both embodied and raced. As Richard Schein makes clear, race is a constitutive element of any American landscape, so that “all American landscapes can be seen through a lens of race, all American landscapes are racialized.”241 But for the “local” people – the “locals” – those most resolutely attached to place, to be racially other to the cosmopolitan elites, has important implications for the elite return to the local and the creation and celebration of local place in the neoliberal era.242 As Tomaney argues, “local attachments remain crucial in human life as people seek a way of ‘being at home’ in an instable world.”243 But if the people are already local, they are not the ones newly seeking local attachments; rather, this renewed interest in local belonging (and a parallel interest in “stillness” in mobility studies) is among those who can afford what Savage calls “elective belonging.” Drawing on Simmel’s “community of strangers,” Savage argues that the people who participate in elective belonging are “the kind of people who have made a choice to live in a particular area and can thereby, through their agency, avoid the fixity which comes from the habit of simply living where one always lives, or following one’s career slavishly so that one does not make a decision to place oneself anywhere.”244 Belonging, like place and landscape, are thus, for certain people in certain places, subjective. In the context of gentrification, the difficulty lies in the power relations between those who elect to settle in a place and those who live there because they cannot afford to move elsewhere. Differing conceptions of the uses and meanings of the place, along with differential access to capital, mean that those with choice can, and do, reshape the landscape to suit their worldview with their bodily practices, aesthetic preferences,

241 Richard H. Schein, “Race and Landscape in the United States,” in Landscape and Race in the United States, ed. Richard H. Schein (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. On recovering the racialized landscape and the struggle that went into its creation, see also Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 242 Dean MacCannell touches on this issue in his discussion of tourism in the modernist/ postindustrial age; see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 243 Tomaney, “Region and Place 2: Belonging,” 1. 244 Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst, Globalization and Belonging, 45.

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and ability to physically redesign the landscape to suit their tastes, needs, and values. However, while gentrifiers often reshape neighborhoods according to their own logic rather than that of the existing (or former residents), many urban “pioneers” move to lower-income neighborhoods not just in search of more affordable housing but also in pursuit of ethnic and racial diversity and the grit and grind of “authentic” local life. For Sharon Zukin, “authenticity” is a classed, consumption-oriented term closely tied to Castells’ local/elite divide: being able to deem a place “authentic” – or local, for that matter – requires knowledge of other places, the capital to access them, and the ability to evaluate them as products on a consumer market.245 Yet despite Zukin’s attempts to reclaim authenticity for the local “people,” she does little to escape the neoliberal mindset that development and gentrification is inevitable or that authenticity is a commodity. Similarly, Joshua Long, in his interview-based study of Austin’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, somewhat ironically constructs “austinticity” as the “unique cultural landscape of Austin [which] must be preserved in the face of invasive large-scale development and homogenization.”246 Long uses the term to refer to the nostalgia for a disappearing Austin that appears in so many of his interviews, most of which occur West of I-35, and to the tendency of many Austin residents to blame Californians for the city’s dramatic growth. Crucial here are the consumption-oriented perspective and the disconnect between the consumers and the consumed. According to Davison et al., in addition to different conceptions of place and landscape, often the gentrifiers and the gentrified also have radically different social networks, so that “existing gentrifiers,” attracted to underprivileged neighborhoods because of their “edginess… didn’t care about, or interact with, the vulnerable groups who were a major part of that edginess.”247 Elective belonging in a gentrifying neighborhood is

245 Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, xii. 246 Long, Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas, 92. 247 Gethin Davison, Kim Dovey, and Ian Woodcock, “‘Keeping Dalston Different’: Defending Place- Identity in East London,” Planning Theory & Practice 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 60.

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not just about creating a new landscape to suit the needs of the gentrifiers, but about retaining and supporting those elements – people, structures, practices, bodies – that support an aesthetic of edginess and grit. Thus, as Dixon & Durrheim point out, “our personal, intimate feeling ‘at home’ in a place may derive from ‘the comforting realization of others’ absence,’” but it is precisely the possibility of the presence of those others that satisfies the desire for the authentic.248 This desire for authentic local culture suggests that dancing belonging also relies on the concept of fantasy. As part of his larger project to introduce Freudian concepts to Marxism, Zizek argues that fantasy (Freud) and ideology (Marx) are the narrative constructs that support or give consistency to reality, masking the traumatic, but necessary, impossible kernel or symptom on which reality is built.249 In other words, fantasy and ideology create order and sense out of an otherwise fragmented existence, and people act according to these narrative constructs even though they know they are illusory. The kernel – the bodies, practices, and places of “authentic” Austin, metonymically transplanted into East Austin – need to remain on the landscape in some form both to legitimate gentrifiers’ fantasies of elective belonging as “natural” belonging and to create the aesthetic of “edginess” that signifies “real” Austin to them. Unlike the total erasure policies of mid-century urban renewal, this gentrification fantasy allows for a kind of sous-rature, an “always-already absent presence,” if in a dramatically altered, highly aestheticized, and contained form.250 Part of the process of sous-rature involves quietly dissolving the differences between history and nostalgia, so that newly constructed or reclaimed spaces can still be rooted in the past and thus “belong” to the “authentic,” pre-gentrification landscape, even though new residents may have little desire to

248 John Dixon and Kevin Durrheim, “Dislocating Identity: Desegregation and the Transformation of Place,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 24, no. 4 (2004): 455–73; Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging - An Analytical Framework.” 249 Slavoj Zizek, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 1994), 323. 250 Fanghanel derives sous-rature from Derrida and Spivak; see Alexandra Fanghanel, “Approaching/ Departure: Effacement, Erasure and ‘Undoing’ the Fear of Crime,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 3 (2014): 347.

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join existing communities. In this context, nostalgia operates as what Fredric Jameson calls a kind of “aesthetic colonization” “where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation.”251 Massey warns that nostalgia can be used to create a “false coherence” about a place “where the only real form of change resides in the tragedy of loss,” but it can just as easily be used to create a narrative of change and growth while obscuring the hegemonic forces that cause it.252 In gentrifying neighborhoods, dancing belonging can easily become more about aesthetics and gestures and spatio-cultural appropriations than about warm feelings toward home, family, community or even about drawing explicit bounds – after all, gentrifiers are often entering communities uninvited, crossing the very lines that were meant to keep people of color “contained” in previous eras of segregation. For gentrifiers, dancing belonging thus becomes a process of enacting fantasy on the landscape, and of incorporating the dancing bodies of the gentrified into a nostalgic sous-rature of authentic, pre-gentrified Austin life. Dancing belonging thus combines concepts from cultural geography, cultural studies, and social dance studies into a powerful analytic for examining the process of gentrification through social dance. Because it is embodied and emplaced, dancing belonging locates belonging in the affective human body, dancing with other affective bodies, in exchange with a socially-structured, relational, physical environment. Further, because dancing belonging is performative, it shows how social dancers communicate, construct, and contest the “spatialized social practices and relations” of gentrification through performance, and thereby both construct and reflect social difference in the gentrifying landscape. And because dancing belonging is differential and thus heavily dependent on fantasy, it reveals the inclusions, exclusions, desires, projections, and erasures that inform political

251 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke, 1991), 18. 252 Doreen Massey, “Places and Their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 182–93. See also Tomaney, “Region and Place 2: Belonging.”

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struggles over changes in the landscape. Below, I use dancing belonging to analyze three moments of social dance in East Cesar Chavez, a rapidly gentrifying, historically Mexican-American neighborhood on Austin’s East Side: the construction of Plaza Saltillo, a Mexican-style plaza and commuter rail stop that was completed in 1999; a typical weeknight at the White Horse; and the experiences of three hip Texas-Mexican dancers within the dance scene. Together, these three instances of dancing belonging on Austin’s East Side reveal that gentrification, at the level of the dancing body, operates by a lopsided logic by which resistance by the gentrified is met with co-optation and aestheticization by the gentrifiers.

You can’t have a Mexican Plaza without Mexicans It’s a sunny, humid Wednesday afternoon in mid-March, the first official day of this year’s SXSW, and Plaza Saltillo, the Mexican-style plaza on the southwest corner of 5th and Comal on Austin’s East Side, is a quiet oasis in the midst of chaos. Every 15 minutes, Austin’s little two-car commuter train clangs into the station flanking the north side of the Plaza, stalling traffic to let off fat suburbanites in their khakis and flip flops, harried women in service uniforms, hipsters in flat-brimmed hats and trendy sneakers, small knots of excited teens threading their way up to the day parties on East 6th Street. Across the street, the recently-vacated Arnold Oil site is crawling with front-end loaders, cranes, and drills, as hard-hatted workers set the foundation for a massive mixed-use development appropriately named “The Arnold.”253 Directly south of Plaza Saltillo, two sleepy-eyed pedicabbers at Dirtnail Pedicab scrape open the corrugated metal sheeting to reveal a wild profusion of

253 Bryce Meyers, “Transwestern Development Breaks Ground on 445,952-SF Apartment/Office Project in Austin,” CoStar Realty Information, Inc., February 17, 2015, http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Transwestern-Development-Breaks-Ground-on-445952-SF- Mixed-Use-Project-in-Austin/168934; “Downtown Development Digest: The Arnold,” Urbanspace: Real Estate + Interiors for Urban Lifestyles, February 19, 2015, http://www.urbanspacerealtors.com/blog/downtown-development-digest-the-arnold.html; Katie Friel, “East Sixth Ch-Ch-Changes: More Big Changes Coming to East Austin as Another Sixth Street Business Says Goodbye,” CultureMap Austin, February 14, 2015, sec. City Life, http://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/02-14-14-east-austin-sixth-street-arnold-oil-changes- eastside-village-office-building/.

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cabs, bike parts, furniture, and last night’s beer cans. Cobain-like vocals, backed by throbbing bass and guitar, compete with the clang of the trains, construction-site pounding, and the wail of downtown sirens for control over the local soundscape. Austin’s East Cesar Chavez neighborhood, long the home of the city’s Latino residents, is in the throes of a dramatic social and economic transformation, and Plaza Saltillo is right in the thick of it. Though it now mostly serves as a transit stop – a place to move through, rather than a place to be in – Plaza Saltillo was designed to be a site of community-in-place, of nostalgia for a lost cultural heritage, and of increased urban mobility. A close analysis of the plaza and the politics and history behind it reveals an attempt to use dance both to preserve a space for East Austin’s Mexican and Mexican-American residents and to attract tourists seeking performances of “authentic” Mexican culture. In the context of Austin’s rapidly gentrifying East Side, this attempt to inscribe dancing belonging in the East Austin landscape reveals the complex spatial, racial, and class-based politics involved in gentrification. Designed by East Austin architect Jose Contera and completed in 1999, Plaza Saltillo was conceived as a “community gathering spot, a tourist draw and a transit hub,” and the physical space reflects these goals.254 The Plaza sits on land donated by Capital Metro, the City of Austin’s Transit Authority, which purchased it as part of the old Southern Pacific railyard in 1987 with plans to develop the lot into a commuter rail corridor.255 It looks much as it did in the early plans, if a little worse for wear. It is an open, airy space, with a raised bandstand on one end, a small pavilion on the other, and an open space for dancing in front of the bandstand. Contera designed the bandstand to include a special surface for Mexican zapateras, folk dancers whose percussive movements provide their sonic accompaniment. The

254 David Matustik, “$542,244 Grant Breathes Reality into Plaza Saltillo,” Austin American-Statesman, May 25, 1994, sec. CITY/STATE. 255 Lauri Apple, “Here Comes the Neighborhood: Capital Metro’s Saltillo Project Is Just One (big) Piece of a Rapidly Changing Eastside Corridor,” The Austin Chronicle, June 27, 2003, sec. NEWS, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2003-06-27/165619/.

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arcade flanking the plaza to the south is light brick, with permanent vendor stalls and easy access to the parking spots directly adjacent. From the plaza, its terracotta roofs and curved entryways and windows are reminiscent of a traditional Mexican market, though the view from inside the arcade reveals that this is a façade: industrial steel beams, painted a faded turquoise, support the structure, and the roof is split at the apex, its back half made of painted corrugated steel. In front of the pavilion is a rose-colored Mexican-style fountain, its simple, curved lines and heavy concrete construction providing a visual focal point, despite its ill-repair. The arcades on the north side of the plaza are lighter and airier, with thin industrial steel beams holding curved arbors loaded with fragrant flowering vines and wrought iron benches beneath – these last were donated by the mayor of Saltillo, Coahuila, to make the plaza more like a traditional Spanish town center, though they are a bit too narrow to relax on comfortably.256 19th-century street lamps line both sides of the plaza. The Austin commuter rail runs along the plaza’s north side, its raised concrete platforms and sleek, urban-looking seating and signage contrasting sharply with the slightly down-at-heels 19th-century feel of the plaza proper, even though there is no architectural separation between the plaza dance floor and the train rails. This connection feels intentional: walking through one of the arcades or sitting on one of the benches, surrounded by sunshine and birds and the heavy floral scent of the arbors, is a welcome retreat from the high-tech, high-speed mobility just outside the plaza’s borders, yet intimately connected to it. As former mayor (then- City Council Member) Gus Garcia said in 1994, ‘It’s a project developed by the community, not the city…. It has good partnership quality.’257 Architecturally, Plaza Saltillo thus reveals an attempt by East Austinites to take control of, and even benefit from, Austin’s “growth” by combining space for community dance events and markets, a Mexican-influenced aesthetic, and transit access.

256 Michael Barnes, “A Plaza Apart,” Austin American-Statesman, August 24, 2010, sec. Lifestyle. 257 Matustik, “$542,244 Grant Breathes Reality into Plaza Saltillo.”

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This attempt to design “partnership” into the East Austin landscape represents only one of the many approaches to “growth” among East Austin activists, and as such it reveals the complicated political history of dancing belonging on the East Side. In 1993, Ole Mexico!, an East Austin business association, proposed that the city build a network of Mexican-style plazas throughout the East Side; according to Ole Mexico Chairwoman Cathy Revilla- Vasquez, this effort at creating a series of ethnic tourist districts could attract both tourist and resident dollars to East Side businesses.258 The first (and, as it turns out, the only) plaza would be Plaza Saltillo, named for Austin’s sister city in Coahuila, Mexico, and designed to anchor East Austin “economic revitalization” efforts by combining a celebration of Mexican heritage with a commuter-oriented rail station. The rail station helped the planners secure more than $500,000 of federal funding through ISTEA (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, a federal funding source for non-car-related transportation improvements).259 Using a combination of federal grants and city funding totaling over $1.7 million, Ole Mexico completed Plaza Saltillo in September 1999, and to celebrate, residents and tourists polka-ed to the “original East Side sound” of Johnny Degollado y su Conjunto, chowed down on chicken mole and tostadas, and heard speeches by dignitaries from Saltillo, Austin’s sister city in Coahuila, Mexico.260 Yet despite the Plaza’s business-oriented goals, Revilla-Vasquez also argued that these tourist-oriented Mexican-style plazas were important for preserving existing Mexican-American communities, saying that ‘[w]e’re very much aware that we run the risk of displacement and gentrification, so it was a matter of preservation for us to say we’re building a Mexican plaza, because you can’t have a

258 Suzanne Gamboa, “After a Long Wait, Community Embraces Plaza Saltillo,” Austin American- Statesman, September 12, 1999, sec. Metro/ State; Nina Reyes, “Council Accepts Funds for Plaza Saltillo,” Austin American-Statesman, October 20, 1995, sec. City/State. 259 Matustik, “$542,244 Grant Breathes Reality into Plaza Saltillo”; Scott Wright, “Plaza Saltillo Project Begins,” Austin American-Statesman, May 6, 1995, sec. City/State; Dylan Rivera, “Trails Could Turn Drivers into Bikers; Central Texas Communities Seek Federal Money for Transportation Alternatives, Historical Projects,” Austin American-Statesman, April 7, 1996, sec. Metro/State. 260 Gamboa, “After a Long Wait, Community Embraces Plaza Saltillo.”

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Mexican plaza without Mexicans.’261 For Revilla-Vasquez, preserving and marketing a space for dancing “Mexican” bodies would ensure that those bodies could continue to belong on the East Side as well as in the city of Austin more generally. Similarly, in his study of dance among working-class tejanos in South San Antonio, Jose Limon argues that associating dance with Texas-Mexican culture plays into white stereotypes of primitive, pleasure-seeking dancing Mexican bodies, but the question also allows for a deeper anthropological analysis of those dancing bodies as constituent elements of the broader capitalist system.262 For Limon, researching in the late 1970s, working-class Texas-Mexicans dance both for pleasure and to regain control over their bodies and their lives:

For these ‘natives’ under their own specie of now postcolonialism, a colonialism inflicting domination upon their bodies, it is precisely the formalized yet flexible, artful and complex if momentary control of their bodies that affords them an opportunity to control some aspect of their lives. Always, it is a complex control posited against a formless, unstable ‘outside’ that attempts the saturation of their very bodies.263

In other words, dancing belonging is a form of resistance that is conditioned by the dancers’ socioeconomic position at both the margins (of power) and the center (of capitalist production, through their labor;) to dance is to belong to both the dance community and the capitalist system. Insofar as gentrification is a form of colonization, the dancing bodies for whom Plaza Saltillo was designed serve a similar function: through dance, they create both community cohesion and a spectacle for outside eyes, so that cultural preservation is a matter of navigating differential belongings within a heritage tourism framework. Further, while other East Austin activists have approached “growth” more cautiously, concerned that turning community practices like social dance into spectacles of authenticity could lead to gentrification and displacement of East

261 Ibid. 262 Limon, “The Native Dances,” 155. 263 Ibid., 165.

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Austin residents, the City of Austin has been instrumental in preparing East Austin for redevelopment. Unlike Revilla-Vasquez, long-time East Austin activists like Susana Alamanza, founder of PODER, a Chicano environmentalist group, and Paul Hernandez, founder of Austin’s brown berets have long fought any and all development on the East Side that might raise property values, change the character of East Side neighborhoods, or price out existing residents. According to Paul Hernandez, SMART Safe, Mixed-Use, Accessible, Reasonably-Priced, Transit- Oriented) growth, of which Plaza Saltillo is a part, is “‘a modern land grant process. Before, Manifest Destiny took our properties; now it's Smart Growth. It's come in different phases and it's not just Anglos. It's been a process by which land has been declared blighted or is cheaper to buy. With a bit of humor, we have our own acronym for the SMART program. It's Send Minorities Across the River Today.’"264 And in the 1990s and early 2000s, Hernandez’ “bit of humor” was often realized. Despite vitriolic opposition from PODER and El Concilio (another activist group), the city approved dozens of new development projects on the East Side in the 1990s, including hotels, an entertainment center, an office complex, a large residential subdivision, and redevelopment of the 11th and 12th street corridors. 265 At the same time, the city also pressed forward with property foreclosures on the East Side: after decades of quietly looking the other way when poor landowners could not pay their property taxes, in 2001 20 East Side properties were sold at the Travis County Tax Auction.266

264 Ricardo Gandara, “An Evolution of East Austin: Higher-Income Whites and Hispanics Are Moving In, and They’re Bringing Change to the Vibrant Barrio,” Austin American-Statesman, October 6, 2002, sec. News. 265 Diana Dworin, “Momentum for Change Growing in East Austin; Revitalization Projects Taking Shape, but Some Worry Residents May Be Displaced,” Austin American-Statesman, February 19, 1996, sec. News. For more on the different East Austin advocacy groups, see Lauri Apple, “Twenty Years of Battle in the Barrio: ECC vs. El Concilio and ‘None of the Above,’” The Austin Chronicle, June 27, 2003, sec. NEWS, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2003-06-27/165621/; Gandara, “An Evolution of East Austin: Higher-Income Whites and Hispanics Are Moving In, and They’re Bringing Change to the Vibrant Barrio.” 266 Susan Smith, “East Austinites Losing Legacies at Tax Auctions,” Austin American-Statesman, June 9, 2001, sec. Metro/ State.

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In the late 1990s, partly thanks to agitation by East Austin activists, the City of Austin selected the East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood Planning Team (ECC) to be part of the Austin Neighborhood Planning Pilot Project, an attempt to include neighborhood residents in the growth planning process.267 The ECC, which included representatives from El Concilio as well as more moderate activists like Lori and Sabino Renteria, operated somewhat like the planners of Plaza Saltillo in that it attempted to manage growth rather than fighting it. Despite vicious infighting among planning team members, the ECC divided the neighborhood into functional zones: south of Cesar Chavez was to remain residential; from Cesar Chavez to 4th Street was reserved for “conditional uses,” which included businesses that were not bars, pawn shops, adult entertainment, and auto work; and the area between 4th Street and the alley below 7th Street would be an arts and entertainment district.268 Against the wishes of El Concilio, the group’s plan was approved in 2001, just two years after Plaza Saltillo was completed, partly because it retained existing property uses while allowing for growth. As the less conservative East Austin activists expected, the plan has since allowed for the development of East 6th Street into a vibrant, hipster-fueled entertainment district, a victory which, though it generates a strong tax base for the neighborhood, is bittersweet at best: attempts to manage growth has resulted in a dramatic shift in the character of the neighborhood. As Lori Renteria says, “I miss my little Tejano bars.”269 Many of the old bars remain, but the owners have changed and the clientele has changed with them, so that the working-class dancers expected to populate Plaza Saltillo are largely absent from the landscape. That East Austin activists would even consider working with developers to manage growth – that dancing belonging as negotiation, rather than outright

267 Mike Kanin, “Sixth Sense: Neighbors, Business Owners, and the City Are All Searching for the Future of East Sixth Street,” The Austin Chronicle, February 24, 2012, sec. NEWS, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/20120224/ sixthsense/. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid.

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resistance, could even be considered – is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the East Side. Plaza Saltillo is the product of generations of tension between “economic redevelopment” and anti-gentrification activism in East Austin that stem from a legacy of segregation dating back to the 1920s. In 1928, City planners, working to retain the “pastoral” feel of West Austin, created a Master Plan that relocated all segregated public facilities for African-Americans from the old freedman’s towns of Clarksville and Wheatsville to the Eastern side of East Avenue; as planned, nearly the entire African-American population had migrated east by 1932.270 The 1928 plan also relocated all industry to the East Side, but otherwise provided little zoning or municipal support to the East Austin residents. While the 1928 plan did not specifically target Latin Americans, they concentrated in East Austin as well, as lower wages and de facto segregation kept them from settling elsewhere.271 By the late 1940s, when the City began its urban renewal planning, the Mexican-American and African-American communities on the East Side were flourishing, but municipal neglect in East Austin was dramatically apparent, with unpaved roads, poorly maintained parks and sewage systems, few sidewalks, poor bus service and severely dilapidated housing.272 In the 1950s and 1960s, several urban renewal projects further marginalized East Side residents.273 Slum clearance

270 While institutional segregation was illegal at the time, segregated munucipal facilities like schools and parks were legal; the City worked with Dallas engineering firm Kock and Fowler to develop a plan that would move African-Americans out of their desirable downtown neighborhoods without violating constitutional law. See Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011,” 202–203. However, as Clark-Madison points out, “[w]e need to separate what ‘Clarksville’ symbolizes from what actually happened there. Not all African-Americans left Clarksville, and activists have since worked to bring black residents back; see Mike Clark-Madison, “The Clarksville Effect: Austin Tragedy or Neighborhood Victory?,” The Austin Chronicle, October 20, 1995, sec. NEWS, -, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/19951020/ 529941/. 271 Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011,” 204. 272 Ibid., 205. 273 David Harvey discusses modernist planning through architect Leon Krier, who argued that “modernist urban planning works mainly through monofunctional zoning. As a result, circulation of people between zones by way of artificial arteries becomes the central preoccupation of the planner, generating an urban pattern that is, in Krier’s judgement, ‘anti-ecological’ because it is wasteful of time, energy, and land.” This understanding of modernist planning contributed directly to mixed-use planning movements like New Urbanism, transit-oriented development, and Smart Growth. See

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was planned (but not realized) for the poorest, most densely populated portion of the East Side – the area bounded by 1st and 7th Streets to the South and North and by East Avenue and Loop 183 to the West and East, where Plaza Saltillo sits today – to make way for an industrial zone. Then, in 1962, I-35 was completed, its concrete ramps bisecting the city and serving as a massive barrier between East and West.274 That same year, in an effort to capture lucrative tourist dollars, the City Council and the Austin Chamber of Commerce began co-sponsoring the annual Austin Aqua Festival in an effort to attract both tourist dollars and long-term residents with the city’s natural beauty, abundance of water, and public character.275 Although Aqua Festivals in the 1970s began incorporating “ethnic” food, dances, and culture, East Austin participated in the festival mainly as a staging ground for motorboat races, which added insult to injury for East Side residents, already frustrated with poor living conditions and increasing white real estate development on the East Side. In 1978, just three years after the upper decks of I-35 were completed, the Austin chapter of the Brown Berets protested this appropriation of Latino space; police violence against leader Paul Hernandez was so widely televised that the motorboat races were moved west of I-35 the following year.276 Yet despite this victory, by the mid-1980s activists were fighting the appropriation of East Side space more directly, as both enterprising real estate developers and city officials saw potential in East Austin properties. In 1981, when

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 66–98. 274 Busch, “Entrepreneurial City: Race, the Environment, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 1945-2011,” 212, 215. 275 Ibid., 82. 276 Ibid., 96–98. Paul Hernandez founded the Austin chapter of the Brown Berets and has remained politically active, though a brain hemorrhage in 1993 and a back operation in 2008 have slowed him down significantly; see Suzannah Gonzales, “Paul Hernandez: A 60s Voice Grows Quiet,” Austin American-Statesman, April 5, 2008, FINAL edition, sec. MAIN. Activist Linda Evans was also involved in the speedboat protests and was later imprisoned for a bomb plot; she was released in the early 2000s with plans to go into the high-tech industry. See Gamino, “Unrepentant Radical; Freed from Prison by Bill Clinton.” On the political implications of the upper decks of I-35, see Dave Mann, “Born to Be Reviled: Easing on down the Road Will Be Tough for TxDOTs I-35 Expansion Plan,” The Austin Chronicle, September 20, 2002, sec. NEWS, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2002-09- 20/102944/.

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a developer announced plans to raze ten houses in the Guadalupe neighborhood, residents formed the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation and used a Community Development Block Grant to purchase the houses, renovate or rebuild them, and sell them to local residents for as little as $7,950 each – just a little over $20,000 in today’s dollars.277 While real estate agents like Brad Kittel and apartment complex managers like Al Stowell renovated East Side properties and marketed them to white, middle-class buyers to ‘clean up the 78722 ZIP code,’ other neighborhoods followed the Guadalupe group’s example, including the Blackland Neighborhood Development Group and Central Texas Mutual Housing.278 Modeled on the Clarksville Community Development Corp, these organizations both sold and rented properties targeted to families making 80% of the city’s mean income. By 2000, however, prices in the Guadalupe neighborhood had jumped 226% since 1995, and the GNDC was unable to find properties in its price range.279 Nor, increasingly, was Kittel, who has since moved on to new markets outside of Austin.280 In this context, Plaza Saltillo, with its Mexican/Spanish-inspired fountains, arcades, and open dance space, serves both as an assertion of Mexican- Americans’ right to belong on the East Side and a harbinger of gentrification, where dancing “Mexican” bodies are increasingly the stuff of romantic fantasy. And, perhaps as expected, despite planners’ good intentions, the plaza has rarely served as a gathering place for the area’s working-class Mexican-American residents outside of official functions. By the early 2000s, the plaza had fallen into disuse and disrepair, and in the mid-2000s it was the site of a large homeless camp.281 At the same time, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the city’s exploding population, combined with a national trend for young white professionals to choose

277 R. Michelle Breyer, “One Home at a Time; Amid Skyrocketing Prices, Development Group,” Austin American-Statesman, May 13, 2000, sec. Business. 278 Kay Longcope, “Restoring Soul; Home Broker Struggled to Stabilize the East Austin Area,” Austin American-Statesman, November 23, 1997, sec. Business; Breyer, “One Home at a Time; Amid Skyrocketing Prices, Development Group.” 279 Breyer, “One Home at a Time; Amid Skyrocketing Prices, Development Group.” 280 Longcope, “Restoring Soul; Home Broker Struggled to Stabilize the East Austin Area.” 281 Barnes, “A Plaza Apart.”

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dense, urban neighborhoods over suburban sprawl, means that businesses and long-time homeowners are increasingly getting priced out of properties in Austin’s downtown and central housing markets and looking to East Austin for cheaper properties, the “‘experience of diversity’ and ‘real’ Austin culture.”282 While Austin’s Mexican and Mexican-American residents are still concentrated on the East Side and are gaining representation in city politics, city planners continue to develop the East Side to appeal to these newcomers. In June 2014 Capital Metro awarded the contract for the development of the railyards adjoining Plaza Saltillo to Endeavor Real Estate, a corporate developer invested in SMART growth, rather than the Saltillo Collaborative, an organization of East Austin architects and city planners interested in preserving the character of the neighborhood.283 And Plaza Saltillo, with its elegant arcades and well-maintained central plaza, is now most often used for the HOPE Farmer’s market, which caters to a wealthier, more educated, whiter clientele drawn in by the romance of locavorism with a vaguely Mexican flavor. The Plaza is well suited to this function - after all, it was designed to support an open-air, tourist-oriented market – but Cathy Revilla-Vasquez’ claim that “you can’t have a Mexican plaza without Mexicans” rings true, and not in the way she intended. Few people feel comfortable dancing the polka at Plaza Saltillo, even when the farmer’s market books a traditional Mexican conjunto. It just doesn’t draw that kind of crowd.

Belonging in an East Austin Honkytonk It’s 10:00 on a drizzly Wednesday night in April, and my friend Jimmy and I are heading to the White Horse. We park by the Habitat for Humanity warehouse on a dark stretch of 4th street and walk north on Comal, where low-income housing and the ramshackle Dirtnail Pedicab Shop hold their ground against new high-end

282 Long, Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas, 9. 283 Amy Smith, “Plaza Saltillo Decision Comes Down to Money,” The Austin Chronicle, June 24, 2014, sec. newsdesk, http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2014-06-24/plaza-saltillo-decision- comes-down-to-money/.

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condos and the glistening, but empty, Plaza Saltillo rail station. The White Horse is just a block up, on the northwest corner of 5th and Comal, an old cinderblock building with a retro sign and strings of white lights over its busy, fenced-in patio. We crunch through the gravelly parking lot to the door, where I hug Thor, the sweet-faced, long-haired metalhead who’s watching the door tonight, and then we duck under the ENTRADA sign and head into the loud, dank, vomit-tinged air of the Horse. The bar is full and the space in front of the band is packed and swaying drunkenly to Mayeaux and Broussard, who are belting out swampy Cajun country from the tiny, red-lit stage. We head out onto the floor just as the band starts a Cajun two-step, and suddenly the dance space is packed full of drunken would-be lovers lurching, couples attempting to two-step or doing the country quickstep, girls waltzing together with drinks in their hands, single dancers swaying in packs of threes and fours. Trying to two-step in this chaos is like trying to pirouette in a mosh pit: I hit a woman in the head, Jimmy takes full-body blows from other dancers, our feet get stomped on, our turns get thwarted and I get fingers in the face at least once. Everyone is covered in sweat, everyone comments on how crazy it is and jokes about how it’s an “elbows out” kind of night, but no one seems to get angry: after all, this is what we’re all here for. This is dancing belonging on a typical weeknight at the White Horse. In country music lore, the 1930s Texas honky-tonk was a “hard, but instructive school” for early country musicians, and the noise, fights, booze and low pay of the “fightin’ and dancin’ clubs” are reflected in songs like “Honky Tonk Blues” and “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin,” both of which are staples of the Austin dance scene today.284 But dance historian Katrina Hazzard-Gordon locates the “honky-tonk” in the history of the African-American jook joint, whose “shoddy confines” constituted a protected place for African-Americans to eat, drink, gamble, and dance from the 1870s to at least the 1920s.285 As black populations migrated to cities for work, the

284 Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 155. 285 Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture, 84, 80.

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rural jook joint became the semi-urban honkytonk, which in turn became the urban after-hours joint.286 Honky-tonks were primarily black spaces but were open to everyone, and white patrons, fascinated with the dancing bodies of the primitive (poor, black) other, frequented these venues and incorporated their dances – the Charleston, the black bottom, the grind – into popular dance culture.287 The honkytonk thus has a long history of both romantic nostalgia and cultural appropriation, where dancing belonging is a performance of be-longing, a romantic desire to be “in place.” While the White Horse’s business model is, like many bars in Austin, based on low-priced, high-volume alcohol sales and a variety of spaces in which to sit, stand, and socialize, the heart of the venue is the performance of Texanness through music and dance, and the possibility that the average bar patron, with a few shots to quell their jitters, of course, can get out on the dance floor and join in the honky- tonkin’. The White Horse, in other words, is a site of dancing belonging. While dancing conjunto at the White Horse is an act of resistance, a close reading of the construction – both physical and imagined – of the venue as an authentic East Austin honkytonk, the porosity of the dance floor, and the competence of the hard-core dancers reveals that dancing belonging can be used as a tool of gentrification, too. The physical structure of the White Horse creates the ambience of an authentic East Austin honkytonk as the setting for dancing belonging. A relative newcomer to its historically working-class Mexican-American neighborhood, the White Horse opened its doors in December 2011. Owners Denis O’Donnell, Nathan Hill, and Marshall McHone signed their lease just three years after Richard Stockton opened Rio Rita and Shangri-La, the first two “hipster” venues on an otherwise Tejano strip, and in those intervening years the neighborhood made a dramatic shift, as little Tejano bars were retrofitted into hipster haunts or demolished by condo developers and replaced by food truck trailer parks.288 O’Donnell and Hill

286 Ibid., 94. 287 Ibid., 93. See also George-Graves, “‘Just Like Being at the Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance.” 288 Kanin, “Sixth Sense: Neighbors, Business Owners, and the City Are All Searching for the Future of East Sixth Street.”

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had been scouting the neighborhood for years and were particularly interested in the property at 5th and Comal: the wide, rectangular cinderblock building, with a door at the corner of one long side and the potential for a bar along the other, had good “flow;” Club La Trampa, the previous tenants, had kept the interior almost entirely open – beer was sold out of coolers along the back wall, and the “bar” was constructed of sawhorses and plywood – so the space was flexible, and the property had room to add an outdoor patio.289 When La Trampa’s owners, hit hard by rising property values on the East Side, a slowing in the construction industry after 2008, and the resultant decrease in their core clientele of working-class Mexican nationals, decided to move elsewhere, O’Donnell and Hill moved in.290 Along with friends and future employees, they painted the building dark brown inside and out, replaced the roof, built a long wooden bar along the entire back wall, filled half the space with custom tables and chairs, hung red lights behind the stage, and booked three months of their favorite honkytonk and roots acts.291 Later, as money permitted, they made other, pricier changes, including new air conditioners, a better sound system, and a fenced-in patio. But they left certain elements of the venue untouched, and these physical traces of the building’s previous tenants lend themselves to the White Horse’s construction as an authentic working-class East Side honkytonk. Despite the makeover, the place feels like a dive, dark and run-down: the tiny, plywood sound booth is original, if its thick brown paint is not; the ancient green-and-white linoleum on the stage is cracked through; and the red-and-black floor tiles are worn through in spots to reveal the concrete beneath. The bathrooms are tiny and barely functioning, even though the entire plumbing system backed up and had to be replaced just a few months after opening; the stench of vomit and piss, stale beer

289 Interview with Denis O’Donnell, September 5, 2014; interview with Nathan Hill, March 3, 2014; conversation with Howdy Darrell, October 2014. 290 Kanin, “Sixth Sense: Neighbors, Business Owners, and the City Are All Searching for the Future of East Sixth Street.” Also, interview with Denis O’Donnell, September 5, 2014. 291 Conversation with John Carbone, January 2015; conversation with Howdy Darrell, October 2014; conversation with Blue Mongeon, March 2015

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and sweat, just add to the romance of poverty, the sense that this is a real, authentic honkytonk. And in their décor, the owners play on the particular East Side association between poverty, Mexicanness and authenticity: La Trampa’s “ENTRADA” sign still hangs over the front door, and an old light-up sign behind the bar – a flea market find by Hill – reads “Schlitz es el gusto!” The Horse appears to be an authentic East Side honkytonk because it has appropriated and aestheticized working-class Tejano culture and preserved it in the structure of the bar. The White Horse’s status as an authentic East Austin honkytonk is also cemented in the lore that has grown up around it. Despite contributing to the change in the neighborhood, the owners prefer to frame their choice to locate on the East Side as a business decision, and owners and bar staff consistently draw on the building’s real and imagined history to prove that their honkytonk not only has a right to be there, but that the White Horse has always been there, that the place is just the latest incarnation of decades of working-class lives, layers of gritty memories: after all, as Lucy Lippard writes, “space combined with memory defines place.”292 Much of this lore concerns the violence, illegality, and poverty associated with the building’s previous tenants or with the roughness of the bar’s early days; it thus constructs a fantasy of belonging in place – a kind of dancing in its own right – that legitimizes the White Horse as a Texas honkytonk AND as a rightful East Side venue. This last is particularly important in the context of generations of anti- gentrification sentiment in East Austin. Built in the 1970s, the building has a storied past: prior to Club La Trampa, it housed a rough club called Daddy-O’s.293 According to this lore, Club La Trampa was a venue that catered to working-class Mexican nationals while serving as a front for drug cartel operations; drug sales, prostitution, and knife fights were common.

292 Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 9. 293 Peter Mongillo, “The White Horse Arrives,” Austin American-Statesman, August 21, 2012, sec. LIFESTYLE; Kanin, “Sixth Sense: Neighbors, Business Owners, and the City Are All Searching for the Future of East Sixth Street.”

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Traces of this “authentic” East Side history are imagined everywhere. In the early months of the club, when the ancient and poorly-maintained plumbing erupted and had to be replaced, the door guys and barbacks joked about a dead Mexican hooker being buried in the concrete floor; more recently, when O’Donnell spent an afternoon replacing the rotted drop ceiling tiles above the stage, Justin, one of the door guys, told me they’d found “all sorts of shit up there,” but when pressed, he winked and said “you don’t want to know.” Stories of violence in the early days of the bar’s existence seemed to draw a straight line connecting the Horse to the building’s former, more authentic tenants, and staff took pleasure in telling them. Rob, who worked as a door guy for the first year of the White Horse’s existence, kept a running list of people he hadn’t let in or had had to remove: “sketchy” men with felony cards; a man who sent two or three prostitutes in to work the bar while he waited outside, chain-smoking cigarettes; an ex-marine who, angry at being thrown out, returned to the bar with a butcher knife and used it to threaten the bartenders until Howdy, the bar’s fearless, five-foot-three booking agent, grabbed the hand with the knife and bent his arm around behind him so that the rest of the bar staff could subdue him and drag him off the property. Read in this context, certain of my own experiences there add to this picture of the White Horse: the night I was chatting with a fellow female grad student – both of us white and bespectacled – after hours, only to look up and realize the bar was full of Banditos who were drinking and roughhousing while the staff cleaned and restocked; the night my dance partner started a fight on the dance floor because another lead kept running into him and both were summarily removed; the night I was standing in line at the taco truck on the patio and struck up a conversation with a flirtatious Mexican-American man who was standing nonchalantly behind me, only to discover later that he was an important drug dealer on the East Side. Together, these stories add to the White Horse’s sense of authenticity as a working-class Texas dive, even if many of the stories are only loosely related to fact or heavily embellished; they add an aura of potential danger and excitement, as if something

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might happen. That many of the stories relate to the venue’s former Mexican and Mexican-American clientele, who are imaginatively associated with violence, prostitution, drugs, and other illegal acts, only seem to make the place more real, more authentically Austin: fantasies of Texanness and Texan honky-tonk culture become anchored in the racial and economic history of the East Side, so that dancing belonging is as much about dancing in place as it is about constructing an ideal honkytonk. The location and structure of the White Horse and the lore that envelops it play a crucial role in constructing the bar as an authentic East Austin honkytonk, one that belongs in both the mythic construct of the honkytonk and in the physical and cultural space of the East Side, but the dance floor at the White Horse is where belonging is most clearly negotiated. Unlike Texas dance halls, where the dance space and dancing dominate the structure and largely determine its shape and flow, the White Horse does not have a separate space for dancing, and the flow is designed to facilitate alcohol sales, not dancing.294 As owner Nathan Hill points out, there is no dance floor at the White Horse: people always complain to him about there not being enough room on the dance floor, he tells me, but “We’re a business, and we have to cater to young people who drink to make our money. We want both crowds, but we can either have two or four old school dance couples on the floor or lots of younger couples.”295 This point was underscored when Houston, one of the bouncers, was disciplined for trying to maintain separation between drinkers and dancers; while many dancers thanked him for keeping the floor clear, other bar patrons complained that his strategy of telling people that “if you’re not dancing, get the hell off the dance floor” made them feel unwelcome. Because there is “no dance floor,” the spatial boundaries between hard-core dancers and drinkers/ occasional dancers are porous, so that drinking a “two-step” – the White Horse $5 special of a

294 Kevin Alter, ed., Dance Halls of Central Texas: Pre-World War II Wooden Structures, Centerline 1 (Austin, TX: The Center For American Architecture and Design, The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, 2005). See also Folkins, Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit. 295 Interview with Nathan Hill, March 3, 2014.

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Lone Star and a shot of T.W. Samuels whiskey – and dancing a two-step both seem equally accessible. This porosity is key to dancing belonging at the White Horse because it makes the fantasy of belonging in an authentic East Austin honkytonk accessible to the average bar patron. And the White Horse draws its share of dancers; most nights, the space in front of the band is crowded with both hard-core dancers and regular folks. In some ways, this dance space functions like an early 20th century cabaret. As Julie Malnig writes,

The entire ambience of the cabaret fostered intimacy and connection with its tightly assembled tables, dimly lit chandeliers, and closely moving bodies. It was in the cabaret that the distinctly reciprocal relationship became established between exhibition ballroom dancers and the audience: after the professional teams performed, the public would rise to the dance floor and ‘perform’ their own versions.296

While the White Horse is far less controlled than these early cabarets, the fantasy that they represent – of becoming the “professional” ballroom dancer, or in this case, of belonging to the honkytonk underclass – is much like that enacted at the White Horse. At that April Mayeux and Broussard show, for instance, the hard-core dancers – those who are out dancing three to five nights a week – wove complicated swing, salsa, and conjunto moves into the basic “slow, slow, quick-quick” pattern, while many occasional dancers, some drawing on distant memories of learning two- step in school or at a dance hall in their hometown, others relying on liquid courage, many watching the “good” dancers’ feet for guidance, lurched out onto the floor in pairs, one set of hands clasped together and pointed up and out, the other around each other’s waists, smiles on their faces and knees knocking together as they tried to figure out the syncopated rhythm of the dance. Some dancers chose to dance alone or in groups or three or four, but in the context of the porous White Horse dance floor, they were all dancing belonging, and all of them belonged, or at least

296 Malnig, “Two-Stepping to Glory: Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility,” 282.

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thought they belonged, in the authentic East Side honkytonk that their rowdiness helped create. When there is no physical separation between hard-core dancers and occasional dancers, the fantasy of Texas being performed on stage and on the dance floor becomes accessible, be-longing becomes belonging, and experiencing the pleasure of muscular bonding, however drunkenly imagined, creates a repeat customer and solidifies the White Horse’s position as an authentic East Austin place.297 However, this porosity is, at least partially, an illusion, a fantasy, a projection of desires or be-longing onto a landscape that seems like it could satisfy those desires through dance. Despite promotions of two-step as an easy, accessible dance by tourist publications like Texas Highways, as Cresswell details in his discussion of “appropriate mobilities” on the early 20th century dance floor, there are appropriate and inappropriate mobilities – ways of moving one’s body through a socio-spatial context – on every dance floor, honkytonk dance floors included.298 And unlike competition two-steppers, “old-school” dancers, and ballroom dancers, who expect the space to conform to the dance, two-steppers at the White Horse adapt the dance to the space. Dancing belonging is thus not just about knowing steps or moves, but about knowing how to perform belonging in the crowded, unpredictable, dive-y dance space of an East Austin honkytonk. Many dancers who prefer the White Horse spend four, five, even six nights a week at the bar, slowly developing their own style based the contingencies of the space.299 Because the White Horse does

297 My reading here is influenced by cultural analyses of the communal power of disco dance; see Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2005), 206–215; Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle: 1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture, and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer.” 298 Weisman, “Texas Two-Step: The Iconic Dance-Step Keeps on Kickin’ in Halls and Honky-Tonks across the State”; Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor.” 299 Conversation with John Carbone, March 10, 2015; interview with Matt Jones, September 3, 2014. In his ethnography of b-boying and b-girling, Joe Schloss argues that good hip-hop dancers incorporate spatial contingencies into their dancing, and this attention to space is also part of contemporary Lindy Hoppers’ ethos. Both hip-hop and Lindy Hop draw their values from African- American dance practices; two-step in Austin is heavily indebted to Lindy Hop and swing dance. See Schloss, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York; Hancock, American Allegory:

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not have the long, rectangular floor that travelling dancers prefer, nor is the spotty linoleum flooring, worn smooth down to the concrete in spots, conducive to the smooth, sliding movements of traditional two-step, the movements are more about weight shift and communication than sliding. Like swing dancers, who took over Austin’s dance scene in the early 1990s and whose influence is still clearly felt, two- steppers at the White Horse do a “spot dance,” where two partners travel around one another but mostly stay in a single “spot” on the floor.300 Because these dancers are closely surrounded by dancers with a wide range of sobriety and dance skills, and thus cannot predict the movements of those dancers, the holds are often close, sexy, and heavily stylized when in closed position – after all, dancers may be in that position for a while on a crowded floor. Also, as in swing, the center of gravity is in the hips and the reflexes are quick, so that dancers can lead and follow into and out of open position quickly, to take advantage of openings in the crowd. And perhaps because the floor is crowded, or perhaps because so many of these younger dancers have backgrounds in conjunto and salsa, or perhaps simply because distinguishing oneself in a crowd of slow-movers requires visibility and contrast, the moves are high and flashy, with dancers constantly revolving around one another in tight circles. While older dancers often complain that dancing at the White Horse is too dangerous, too difficult, and too rowdy, these dancers relish the rowdiness and show that they belong by competently negotiating it. Like the professional ballroom dancers in early cabarets, these dancers directly participate in dancing belonging by performing their membership in the in-crowd in a highly visible way, while also fostering a fantasy of belonging among the aspiring dancers who share the floor. Dancing belonging operates through the White Horse’s physical structure, the stories surrounding it, and the (de)construction of the dance floor within it. The venue’s success among its target clientele relies on the layers of belonging embedded within it: its construction as an authentic honkytonk; its right to be on

Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination; Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, esp. 1–7. 300 Interview with Matt Jones, September 3, 2014.

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the East Side not as a gentrifying presence but in its own right; the fantasies of belonging that its porous dance floor allows; and the development of its own dance style among its regulars. But the venue’s target clientele, which seems generally to be young, white hipsters, is drastically different from the historically Mexican- American working-class composition of the surrounding neighborhood, and while the internal logic of the White Horse creates a sense of belonging among its clientele, the bar seems to many East Side residents to be part of the problem of gentrification, not a potential solution to it.

Dancing Like a Texan

Except we actually are at a honky-tonk. And listen to classic country. We aren’t hipsters. We’re Texan. - Sandra, dancer at the White Horse

Not everyone who dances at the White Horse is white, however. Unlike the Broken Spoke, where dancing is integrated into a re-membering of the plain white folk, the White Horse constitutes a safe space for a group of young, hip, Texas- Mexican dancers, many of whom hail from small towns in South Texas, to construct a racially hybrid Texas identity on the dance floor. These dancers, who call themselves the T-Birds, are skilled dancers who feel more at home at the White Horse than at other venues in Austin’s two-step scene, thanks to its welcoming dance floor culture, the nightly co-presence of T-Bird dancers, and the dense, dance- based social networks that make them feel like they belong. The warmth of the White Horse contrasts sharply with the more racially-charged atmosphere of the Broken Spoke, where dancers feel out of place both because they are Texas-Mexican and because they feel judged for their clothing and dance style; to an extent, belonging at the White Horse is contingent upon not belonging, or what Probyn calls be-longing, at other venues. At the White Horse, T-Bird dancers are free to reshape two-step so that it reflects not a whitened fantasy of Texas country music culture,

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but their own experiences as Texas-Mexican hipsters with roots in South Texas who dance in a mostly white scene in gentrifying East Austin. Their performances on the dance floor both construct and express this hybrid identity. I sat down to interview three members of the T-Birds, Tomas, Jorge, and Deirdre, in Fall of 2014; as their interviews suggest, dancing belonging at the White Horse is a complex negotiation of race, ethnicity, class, and the politics of dance. For many members of the T-Birds, the White Horse feels like home, a place where nightly physical co-presence, dense, dance-based social networks, and a welcoming dance floor culture contribute to warm feelings of belonging. Deirdre remembers the exact moment when she realized that the White Horse would be a place she could call home. Although Deirdre had lived in Austin for two and a half years when she started dancing, a grueling work schedule and a long-term boyfriend had left her with few social connections beyond a few friends she knew from her hometown. When she changed jobs and became single again, she slowly started going out and meeting people, and she discovered two-step, but “home” was still the place she was from, not the place she lived. One Monday evening at the White Horse, she was sitting alone at a table, wanting to dance but unsure of how to approach a dance floor full of strangers, when Tomas, by then a White Horse regular, walked up to her and said Hi, aren’t you Deirdre? She said yes, and he sat down and they chatted a bit, and then he asked her to dance and she said Oh my god yes! And as he led her out on the dance floor, she realized that

I can just – and again, not being someone who just went out on my own, especially on weeknights, I was like I can come here on my own and meet nice people, and not feel like – I felt like I had to get introduced to folks before I could like walk up and be like Hey would you like to dance? That concept was another weird thing for me – strangers would just come up to you and be like would you like to interact with me for five minutes? [laughs] You know? That’s kind of a strange thing – in most other social settings no one is like Come hang out with me for 5 minutes and then we’ll never talk again.

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For Deirdre, this interaction with Tomas suggested that the White Horse is a safe space, somewhere that she can “come here on my own and meet nice people” without needing the protection of a man or a friend. People like Tomas will come up and talk with her, ask her to dance with no ulterior motives or ill will. The conventions of the dance floor also contribute to this sense of safety: she can ask anyone to dance, and anyone can ask her to dance, and the other person will usually say yes, and there are no strings attached beyond the five minutes of the song, no minefield of sexual advances or awkward conversations to deal with as there might be in other interactions with strangers. At the White Horse, Deirdre could dance, meet new people, and let her guard down because the dance floor is a protected, welcoming space. That night, Tomas also introduced Deirdre to a few members of the T-Birds, and though she was still apprehensive about dancing with strangers, she accepted their invitations to dance. She had so much fun that night that she decided to come back another night, and then another: as she says, “I realized I could just come back again and see what another night is like. So I just started coming back, and through just being there I just started meeting everyone who’s in our little dance scene now.” As she became a regular who, like Tomas, Jorge, Angel, Jason, and other members of the T-Birds, spent nearly every night at the White Horse, Deirdre found herself surrounded by “all these people who just want to hang out and have a good time,” and for the first time in a long time she had a close, tight-knit group of friends that she could dance with, have family dinners with, and count on to be there for her night after night and week after week. Through dancing, Deirdre, who had previously only associated “home” with her hometown, found a new home at the White Horse:

This sounds cheesy, but the White Horse feels like home. I feel like I can go to the White Horse anytime and somebody I know is gonna be there, and there’s gonna be a band playing that I like and want to dance to.

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For Deirdre, the White Horse is a safe place where “somebody I know is gonna be there” no matter what time or day it is, where a good dance band will be playing and where she’ll always be able to dance. It is where she belongs, and where belonging is sustained through the continual co-presence of the regulars, her friends, who strengthen their bonds with one another just by “coming back” and interacting with one another socially and on the dance floor. Home is also, and most importantly, a place structured by and sustained through dancing the two-step, which in turn structures and sustains the “little dance scene” to which Deirdre now belongs. Tomas, the regular who introduced Deirdre to the T-Birds, also considers the White Horse to be home, though he is careful to associated himself not just with the bar, but with the dance community within it. In an interview, he tells me that

I call it ‘home.’ Heh. Everybody does. It’s home base, I mean it’s been tried and true to me for two years, since I first started going there…. You know you’re gonna run into people there that you know. And you know that’s another thing too. I had no fucking clue there was a dance community. That was completely new to me. That was a foreign thing to me: I’m just like look, people just get together and go dance? It reminded me of going in high school to these quinceaneras with my friends, like we get together, we go to a dance. Here, what’s different is that we don’t call each other up, we just know we’re gonna be there. We just KNOW. I’m like I don’t have to text you anymore. I don’t have to text Angel or Justin or any of my friends or anybody that I know that wants to go dance because I know they’re going to be there.

Like Deirdre, Tomas associates home with the knowledge that his friends will always be there and that he will always be able to dance: “[y]ou know you’re gonna run into people there that you know.” He also asserts that he belongs in this home- place because of the weeks and years he has spent here: “it’s been tried and true to me for two years, since I first started going there.” Like Deirdre, he is a regular who belongs at the White Horse because his ongoing, embodied presence there makes the place familiar, “tried and true.” But he also recognizes that the White Horse is the site of a burgeoning “dance community,” and that the comfort and familiarity he feels that the Horse is due to his membership in this community. In a way, the social

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connections within this community are even closer than those he had in South Texas where he grew up: unlike his high school friends who planned dance outings, he and the other dancers in the T-Birds are so in sync that “we don’t call each other up, we just know we’re gonna be there.” Here, safely ensconced in the warmth and interconnectivity of his dance community night after night, Tomas belongs. Further, this knowledge that he is one of the regular White Horse dancers, that dancing allows him to belong at the bar in ways that others do not, allows him to do things he would never do. In particular, he feels comfortable going to the bar alone because even when he’s sitting by himself, he is not alone:

I mean, I know that person over there; they’re in the middle of a conversation, I know them, I’ll probably see them later at the bar or whatever. I’m not gonna – I’m just sitting here. And then of course like a group of people I know would rush the door and of course I’d walk up and they’d just be like AHA!

For Tomas, as for Deirdre, the White Horse is home because dancing there promises deep social connections and the warmth of belonging to a tight-knit group of friends. They feel comfortable going to the bar by themselves because they can count on good friends, good music, and good dancing every night of the week. As soon as they step in the door and onto the dance floor, they are not alone. The warmth of home that Tomas and Deirdre attach to dancing at the White Horse reflect the embodied, emplaced nature of dancing belonging. The “little dance scene” to which they both belong relies, as does the broader two-step scene, on the nightly embodied co-presence of dancers on the dance floor, all dancing together and acting according to the shared conventions of the dance. On the porous dance floor of the White Horse, where anyone can participate in the fantasy of producing and consuming an East Austin variant of Texanness, this small group of dancers has created a community whose close emotional ties are intimately interwoven with the pleasures of dancing and dancing well together. Those ties are also based on the knowledge that they all share the same fascination with dancing – what Deirdre

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calls “the bug” – and that they will all be at the bar every night. For the T-Birds, dancing belonging is very much about the affective ties created by embodied co- presence on the dance floor, and the dance floor itself is a site for the production of the dance community they all hold so dear. However, because the majority of these dancers are Texas-Mexican men and women from South Texas who now identify as Austin hipsters, the location of their favorite venue in the overlapping contexts of both the broader dance scene and the rapidly gentrifying East Side suggests that belonging is also differential, and that exclusion is as important as inclusion to the construction of their dance community. As Deirdre and Jorge suggest, the White Horse – on any day but Sunday – constitutes a safe space for dancers who, like themselves, are neither white enough for the Broken Spoke nor “conservative” enough for the working-class Mexican-American crowd at Conjunto Los Pinkys. Where Deirdre finds the White Horse to be a welcoming place where she can “come here on my own and meet nice people,” she finds the crowd at the Broken Spoke to be older, “conservative,” and judgmental. She has only gone there a handful of times, and never alone – she always goes with Jorge – and every time,

I feel like when Jorge and I dance, um, I feel like we get looked at like we’re riffraff, which is the nicest way I can say it, people being like Who are these young kids with tattoos, you know what I mean? Um, you know, Here in our sacred place! ! Um, it’s – I don’t know if snobby is the right word to use there, but I feel like some of the folks that go there to dance see it as this like You should only be here if, you know, you are a certain caliber of dancer, you know, and REAL TEXAS honkytonk, and it’s like Hey, we’re just here to dance.

Unlike the dancers at the White Horse, who welcomed Deirdre in even when she was a complete stranger to the dance scene, the dancers at the Broken Spoke look down on her and Jorge as if they are “riffraff.” Deirdre partially attributes this attitude to their being “young kids with tattoos” – she is heavily tattooed, and Jorge has a large chest piece that is visible when he wears a tank top, as he often does on the dance floor. But Deirdre also suggests that perhaps she and Jorge are disrupting dancers’ efforts to re-member the “plain white folk” at the Broken Spoke. They are

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“just here to dance,” but the Spoke is a “sacred place” where only a “certain caliber of dancer,” those who are “REAL TEXAS honkytonk,” are welcome; dancing at the Spoke, as Deirdre recognizes, is as much about preserving an idealized, and whitened, version of Texas country music culture as it is about dancing. And with their brown skin, alt-country hipster attire, and tattoos, Jorge and Deirdre represent everything the Spoke dancers are trying to forget. Their dance style also seems to upset Spoke dancers:

It’s really great when you can kind of go and blow them out of the water, be like look at that behind the back twist! You know? I do like the fact that they take care of their musicians, the bands that play there seem to enjoy playing there. But as far as the folks that go there, you know, they’re either like - they seem really, really conservative maybe is the right word? in terms of their dancing style and what they expect of other people? And I feel like sometimes when we go there… some of the turns or things that we’ll do seem flashy to them, and like maybe they don’t appreciate that for whatever reason.

Deirdre is proud of her dance skills, and she enjoys showing them off, even in this unforgiving space: “it’s really great when you can kind of go and blow them out of the water, be like look at that behind the back twist!” But the dance style of the T- Birds is a spot dance developed on the chaotic, drunken floor of the White Horse, where, like generations of people of color before them, dancers have to wrest space from non-dancers through quick directional changes and distinguish themselves through complicated turns. At the Spoke, where dancers control the dance floor and pride themselves on gliding smoothly around it, the White Horse style seems “flashy” and out of place; it doesn’t belong here, and neither do the dancers practicing it. Jorge also recognizes the “conservative” atmosphere at the Broken Spoke, but where Deirdre senses ideology and the desire to preserve a fantasy, Jorge senses ethnic difference that he is determined to overcome. The first time he went to the Spoke, he says, “I felt out of place and it wasn’t my clothes – just being Hispanic, walking into a good old honkytonk like that was weird and jarring.” To Jorge, the

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Broken Spoke is a “good old honkytonk,” much like the “REAL TEXAS honkytonk” that Deirdre experiences, but Jorge feels the racial undertones more explicitly: “it wasn’t my clothes – just being Hispanic.” Jorge tells me that because he grew up in rural South Texas, he is well aware that his clothes and his tattoos are welcome in Austin but unappealing to older, conservative Texans, and he is used to that. What he wasn’t expecting was the overt racism: he finds it “weird and jarring.” In response, he decides to show off with his dancing, to show that if he does not belong at the Spoke, it is his choice, not theirs. The conservative dancers might look at him as an outsider when he walks into the dance hall,

but then they see you dance, and they’re cool. For me, the most satisfying thing for me out of all of this – the people I’ve met are great, but I like when people compliment me. At the Horse, everything impresses them, but my favorite compliments are the ones that come from the older couples and the old folks – they’ve been dancing for years and years and they’re just like You guys are really good. I like watching you dance – my favorite compliment from them.

For Jorge, dancing in the hostile territory of the Spoke, where his ethnicity automatically marks him as an outsider, is partly a matter of shoring up his outsider status: he doesn’t want the dancers at the Spoke to accept him into their world; he merely wants them to be “cool.” But it is also a matter of beating them at their own game, of appropriating and transforming their culture into something new and beautiful that they can still respect. At the White Horse, he is one of the best dancers, but, as he says, “everything impresses them.” More important to him is that long-time practitioners of the two-step, people who are set on integrating two-step into the preservation of a whitewashed country music culture, recognize his talent: “my favorite compliments are the ones that come from the older couples and the old folks – they’ve been dancing for years and years and they’re just like You guys are really good.” Jorge understands that belonging is differential, just as Deirdre understands that belonging is based at least partly on the embodied realization of a shared fantasy.

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But if Jorge doesn’t feel that he belongs at the Broken Spoke because he is not white enough, he also feels that he doesn’t quite belong at Texas-Mexican events, either. Every Sunday at the White Horse, Conjunto Los Pinkys, a multigenerational Texas-Mexican band, plays traditional conjunto music for a working-class Mexican- American crowd. The event was initially established to provide space for the Mexican-American residents of East Cesar Chavez to dance and reclaim the venue from the encroachment of gentrification, and its continued popularity suggests that regulars have made a home of this event just as the T-Birds has made a home of the other six nights a week. For Jorge, this event is like a re-enactment of growing up in South Texas:

Jason [another member of the T-Birds] said it was a little rougher than it is now on Sundays is now more of an older crowd, almost like the crowd you see at the Spoke but like Hispanic. Aunts and uncles and grandmas. Good for if you’re homesick. First time I walked in on a Sunday it was like a time warp back to South Texas. This is amazing. And the band’s really good, too – Los Pinkys are amazing.

At Conjunto Los Pinkys, Jorge finds a home-away-from-home that is rife with the complexities of being from one place but identifying with another. The crowd here is familiar in their conservatism, as they are “more of an older crowd, almost like the crowd you see at the Spoke.” They are also familiar in their ethnicity: because they are “Hispanic,” this older, conservative crowd is not anonymous, judgmental strangers but “aunts and uncles and grandmas,” people who might criticize the way he dresses or acts but who do so out of love rather than racism. Thus, the space is comfortable and familiar in its discomfort, “good for if you’re homesick” if – as it seems to be for Jorge – home is the place you are from but not necessarily the place you belong. Jorge further emphasizes the tension between the temporal and spatial nature of home when he says that “it was like a time warp back to South Texas.” South Texas is as much a time in his life as it is a geographical location and culture; belonging there, for him, is in the past. Although he appreciates the familiarity of a

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shared ethnic identity with the regulars at Conjunto Los Pinkys, he recognizes that even here, belonging is differential, as it is based on a network of social ties and an understanding of cultural norms and values that he no longer shares. For both Deirdre and Jorge, the welcoming atmosphere of the White Horse, the openness of its dance floor and the dense social networks that they’ve formed there through dance are structured just as much from without as from within. As their impressions of both the Broken Spoke and Conjunto Los Pinkys suggest, the feelings of belonging that they experience at the White Horse – on every day but Sunday – are structured at least as much by exclusion and judgment from the “conservative” crowds at other venues and events as they are by other members of the T-Birds. This exclusion is partly the result of a clash between what Annetta White, wife of Broken Spoke owner James White, calls “old Texas, real Texas” and hip, creative Austin.301 Deirdre’s vintage dresses, Jorge’s skinny jeans, their shared love of tattoos, and their flashy spot dance style are all part of a uniquely East Austin variant of country music culture, which means that Deirdre and Jorge represent a gentrifying Austin that dancers at the Broken Spoke and at Conjunto Los Pinkys are trying so hard to avoid. But this exclusion is also deeply intertwined with the racial politics of both gentrification and country music and with the complex identities that Deirdre and Jorge inhabit. Like the other members of the T-Birds, they identify as both Texas Mexicans and Austin hipsters, and they derive immense pleasure from dancing the two-step even as they are well aware of the whiteness embedded in the dance. For dancers inhabiting these hybrid identities, dancing belonging is differential, an ongoing negotiation among inclusions and exclusions, projections, fantasies, and racial ideologies. Crucially, unlike other two-step venues, the White Horse constitutes a safe space for these dancers to shape their hybrid identities through dance, and to create a dance scene that is as welcoming as other segments of the scene are closed. Dancing belonging at the White Horse is thus also performative in that dancers use dance to both construct and express these hybrid

301 Corcoran, “If It Ain’t Broken: Austin’s Legendary Broken Spoke Honky-Tonk Turns 50.”

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identities. In the context of the racial politics of Austin’s rapidly gentrifying East Side, where the White Horse trades on Mexicanness as a marker of authenticity and belonging in a previously working-class Mexican-American neighborhood, the members of the T-Birds work to show that they are neither dispossessed working- class Mexicans nor hipsters enjoying the spectacle of Texanness. They are, as Sandra points out at the beginning of this section, Texans. As Tomas suggests in the story of how he became a White Horse regular, the Texanness that they perform is a hybrid cultural form that knits together Texas-Mexican and Anglo cultural elements in a way that could only happen at the White Horse. Like most of the dancers in the T-Birds, Tomas grew up around country music, but he didn’t learn how to two-step until he started going to the White Horse. In his hometown of San Diego, a small town outside of Corpus Christi in South Texas, two- step was the stuff of gym class and country music was either George Jones or top 40, neither of which spoke to his experience in a largely Texas-Mexican community. At quinceaneras and school dances, dance halls and VFWs, he and his friends danced the cumbia, a South Texas dance that is related to the polka and the Cajun two-step, but with a distinctive cross-over step. When a friend invited him to the White Horse to dance to Mike and the Moonpies, who played a raucous Thursday night residency there for almost two years, Tomas danced so much that his clothes were drenched, and he had so much fun he returned the next week, and the next. When Leo Rondeau started playing a Wednesday night residency, his once a week ritual became twice a week, and in a few months he had added blues dancing to Mrs. Glass on Tuesdays and had lost 35 pounds. Like Deirdre, he found the White Horse to be welcoming in a way that country music and two-step previously hadn’t been. The racial binaries that had informed his dance experience in South Texas did not operate in the same way here: instead of excluding him, this crowd and this country music drew him in:

I just remember I was just like Wow, this is really good, I actually started listening to country. It took me to move to Austin to listen to country and

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appreciate. I mean, you can go back to, you know, like, George Jones and like, you know, Johnny Cash, we listened to that, but we didn’t grow up on that, we didn’t live it. This is what we’re living right now. This is what we’re accustomed to.

If country music and two-step were inaccessible markers of whiteness in South Texas, at the White Horse in Austin they are inseparable from Tomas’s everyday life. The experience of dancing at the White Horse makes country music sound “really good,” so good that he “actually started listening to country.” Tomas is careful to point out that this is not the country music of his youth: though he listened to classic country artists like George Jones and Johnny Cash, “we didn’t grow up on that, we didn’t live it.” Rather, the country music he listens to and dances to at the White Horse is “what we’re living right now. This is what we’re accustomed to.” And he rattles off artists to me: in addition to Mike and the Moonpies and Leo Rondeau, he listens to Whitey Morgan and the 78s, Daniel Romano, and JP Harris and the Tough Choices, all contemporary touring artists who cultivate urban, alt-country audiences by walking the line between hipster and honkytonk. While country music had seemed irrelevant or inaccessible to Tomas in South Texas, two-stepping at the White Horse allowed him to reclaim country music, albeit in a more malleable, more urban form, and to belong in country music culture on his own terms. Although Tomas is a skilled two-stepper and an avid alt-country fan, he has not given up the cumbia, nor does he have any interest in shedding his Texas-Mexican identity or his South Texas roots. And unlike the closed, tightly controlled floor at the Broken Spoke, the porous and largely unregulated floor at the White Horse allows him to integrate cumbia into his two-step. Tomas learned to two-step by watching other dancers at the White Horse and incorporating their moves and aesthetics into his dancing, but his footwork is slightly different – unlike many two- steppers, he steps on every beat. When I ask him about this, he says

what I do differently with my two-step is that I actually, this is what I found out by other people watching, my parents actually watched me two-step for

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the first time in a long time. And it’s just like, they’re like What are you doing with your feet in your two-step? And I’m like Well, I’m not really quick-quick slow. Well I’m doing… if you ever just at one point look down and look at what I’m doing with my footwork… what that footwork is, it’s the basic steps of cumbia.

Through his footwork, Tomas is performing a dance hybrid that reflects his own hybrid identity on the dance floor. This hybridity is partly constructed by observers, especially fellow cumbia and two-step dancers who point out that his dance style is a combination of the two dances: “this is what I found out by other people watching, my parents actually watched me two-step for the first time in a long time. And they’re like What are you doing with your feet in your two-step?” Because I have little experience with the cumbia, this hybridity was lost on me until he pointed it out: the people who recognize and appreciate it are those who share his hybrid identity and his experience in two different dance cultures. It is also an expression of Tomas’s own experience with navigating two different cultures; as Tomas says, “well, I’m not really quick-quick slow.” He is dancing with white two-steppers to country music, but he is not really one of them. And at the White Horse, among the other members of the T-Birds, Tomas’s adaptation of the two-step is not just welcomed, but celebrated as one possibility for incorporating Texas-Mexican dances and dancers into a predominantly white dance culture. As Tomas’s experience shows, for young, Texas-Mexican hipsters from South Texas, dancing belonging at the White Horse is not a matter of whitewashing their identities as Texans, as it might well be at the Broken Spoke, nor is it a matter of retrenching themselves in a wholly Texas-Mexican identity, as they would if they were to make their home at Conjunto Los Pinkys. Rather, it is a matter of performing themselves on the dance floor, and of using dance to both construct and express their hybrid identities. The porous, largely unpoliced dance floor at the White Horse is a space where dancers can reshape the two-step to incorporate not just quick directional changes to avoid drunks, but elements of conjunto, cumbia, salsa, swing, and other dances that better reflect who they are and who they want to

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be. As a result, the T-Birds’ two-step style is markedly different from the travelling two-step practiced at the Spoke and at many rural Hill Country dance halls. It is also more open to innovation. But while the White Horse is open to innovations on the dance floor in ways that other venues are not, its location on Austin’s East Side can also threaten the political potential of these hybrid Texan identities. Among the mostly white, young, hip crowd at the White Horse, many of whom are not familiar with (or interested in) the racial politics of Texas dance cultures, the members of the T-Birds, with their attractive features, distinct alt-country hipster style, and “flashy” dance moves, are often read as a younger, hipper version of the Spoke. The hours and months of careful political work by these dancers is lost on much of their audience. Deirdre, Tomas, Jorge, and other members of the T-Birds take advantage of the venue’s openness and its dance floor’s porosity to shape the two-step into a truly Texan dance. For these dancers, dancing at the White Horse is dancing belonging. The venue and its “little dance scene” feel like home, with all the warmth, embodied co-presence, dependability and close emotional ties that that word implies. The warm welcome of the White Horse – or at least the benign indifference that allows the T-Birds to form their own dance community – operates in stark contrast to the conservatism and felt racism at other venues and events, especially the Broken Spoke and, to a lesser extent, Conjunto Los Pinkys; dancing belonging is differential and is shaped as much by exclusion as by inclusion. Dancing belonging is also performative, in that dancers both shape and express themselves and their identities. For Texas-Mexican dancers attempting to express their right to belong - in the two-step scene, in Austin, in Texas – the performative aspect of dancing belonging is particularly crucial, as the dancing body is the site at which both cultural coherence and cultural difference are produced and thus where belonging is made. Yet while the White Horse provides space for the production of hybrid Texan identities, the venue is also part of the wave of gentrification on Austin’s East Side, and it tends to aestheticize Texas-Mexican and Mexican-American culture as

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signifiers of authenticity and belonging. The T-Birds may be welcome for their dancing, but as dancers who bridge the racial and cultural divides that currently characterize East Austin, there is also a danger that they, like the “ENTRADA” sign on the door and the legends of Mexican hookers circulated by the door guys, are key to making the White Horse feel both approachable and authentic to white patrons.

Conclusion In the rapidly transforming landscape of Austin’s East Cesar Chavez neighborhood, dancing belonging is at once a site of resistance via cultural solidarity and a commodification (and co-optation) of that resistance into “authenticity.” This commodification – whether intentional or no – is apparent at Plaza Saltillo, whose airy arcades, Mexican-inspired aesthetics, and easy transit access appeal more to middle-class whites seeking authenticity than to working-class Tejanos seeking safe, comfortable leisure space. It is also apparent on a weeknight at the White Horse, where dancing belonging is a matter of performing one’s knowledge of both the venue’s particular spatial challenges and the fantasy of its Mexican-American roots. And of course it is most apparent among the Texas-Mexican hipsters who call the White Horse home, even as their presence provides more fodder for the venue’s reputation as an “authentic” East Austin honkytonk. Paradoxically, to belong in this gentrifying landscape is to dance in the aesthetic language of the gentrified, who are compelled to dance as a matter of self-preservation, even as their dancing belonging obliterates their right to belong. In Austin, using dance to resist gentrification and claim ownership of the gentrifying landscape is difficult partly because of the neoliberal context in which the city is developing. As the history of anti-gentrification activism on the East Side makes clear, the City of Austin has historically sided with developers, white business owners, and middle-class “urban pioneers,” and against existing residents seeking to preserve their ways of life and the character of their neighborhoods. Attempts to help East Austin residents buy or rent affordable properties have generally been

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non-profit ventures that are lauded but underfunded by the City. Further, while dancing “Mexican” bodies are imaginatively encouraged as tourist spectacles or performances of authenticity, social dance as a component of working-class Tejano culture is marginalized, as dance events are held on off-nights and the people who attend them are increasingly priced out of their neighborhoods. As the spaces and demographics of the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood change, so do the neighborhood’s social dance practices; if the White Horse on a Wednesday night is any indication, the “Original East Side Sound” may be slowly morphing into a performance of Texanness, lightly qualified by “local” East Austin practices as imagined by dancers who complain about gentrification even as they actively participate in it. Dancing belonging certainly has radical political potential – after all, in gentrifying areas, the colonizers cannot exist without the colonized, and the necessity of their presence gives them great power – but the ease with which dance practices can be co-opted and transformed from resistance to “authenticity” indicates that a shift in strategy may be necessary if East Austin residents are going to continue to use embodiment to resist gentrification. Given these complications, dancing belonging in the context of gentrification also raises questions about the construction of local communities and local identities through two-step. Many of the inner workings of Austin’s dance scene are structured around mitigating the disruptive effects of non-dancers, so that to dance well is not just to reveal one’s own intimate knowledge of dance venues, behavioral expectations, and gender conventions, but also to use this knowledge to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, between those who belong and those who only belong. By making these distinctions, dancers shore up their membership in the dance scene and show that they belong here, that they are local to Austin. Yet at the White Horse, two-steppers are not the oppressed and displaced local residents but are themselves the oppressors, the colonizers, the gentrifiers who aestheticize and displace the locals. Even the Texas-Mexican dancers, caught between their Texan heritage and the whiteness of the imagined Texanness at the White Horse,

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contribute to these gentrification processes. The owners of the venue have made substantial efforts to include their working-class Mexican and Mexican-American neighbors at the White Horse, but the fact remains that the White Horse represents the very development and ethnic whitewashing that the ECC was trying so hard to prevent. That two-step can be an active force of gentrification while simultaneously claiming to be dispossessed by gentrifiers points to an inconsistency between the romanticized local in Austin’s honkytonks and dance halls and the often harsh realities of working class life in Austin. In chapter 4, I put this inconsistency into by examining Austin’s two-step scene through the concept of scale.

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Chapter 4: Tourists Behaving Badly in Honkytonks “I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be….” - Jack Kerouac302

When Cody and I finally arrive at the Dogwood, a small bar on the edge of the blocked-off South by Southwest festival space downtown, we find bassist Chris Rhoades out front smoking a cigarette, his thick black hair slicked back into a high pomp. I’m surprised and glad to see a familiar face in an unfamiliar landscape, and so is he. Chris tells us about the other gigs he has this week – he’s super excited about St. Vincent’s tomorrow, an all-day punk and rockabilly showcase in an empty lot next to a thrift store on South Congress. He’s playing bass with most of them. Tonight he’s on the inside stage with Rosie Flores, right after Chuck Mead finishes up on the outside stage. There are two stages? I ask him, eyeing the tiny building behind us. “Yeah, that way they can fit more bands in,” Chris says matter-of-factly. I ask him who else is playing, and he rattles off names: Los Lonely Boys, James McMurtry, Billy Joe Shaver, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, all roots acts that got tons of “buzz” during SXSW in the late 1990s but that are now far from the mainstream, their big-label record deals replaced with smaller “boutique” labels and PR firms, their headlining performances at the Continental Club replaced with half-hour daytime slots at a tiny venue at the edge of the fray. Chris crushes his cigarette on the sidewalk and heads inside to finish setting up, and Cody and I head over to the little patio, where an indifferent, muscle-bound guy in a black Dogwood t-shirt half- heartedly checks our IDs and waves us in. The patio is small and everything is beige, muted, earthy: beige stone walls, beige stone floor, beige stone bar rising up in the center of the space and blocking our view of the band. The place is packed – bands have been playing since 10:30am – but the crowd, like the space, is pleasant, indifferent, far from chic: folks in their 40s and 50s, frizzled blonde hair and black Harley shirts stretched over well-fed

302 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1976), 97.

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middle-aged bellies; lots of cargo shorts and white sneakers. We pick our way around beers and cigarettes and cameras and push through to a spot just a few rows back from the tiny stage where a three-piece led by Chuck Mead, in a beige shirt and round thick-framed John Lennon glasses with green lenses and a red neckerchief, is playing the upbeat, danceable rockabilly and western swing that made his former band, BR5-49, so famous in the late 1990s. Cody is bouncing around, he feels the music, he wants to dance but it’s so crowded, there’s no room, so we find a spot to the side of the stage where there’s a little open space because you can’t really hear the band. A few other dancers materialize from the crowd and follow us: Hunter, Kristen, Loretta, two lindy hoppers. We say hi, and then Cody and I break into a dance. At this point, the cameras fly out: a kid videos us, a pudgy man in blue with a large camera takes photos, a man sitting on the corner of the stage whips out his phone and takes a minute of video with his camera strangely close to my chest. The lindy hoppers dance too. One woman tries to jump in and dance with us solo, and one man starts moving his arms like Cody’s, imitating him in mock confusion, and Kristen and I accidentally bump into a guy and spill his beer, though he doesn’t look particularly upset. Here, in the deterritorialized festival space of SXSW, where neither the band nor the audience nor even the venue is part of Austin’s dance scene, the local dancers are part of the show. SXSW, the annual music festival that draws hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world to see thousands of bands playing in hundreds of venues, is a particularly tourist-filled, externally-focused event, and in the chaos of the festival, two-step is always a spectacle, a tiny moment of local expression in an otherwise placeless tourist space. But tourists are also part of the everyday two-step experience. Many Texans do not consider Austin to be in Texas per se, but for visitors and transplants from beyond the state lines, eating barbecue, buying boots, pearl snap shirts and Stetsons, and two-stepping in a real dance hall or honky-tonk all constitute a “pure Texas moment,” a surefire way for the uninitiated to

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experience true Texas culture the way the locals do.303 Because two-step serves as a point of contact between local dancers and cultural outsiders hailing from as far away as Australia and as nearby as the local indie rock scene, the dance reveals some of the ways in which tourists observe and participate in Austin’s local dance culture, as well as the various ways dancers and dance instructors perform for, interact with, and otherwise shape tourists’ experiences in dance halls and honkytonks. These interactions among dancers, tourists, and dancers-as-tourists also reveal a great deal about what it means to be “local” when an increasing number of people on the dance floor, and in Austin more generally, are not “from” here. In this context, while the local still operates as a place and a scene and a kind of belonging, it also functions as a geographic scale, constructed by and operating in relation to other geographic scales. The various relationships between tourism and two-step suggest that the local in contemporary Austin is shaped by both internal and external factors and operates within multiple spatial logics simultaneously. In this chapter, I examine interactions between and among tourists, dancers, dance instructors, and others in dance spaces both in and out of Austin. Throughout, I am attentive to the ways these interactions situate the local within different scalar epistemologies and the ways they contextualize, and thus give meaning to, the local as a geographic scale. I begin by locating the complexities of scalar production on Austin’s dance floors within existing debates regarding geographic scale. Currently, two competing scalar epistemologies exist, one based on a hierarchy of terrestrial units and the other based on practices and networks. In Austin, which is simultaneously the capital of Texas, the “Live Music Capital of the World,” and a living city with its own local norms and politics, these epistemologies coexist uncomfortably, each shaping and being shaped by the other through countless interactions among long-time locals, recent transplants, and tourists. The rest of the chapter examines this interaction-based production of scale in three

303 Weisman, “Texas Two-Step: The Iconic Dance-Step Keeps on Kickin’ in Halls and Honky-Tonks across the State.”

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different kinds of tourist-local interactions that occur in the honkytonks and dance halls in and around Austin. First, some tourists make little or no attempt to understand Austin’s local dance culture, and their interactions with dancers indicate a desire not to learn from local culture but to shape the local around the tourist’s desires. Whether earnest or ironic, these interactions reproduce a hierarchical politics of scale, in which the local plays a supporting role rather than a starring one. By contrast, interactions among dancers in tourist-centered dance halls, where nearly all of the dancers are from somewhere else, have the potential to produce a networked politics of scale. Here, geographic relationships exist only in the interactions and practices of the dancers; as the site of the production of scale, the local becomes a privileged, if deterritorialized, location. Finally, interactions among tourists and guides – those interpreters, translators, and dance instructors who mediate connections between tourists and locals – show how hierarchical and networked scalar epistemologies intersect to create new hybrid scalar forms and new hierarchical relationships. Together, these tourist-local interactions reveal how, when, and why these dance floor actors deploy different scalar logics, with an eye to both Austin’s location within different scalar epistemologies and the ways in which the production of scale on the ground shapes the local more generally.

Producing Scale on the Dance Floor In Austin, two-step is both a social dance and a tourist attraction: it is at once the backbone of Austin’s local dance scene, a component of a specifically Texan identity, and part of a package of symbols and practices that is marketed as “Texan” at local, state, national, and international scales. Thus, while the dance scene has a core of regulars who spend nearly every night learning the particularities of the city’s honkytonk dance floors and creating unique, situated knowledges around the local two-step variant, it also includes tourists from other scales and other scalar epistemologies who are attracted by the dance’s association with Texanness. The term “tourist” has many definitions, but among regular dancers, a tourist is an

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outsider who evinces only a superficial interest in the dance: they might go to a dance venue, take a dance class, or even attempt a turn around the dance floor, but they do so with little interest in learning how the dance culture works, and the disruptions they cause are mitigated only by the knowledge that they don’t intend to stay long. While individual tourists usually have only a minimal impact on the dancing, the continued presence of these outsiders is part of the fabric of Austin’s local dance culture, and interactions between dancers and tourists can reveal how the scale of the local is constructed and how it fits into broader scalar epistemologies. Although scale is usually interpreted as either hierarchical or network-based, examining the production of scale through two-step suggests that scale is complex and multiple, tied to both the “scalar fix” of an earlier iteration of capitalism and to newer, deterritorialized forms of spatial and social organization. The organization of social space is shifting away from terrestrially-based models, but hierarchical scale still has a big impact on many people’s lives. Hierarchical scale divides the world into a “nested hierarchy of differently sized and bounded spaces,” where smaller scales like the body, the household, and the community are terrestrially bound and physically located within larger scales like the state, the nation, and the world.304 The production of scale is a political process: as Neil Smith argues, “’scaling places’ – the establishment of geographical differences according to a metric of scales – etches a certain order of empowerment and containment into the geographical landscape.”305 Because the geographic units in a hierarchical framework are nested like so many Russian dolls, larger scales have some measure of power over the smaller scales within them. Laws made at the state level, for instance, apply to people living in the cities and towns within that state; decisions made at the corporate level apply to regional branches as well. Smaller scales thus contain elements of larger scales within them. By this logic, Austin is a

304 Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 416. See also Neil Smith, “Scale,” ed. Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, and Michael J. Watts, Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 305 Smith, “Scale.”

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place with its own local culture, laws, and population, but these are shaped and constrained, to an extent, by the broader Texan cultural and political processes in which it is situated. This relationship is most obvious with respect to politics: in the liberal capital of an otherwise conservative state, Austin residents recently saw funding to Planned Parenthood cut, gained the right to open carry, and failed to receive some federal health care benefits. Texas also shapes the city’s population: although the city has growing out-of-state and international in-migrations, the majority of people moving into the city still hail from Texas.306 Texas also influences those segments of the city’s tourism industry that trade on visitors’ interest in Texan culture, so that the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas State Capitol (15 feet taller than the national capitol) share a crowded field with attractions like the Broken Spoke, Allen’s Boots, Franklin’s barbecue, the healthy “Texana” section at Half Price Books, and a host of shops dedicated to pearl snaps, Wranglers, and Texas kitsch. While Austin is physically nested within Texas, this hierarchical politics of scale is (re)produced not only at the state level, but in the everyday interactions among newcomers, longtime residents, tourists, and an army of facilitators, translators, and guides both on and off the dance floor. As Marston et al write, “spatial scales do not… rest as fixed platforms for social activity and processes that connect up or down to other hierarchical levels, but are instead outcomes of those activities and processes, to which they in turn contribute through a spatially uneven and temporally unfolding dynamic.”307 Scale is not a given but a process, an “unfolding,” a becoming. As a becoming, the production and reproduction of this hierarchical relationship among different scalar units – what Neil Brenner calls the “politics of scale” – is based on the technologies and logics of industrial

306 Brian Kelsey, “Migration Matters: Is California Ruining Austin?,” CivicAnalytics, June 17, 2015, http://civicanalytics.com/migration-matters-is-california-ruining-austin/. 307 Sallie Marston, Keith Woodward, and John Paul Jones III, “Scale,” ed. Derek Gregory et al., Dictionary of Human Geography (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 665.

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capitalism.308 And even though newer technologies, especially mobile technologies and the internet, are slowly stretching, perforating, and reshaping the ways we think about spatial organization, the old terrestrial hierarchy shows remarkable staying power. Danny MacKinnon, following David Harvey, argues that this is partly due to a “scalar fix,” in which major institutions like corporations and national governments work together to maintain the politics of scale on which their power is based.309 Certainly, conservative Texans would have a vested interest in retaining control over the liberal upstart in their midst. But many people in Austin, especially those who have been living and dancing here for years, also have their own reasons to “lodge” themselves in Texas, especially as the city’s population becomes more cosmopolitan and its dance floors fill up with unfamiliar faces.310 Some, of course, are happy to capitalize on visitors’ interest in experiencing Texas within the city limits: they give tours of the capitol, bring friends to the Broken Spoke, don hats and boots and ride horses through downtown, and stock their shops with t-shirts and bumper stickers that say “Don’t Mess with Texas!” But others, especially folks who experience Austin’s growth and development as a loss rather than an opportunity, hold onto the “old Texas, real Texas” in Austin as a way of resisting that growth, or at least retaining some control over it. Despite the staying power of the old scalar fix, this retrenchment and the growing non-Texan population in the city suggest that there are also ways in which Austin is not in Texas, and instead belongs to a global network of neolocal, creative class cities. Unlike hierarchical scalar constructs, networks “span space rather than covering it,” so that geographical relationships are defined by affinities among

308 Neil Brenner, “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 4 (2001): 600. 309 MacKinnon is building on Brenner’s use of David Harvey’s concept of the scalar fix; see Danny MacKinnon, “Reconstructing Scale: Towards a New Scalar Politics,” Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 1 (2011): 25. 310 John Allen and Allan Cochrane, “Beyond the Territorial Fix: Regional Assemblages, Politics and Power,” Regional Studies 41, no. 9 (2007): 1161.

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network members rather than by geographic borders.311 These relationships are not fixed in a particular geographic location; instead, they are entirely contingent upon practices, interactions, and connections among the members of the network, and their location in space is often arbitrary. In Austin, this networked, deterritorialized politics of scale is evident in the newly omnipresent multi-use buildings in South and East Austin, the eerily corporate bohemian landscape of the Rainey Street entertainment district, and in the dramatic gap between housing prices in Austin and in other major Texas cities.312 All of these elements link Austin with the geographies and aesthetics of other cities in the network, so that tourists from those cities can feel at home in Austin as well. From this perspective, the two- step, boots, pearl snaps and country music in Austin are not a product of terrestrial rootedness in Texas but merely a means of differentiating this creative class city from other increasingly similar cities in the network. Austin’s inclusion in a network conception of scale is also evident in the curation of a “neolocal” culture that has more in common with cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon, than with Waco, Dallas, or Laredo. With its bike lanes, food trucks, large music scene and burgeoning tech sector, Austin is thoroughly interpenetrated by the cosmopolitanism that shapes it, and the neolocal is a romantic escape from the old scalar fix. According to Steven Schnell, neolocalism is not based on territorial attachments, nor does it lodge the local at the bottom of an increasingly powerful scalar hierarchy. Instead, the neolocal is made entirely of practices, “the conscious attempt of individuals and groups to establish, rebuild, and cultivate local ties, local identities, and increasingly, local

311 Leitner, “The Politics of Scale and Networks of Spatial Connectivity: Transnational Interurban Networks and the Rescaling of Political Governance in Europe,” 237. 312 Austin currently boasts the most expensive housing in Texas; the closest is Houston, with a median rent price of $910 for a one bedroom and $1,040 for a two-bedroom apartment. See Arden Ward, “How Austin’s Rent Prices Actually Compare to the Rest of the Nation,” CultureMap, December 5, 2014, http://austin.culturemap.com/news/real-estate/12-05-14-austin-rent-prices-average- expensive-apartments/; Tanvi Misra, “Mapping the Hourly Wage Needed to Rent a 2-Bedroom Apartment in Every U.S. State,” CityLab, May 27, 2015, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/05/mapping-the-hourly-wage-needed-to-rent-a-2- bedroom-apartment-in-every-us-state/394142/.

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economies.”313 Neolocalism has its own economic engines, values, and aesthetics: locally owned coffee shops, bars, boutiques; local breweries, community gardens, food co-ops; and local artists and musicians, all signifying that they belong to the same network with a carefully styled retro aesthetic.314 In Austin, neolocalism has long been sited in the city’s alternative country music culture. In the 1970s, when Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings spearheaded the outlaw country movement, and again in the 1990s, when Austin briefly became the center of a national roots revival, alt country simultaneously connected Austin to other hip, urban centers and helped the city differentiate itself on the global marketplace.315 Similarly, the contemporary two-step scene fosters interactions among tourists, locals, and transplants, many of whom are engaged in producing local dance culture that fits a cosmopolitan fantasy of Old Texas, or at least Old Austin. From this perspective, Austin is, in a sense, a cosmopolite’s localist fantasyland, made up largely of people who aren’t from here. A scalar epistemology based on horizontal differentiation and affinity rather than territorial hierarchy is not, however, free of politics. Nor, for that matter, has it completely supplanted the older scalar fix. While the emphasis on practices within the deterritorialized neolocal could lead to a democratic production of space, in Austin it reifies a growing divide between classes wherein, as Manuel Castells writes, “elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”316 There is a big difference between choosing to live locally and having to live locally, between consciously forming local connections and relying on those connections to survive. Those who can choose locality often experience the local as a “spatially bound, interpersonally networked subculture” whose conversational patterns, behavioral norms, and cosmopolitan tastes for sushi, yoga, locally-roasted coffee, and Apple products serve

313 Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” 56. 314 Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age.” 315 On Austin in the 1970s, see Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture; Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene. 316 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 445.

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to exclude as much as they include.317 Tourist and elite come to mean roughly the same thing. Meanwhile, the people who live locally out of necessity rather than choice form social networks that are based as much on terrestrial proximity as on affinity, usually only accessing the spaces of the elites as service workers. Austin’s honkytonks and dance halls constitute a point of contact between these two scalar epistemologies: many, though not all, dancers and musicians are college-educated and many of the students in my dance classes are relatively affluent, while venue employees, the people who make the scene work, tend to come from working-class backgrounds. The development of these two separate, but linked, networks suggests that networked space, or what Castells calls the “space of flows,” has yet to completely replace the terrestrial fixity of the “space of places.”318 Instead, as Leitner argues, “the actors occupying and maintaining particular nodes and links within any network remain situated in, and retain identity with, places – cities, regions, and nations.”319 Networks overlay terrestrial scalar units so that interactions among people from both worlds shape new, hybrid scalar formations that are at once embedded in local place and interconnected with other places across the globe. Among tourists, local dancers, and guides in Austin’s dance halls and honkytonks, the production of scale is thus a complex, hybrid, social process, and the dance floor is a contested site. While hierarchical scalar constructs and epistemologies locate two-step and the local dance scene within Texas, Austin is, for an increasing number of people, located not in Texas but within a global network of creative class cities. The city’s dance halls and honkytonks are thus simultaneously lodged in Texas and deterritorialized sites for the production of difference in a global marketplace. Further, although the dance scene is still relatively

317 Ibid., 446–447. 318 Ibid., 442–445. 319 Helga Leitner, Claire Pavlik, and Eric Sheppard, “Networks, Governance, and the Politics of Scale: Inter-Urban Networks and the European Union,” in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 297–298.

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heterogeneous, the honkytonk dance floor is increasingly constituted by mobile elites engaged in neolocalization, with working class “locals” serving supporting roles, so that different scalar epistemologies interpenetrate and shape one another. Here, interactions among people who come from different scalar constructs and different ways of interpreting sociospatial relationships produce scale in three ways. First, tourists with a hierarchical sense of scale often attempt to reproduce that hierarchy in interactions with local dancers by asserting their dominance over dancers’ bodies and the dance space. By contrast, in dance spaces like Luckenbach, where nearly everyone is a tourist, dancers renegotiate the politics of scale with each interaction, so that the production of scale is a matter of practices and tactical maneuverings in a horizontal field rather than a vertical one. And Third, the scale of the local is often a negotiation between these two different epistemologies, with guides, interpreters, and dance instructors mediating and translating the old scalar fix into the language of the space of flows.

The Best Souvenir Ever Two-step is the best souvenir ever that you can take home with you. - Keith Byrd, Austin tourism industry entrepreneur

Cody and I know that Chickenshit Bingo at the Little Longhorn on Sunday afternoons is a tourist affair that doesn’t attract many dancers, but we decide to go anyway because we noticed on Friday that Wyldwood Four (spelled Wlydwood Four on the Little Longhorn’s lightboard) would be playing and they’re one of our favorite bands to dance to. During the week, the Little Longhorn is the province of dancers, neighborhood regulars, and those few tourists who want to experience local country music culture on a weeknight; it’s often quiet, with a circle of smokers on white plastic lawn chairs in the parking lot out back and dancers and drinkers and musicians inside. But when I arrive a few minutes before the band is set to start and lock my bike to the only available bike parking, a pole in front of an abandoned building across the street from the bar, tents are already set up in the Little

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Longhorn’s parking lot and the spots in front of the bar and in the lots along Burnet are filling up and people are milling about. Their faces are unfamiliar, a few bikers, a few older folks, some rockabillies, and several younger people who look more hip than the bar’s usual crowd. No dancers. Cody, dressed in his usual dance uniform of dark dress slacks, a plaid button-down shirt and a light straw cowboy hat, is already inside when I walk up, providing a little local color and charm for the two drunk middle aged women from Alabama who are flirting with him. Although I’ve been coming to the Little Longhorn for a few years, this is only the second time I’ve been to Chickenshit Bingo, and I realize that Sunday is by far the venue’s busiest day of the week; catering to tourists by putting “local” “Texas” culture on stage allows them to support the slower nights dedicated to weekday regulars. A few minutes after four, the band launches into their first song, a great upbeat 50s R&B number with Bobby Marlar wailing into an old 50s style mic. His hair is slicked back and his jeans are cuffed, rockabilly style, but his Aztec print t- shirt looks like it came from Urban Outfitters, an oddly anachronistic contrast with the venue’s honkytonk vibe. The bar is already darker and warmer than at the grand re-opening a few months before, its blank white walls slowly filling back up with signed portraits of local musicians, memorabilia from owner Dale Watson’s storied music career, and numerous Texas flags. The crowd near the band is quiet, respectful, and they’ve kept a little half-moon of space open in front of the stage in case dancers arrive. Since there are no other dancers, Cody and I sit the first one out. But the second song is a slower dance number, and though there are still no other dancers, we can’t resist. We push through the crowd and into the open space and suddenly we are THE SHOW – all of the people who were watching the band are now watching us. I can feel their eyes boring into my back and see people craning their necks to watch us. A large man in a navy blue polo with a massive camera around his neck pushes through the crowd and into the space and starts photographing: Bobby’s face, the crowd, our feet. Even though I love this band and I love Cody’s jive dance style, I can’t let loose with so many eyes on me. Cody feels me

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stiffen, grins, and simplifies his moves for me, and I spend the entire song looking at the band, the wall, Cody’s face, anything but the crowd or the camera. I tell Cody We’re part of the show! And he laughs and says We’re at Ginny’s on a Sunday. What did you think was gonna happen? For some tourists of Austin’s dance halls and honkytonks, the local scale is fascinating but quaint in its parochialism, and the situated knowledges of its dancers are valuable only in their ability to reinforce the tourists’ cosmopolitan perspective. This perspective often comes out of an understanding of scale as hierarchical and territorially fixed, such that inhabitants of larger geographic units – the nation, the world – are more powerful than inhabitants of the city, the local, or the honkytonk, thanks to their broader, more cosmopolitan outlook. From this perspective, tourists are more cosmopolitan because life lived locally is only a small part of their overall experience; as outsiders, they can, at least in theory, think more broadly and objectively about the local. Proponents of this viewpoint often act as if these “nested” scalar units are real, material forces shaping their lives and structuring their world. Because hierarchical scale is a social construct, these tourists’ interactions with dancers and their behavior in tourist spaces reproduce this politics of scale on the dance floor. While tourists often insist on direct bodily contact with dancers, they do so with the understanding that there is a clear line between “us” and “them,” and that despite being outsiders, their role as tourist puts them in control. Whether they are watching dancers, dancing with them, taking pictures or asking dancers to “perform,” interactions between these tourists and dancers produces a local scale that is consistent with a hierarchical scalar epistemology. Although critics often argue that a “nested hierarchy of differently sized and bounded spaces” no longer adequately characterizes sociospatial relations, hierarchical scale still matters to many people and still informs their interactions

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with others, especially in tourist contexts.320 Although they appear to be fixed, hierarchical scales are the product of embodied and emplaced practices and interactions, so that the dance floor itself becomes a site for the production of scalar epistemologies, an “assemblage of central, regional, and local actors engaged in a complex set of political mobilizations at one point in time.”321 To an extent, the production of a hierarchical scalar epistemology is the project of tourism itself: as Dean MacCannell argues, tourism is about piecing together a metanarrative out of the discontinuities of modernity, and tourists have to fetishize, objectify, or otherwise depoliticize local cultures to fit them into the mold. 322 For these tourists, seeing and experiencing other cultures is only useful insofar as the “natives” reinforce the tourists’ belief in their own cultural superiority – a superiority derived not from the parochial perspective of the local people but from the cosmopolitan perspective that collecting many such experiences affords them.323 And if these tourists cannot immediately see their preferred worldview reflected in local practices, they attempt to shape or order the local scene so that it better fits their expectations and their understanding of the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan. Using their interactions with dancers, these tourists inscribe their desired politics of scale in the local dance space. This hierarchical politics of scale is tied to tourists’ search for authentic culture that is detached from the capitalist mode of production. Some tourists earnestly believe in the existence of an authentic anti-capitalist space. MacCannell argues that tourists seek to flesh out their cosmopolitan worldview by experiencing other cultures because “[f]or moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler life-

320 Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 422. 321 Allen and Cochrane, “Beyond the Territorial Fix: Regional Assemblages, Politics and Power,” 1171. 322 As tourists “scavenge the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic vision of other peoples and other places,” they “subordinate other peoples to [their]… values, industry and designs.” MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 13. 323 Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 195.

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styles.”324 Like folklorists before them, these tourists define local “authentic” cultures against their own, which seems placeless and bland in comparison to the color, intimacy, and truth of the “pre-modern” cultures they seek.325 In honkytonks and dance halls, they demand that this color and “authenticity” be accessible to them. If the dancers appear to be having fun, they want in; if the dancers appear to be paying too little attention to the tourists, they demand more and flashier dancing. Among these tourists, scale operates as a “socially constructed instrument of power which embodies and expresses the underlying power relations between actors.”326 And it is perhaps no accident that these scalar politics are enacted at the site of the dancing body: as Jane Desmond argues, social relations are both enacted and produced through the body, and not merely inscribed upon it.”327 Further, as J.K. Gibson-Graham points out, the attempts to dominate the local seem to “emanate from a bodily state, not simply a reasoned intellectual one.”328 In both its immediacy and its irreducibility, the dancing body is as threatening as it is attractive. When dancers seem to resist tourists’ desired politics of scale, they are the logical targets of those tourists’ attempts to reassert the dominance of their cosmopolitan perspective over the situated knowledges of the local. Other tourists approach the entire tourist experience in an ironized search for authenticity, but the scalar hierarchies embedded in their interactions with dancers are still evident. These “post-tourists” seek authentic local culture not earnestly but ironically, with the understanding that authenticity “is a cultural construct, a set of ideas about ‘natural’ states, experiences, or artifacts that are shaped by social structures and forces.”329 They believe that authenticity, especially

324 MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 3. 325 Ibid., 94. 326 MacKinnon, “Reconstructing Scale: Towards a New Scalar Politics,” 23–4. 327 Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” 33. 328 Gibson-Graham, “Beyond Global vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame,” 27. Cited in Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 11. 329 Post-tourism was first developed in Maxine Feifer, Going Places: The Ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day (New York: Macmillan, 1985). Discussed in John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd ed., Theory, Culture and Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE

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in the tourist context, is manufactured. Unlike tourists who believe that if they can only get on the dance floor, into the arms of a “real” dancer, or otherwise into the “back region” of a dance event, they will be able to access the truth and intimacy they seek, post-tourists are, as John Urry puts it, aware that “they are tourists and tourism is a series of games with multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist experience.”330 Post-tourists know that “the apparently authentic local entertainment is as socially contrived as the ethnic bar,” but rather than despair they will never find truly authentic culture, they take pleasure in the inauthenticity of the experience.331 But while they seem to understand the world in terms of undifferentiated surfaces – what Marston et al call a “flat ontology” – in interactions with local “performers,” tourists operating from this perspective often take pains to reify a hierarchical politics of scale. In honkytonks and dance halls, they act as if their consciously-constructed outsider perspective allows them to perceive inauthenticity in ways that insiders can’t, and they use the power of this knowledge to treat dancers as living props in the spectacle of authentic local culture. Like tourists in earnest pursuit of authentic local culture, these post-tourists use interactions with dancers to produce scalar inequalities on the dance floor. I experienced a “modern” tourist’s hierarchical concept of scale while dancing at the Little Longhorn in February 2014, just a few months after Dale Watson bought and renovated the venue, and Jorge, a fellow dancer, interacted with “post-modern” tourists at the White Horse. In both cases, tourists integrated local dancers into a politics of scale that privileged their cosmopolitan worldview over the situated knowledges of the local. One of my more egregious experiences with a modern tourist occurred at the Wyldwood Four show at the Little Longhorn. Despite my discomfort at being watched, Cody and I danced a few more songs that afternoon. Though the man with

Publications, Inc., 2011), 13. Authenticity, Ching and Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic - Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt country Music,” 9. 330 Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 113–114. 331 Ibid., 114.

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the camera wandered off, several of the people nearest the band were still watching us intently, so I was thankful when a middle-aged couple in Chuck Taylors and matching striped shirts, a tall thin woman with feathered blonde hair and a shorter man with a mustache, came in and joined us on the floor. When he threw her into a flip the crowd applauded, and Cody and I took the opportunity to go outside for some air. We pushed through the crowd to the back of the bar and out through the back door and into the parking lot, where dozens of people were chatting at picnic tables and in scattered clumps, beers in hand. We only stood alone for a moment when an older, overweight man in khaki shorts and a sweat-stained blue t-shirt came up to Cody and said something that sounded like “Cody Price Eastern Tennessee.” To our ears he had a thick, unfamiliar accent, so Cody said “Your name is Cody?” and the man said “Eastern Tennessee,” so Cody said again “your name is Cody?” “No,” the man grunted, “Price.” “My name is Cody,” Cody said. “Is that really your accent?” I asked. The man looked at me and then looked at Cody and then said something to the effect that he likes our dancing and his wife is enjoying watching us, and he would love to dance but he would only last for 15 seconds, and also he only knows the twist, he learned it in the army in Germany. Despite the accent, or perhaps because of it, he wanted us to know he’s worldly, and also a veteran, as though this cosmopolitanism were qualification enough to dance with one of the local women. It took us a while to get this information out, though, partly because the man was very drunk and partly because he had a thick accent and it was hard to understand him. We thanked him, and then he looked Cody in the eye and asked if I would dance with him for 15 seconds. Cody looked at me and chuckled and said sure, she’ll dance with you. As the object of exchange, I had no say in the matter. We tried to follow the man into the bar through the back door, but just then the band went on break and everyone inside was trying to get out as we were going in, so Cody and I walked around the building to the front. As soon as we stepped inside, the jukebox started up with Chubby Checker’s “Do the Twist” and Price grabbed me and led me into the twist, right up by the front door, next to the jukebox,

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and we danced, and I was thankful both that the twist is a noncontact dance and that my back was to the bar so that I couldn’t see if we had an audience or not. He grinned and sweated and bounced while his wife, a small woman with auburn hair and wire rimmed glasses, clapped and laughed and pointed, and his son took video of us with his iPhone, moving around us so that he could capture his dad dancing with this much younger woman, a real live dancer in a real live honkytonk, from all angles. For my dance partner and his family, this was clearly the ultimate tourist experience. After what seemed like an eternity of me twisting and the man bouncing around and sweating, I said Hey, I think you got your fifteen seconds in! And he stopped and thanked me and his son stopped recording, and then I politely asked him what he was doing in the army in Germany, and he told me he was guarding nuclear missiles that were aimed at Russia in the 1960s. He never knew who had the power to push the button or what they were for, but since he had joined the army prior to the draft, he got to go to Germany rather than Korea or Vietnam. He insisted that I look it up – the Colonel Mission, he says – and then watched carefully as I typed it into my phone. I may have been the better dancer, but his insistence that he traveled to get here, that I dance with him and that I look up and study his piece of American history all suggest that participation in American culture at a national, rather than a local, scale gives him a kind of power that I, a local dancer, do not have. Much of Price’s touristic desire is focused specifically on objectifying and possessing the dancing female body, if only for “fifteen seconds.” He begins by watching. Laura Mulvey argues that this relationship between male watcher and objectified female performer is mediated by the “determining male gaze,” which “projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly,” such that “[i]n their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with the appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that

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they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”332 The initial conversation among Price, Cody and I seems to fall out along these lines: he says he has been watching us, he likes our dancing, and his wife is enjoying watching us, too. Based on what he saw, he has determined that I am an object rather than a subject and asks Cody if he can dance with me, rather than asking me directly. But because he is a self-identified tourist (from Eastern Tennessee) in this tourist-dominated space, his male gaze is intertwined with the tourist gaze. According to John Urry, tourism is associated with “departure,” a “limited breaking with established routines and practices of everyday life and allowing one’s senses to engage with a set of stimuli that contrast with the everyday and mundane.”333 Tourists seek out and make sense of this “departure” through the tourist gaze, which, like the male gaze, is a “performance that orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world.”334 Also like the male gaze, the tourist gaze shores up power by “making a fetish of the work of others, by transforming it into an ‘amusement,’” a depoliticized commodity rather than a living set of social relations.335 This move also constructs the tourist, rather than the local people, as the ordering subject, the person who, because he is looking in at local culture from the outside and thus has “direct access to the modern consciousness or ‘world view,’” is more powerful, because operating at a broader scale gives them access to more knowledge and more power. As both a tourist and a man, Price commodifies and disempowers a dancing female body by watching me dance and using the gaze to fit me into a male-dominated worldview. And at an event that is both designed for and shaped by tourists interested in experiencing “local” culture, his gaze is arguably the dominant one. That he acts on the gender politics that he constructs through the male tourist gaze suggests that he is not satisfied with just looking; he also wants to participate, to touch. Like Mulvey, Urry argues that the gaze mediates a relationship

332 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 333 Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3. 334 Ibid., 2. 335 MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 6.

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between gazer and gazee such that both are implicated in an “ongoing and systematic set of social and physical relations.”336 And the tourist’s decision to manifest those imagined relations by commandeering the body of a local woman reflects the belief that they, as ordering subject, have a right to do so. When Price asked Cody if he could dance with me and then, as soon as I walked into the building, grabbed and danced with me while his wife watched and his son videoed the ordeal, he was acting out the power relations he imagined while watching: he, the male tourist, with his cosmopolitan viewpoint, was integrating me into his narrative of how the world works and where he and I fit into it. That he wanted to do a dance of his choosing, the twist, and not the dance he’d been watching us do, further indicated his desire to shape his experience at the Little Longhorn into a coherent narrative of his own creation. And his ability to shape the touristic experience to fit his expectations is crucial to his pleasure. Doing the twist to Chubby Checker in front of an old jukebox in an Austin honkytonk seemed to entertain him to no end: he jumped and bounced and twisted and sweated and seemed genuinely glad to have this experience. It also allowed him to go beyond the gaze and engage with local culture more directly. According to MacCannell, tourists want a “deeper involvement with society and culture to some degree; it’s a basic component of their motivation to travel” beyond the limits of their everyday geographies.337 And dancing in particular, with its emphasis on embodied co- presence and its potential for muscular bonding, allows for this “deeper involvement” with another culture in a very real and immediate way, at the scale of the human body. Yet unlike many members of the local dance scene, dancing for Price is not a matter of total immersion, of creating a sense of belonging with a group of people. It is only temporary, as he’s just visiting, and he spends our interaction controlling the experience rather than giving himself up to it. As a “local” woman, it becomes my job to provide him with the experience he desires.

336 Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 17. 337 MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 10.

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This objectification of female dancers through the tourist gaze and its accompanying politics is relatively common in Austin. Tourists most frequently perform this operation through photography. Once at the White Horse, for instance, a group of women posed for a photograph in the middle of the dance floor in the middle of a song and the photographer took photo after photo with a flash directed at the dance floor, but when I asked them to stop because they were blinding the dancers they told me, in no uncertain terms, to fuck myself. For them, getting the perfect photo with the dancers as a backdrop was more important than respecting the dancers’ space. A similar incident happened at the Continental Club. As a new dancer, I was dancing with Don, and halfway through the song, we noticed a series of camera flashes at the edge of the dance floor. When I looked over, Alex, a female dancer about my age, was arguing with a man with a large camera, who continued to take photos of her even though she asked him to stop. The man reached out to grab her and suddenly I was alone on the dance floor, Alex was behind the bar, and Don had the guy on the ground and was threatening to knock him out if he ever touched Alex again. The band kept playing. The security guys removed the man with the camera, Don came back and we resumed dancing, though he was visibly shaken: the man had insisted that it was his right to take photos of whatever he pleased, even if it meant going against the wishes of the dancers. And at the end of one of my dance classes at the White Horse, a young man with a Go-Pro attached to a selfie stick asked if he could dance with me and film the experience. I agreed – he was from Brazil and was making a video of his travels through the United States, and he seemed nice enough – and we danced a song made doubly awkward by his inexpert steps and the Go-Pro held between us. In each case, as with Price, the dancers are more important for the image of Texanness that they represent than for the human connections they might make with the tourists who watch, photograph, and touch them. This uneven tourist-local host relationship is not limited to men objectifying women, nor to tourists who have traveled a great distance to be in an Austin

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honkytonk nor even to tourists who are interested in integrating local dancers into a modern metanarrative. Jorge, who was a singer in Austin’s local indie music scene before he started two-stepping, says that sometimes people from his old scene come to the White Horse specifically to watch him dance and to take pictures and video of the experience. As he said in our interview:

J: But you know, they want to take pictures and videos of like their friends dancing with people, you know. So it is, kind of like I said it’s more of a novelty for people when they come in to the White Horse, because they get to watch the band, and like, you know, Look at all these cowboys and half of them aren’t really cowboys, they just have the hat on, you know. Ah… and you know and then also like yeah, seeing people dance. Like I’ve had even friends of mine that know I go there quite a bit and they’ll just come one random night and be like Hey when you show up, I’ll bring you some friends so you should dance.

K: Wait, to watch you?

J : Right, just to watch - just to watch me dance.

K: that’s weird.

J: It’s super weird. Yeah. They’ll be at Yellow Jacket and they’re like Hey, are you at the Horse? I’m like Yeah, I’m just hanging out. And they’re like alright, when we come in - and then like you know say it’s a song I really don’t care for, and they’re like Yeah, but you should dance. And I was like, But I don’t want to dance - yeah, exactly. Just like C’mon monkey, and like what - what do you want me to do? Yeah, so, I think it’s a novelty, it is a form of entertainment, you know. just the atmosphere, the dancers, and, you know. like I said, people want to get video and get a picture taken, you know, show that they were in a honky-tonk, that’s kind of - it. It’s weird. I don’t get it.

Here, the “tourists,” who are members of his old scene, are interested in Jorge not because they think he embodies authentic local culture, but because they see him as a performer, a member of a farcical scene that produces inauthentic culture. From Jorge’s perspective, they treat the White Horse as “a novelty… a form of entertainment,” and an artificial one at that: “Look at all these cowboys and half of them aren’t really cowboys, they just have the hat on.” To these onlookers, the

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dancers are “all hat, no cattle,” playing at Texan identity but with nothing to back it up. Unlike Price, these tourists are post-tourists; they see all tourist experiences as inauthentic, and they find a perverse pleasure in the “multiplicity of tourist games.”338 They know that there is no authentic tourist experience, that the two- stepping at the White Horse is not “authentic” “Texas” culture, and they want to enjoy it in all its kitschy, obviously-constructed glory. Yet while a post-tourist attitude could lead to a more egalitarian relationship between dancers and tourists, in Jorge’s case his “friends” use it to objectify him, along with other dancers, as members of this “novelty” world. They act as if they can see what Jorge cannot: that dancing at the White Horse is a farce, a performance, a facsimile, such that the only appropriate response to it is to treat it as superficial, lacking the depth complexity of an “authentic” space. Accordingly, they do not seem interested in learning to dance well, preferring instead to “take pictures and videos of like their friends dancing with people.” They want to “get a video and get a picture taken, you know, show that they were in a honky-tonk, that’s kind of – it.” They treat the dance scene at the White Horse lightly as though it were a facsimile of Texanness, made of nothing but surfaces. And in this world of surfaces, Jorge is just another performer. Sometimes people go to the White Horse and then text him to come out because “I’m bringing some friends so you should dance.” Or they text to see if he’s there and then, when they get there, they try to get him to dance so they can watch, without any concern for whether he wants to dance or likes the song: “just like C’mon monkey.” Here, as with the girls who photograph themselves with dancers in the background, Jorge’s friends seem fascinated by the novelty but uninterested in participating in it directly, as though being outside of the dancing somehow positions them above it. Although these people know Jorge, in this space they disparage his deeper connections to the dance scene by treating him as though, somehow duped by the spectacle of local Texas culture, he is at their command.

338 Feifer, Going Places: The Ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day. Discussed in Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 13.

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Like Price or the insistent photographers, these tourists reproduce a scalar hierarchy that objectifies dancers by embedding the dance floor within Texas and positioning themselves above and beyond it. Tourists coming from a hierarchical scalar epistemology approach the dance floor with varying expectations: some, like Price, are interested only in imposing their own worldview on local dancers; some want to photograph dancers as symbols of Texanness or female sexuality, and some willingly watch and participate in dance culture but see it as an inauthentic representation of “true” Texas culture. For these tourists, two step really is, as Keith Byrd puts it, “the best souvenir ever,” but likely not in the way that Byrd intended. Although they each do it in different ways, these tourists all use interactions with locals to reproduce a hierarchical politics of scale in which the Austin honkytonk dance floor is nested deep in the heart of Texas, physically and politically; while the tourists’ cosmopolitan perspective derives power from their location outside and above the local, it renders dancers relatively powerless. Tourists attempt to objectify or otherwise control local dancers, and in many cases, we oblige them, because – as the incident with Don and Alex indicates – to do otherwise would cause a scene and expose the hierarchical politics associated with lodging oneself in the local. From this perspective, associating two-step with Texas is as disempowering for dancers as it is attractive to tourists, and because scale is socially produced, the inequalities of hierarchical scale are enacted and felt, literally, on dancers’ bodies. But hierarchical scale is only one of several scalar epistemologies at play on Austin’s dance floors. Uprooted from the territorial fix of older, hierarchical concepts, network and practice-based models place a higher value on the situated knowledges of dancers and thus offer the potential for a more egalitarian politics of scale.

Everybody’s Somebody in Luckenbach It’s sure not upscale, but what we have is more of a feeling than a showplace. - Abbey Road, former Luckenbach manager

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The drive out to Luckenbach, a ghost town turned tourist attraction in the Texas Hill Country, is surprisingly long. It’s Saturday night at the height of South by Southwest, but things are quiet once we get on 290 at the southern end of town, and quieter still once we pass Dripping Springs, the site of Willie Nelson’s famous (or infamous) first Fourth of July picnic in 1973. After a while we don’t see any other cars, and we appear to be going through farmland, with scrubby trees and bushes and low fences and low clouds obscuring the full moon. In front, Matt and Tim, both visual artists, are talking about dance as an art form; in the back, Margaret, Thom, and I alternate between choosing songs to play through the car stereo and chiming in on the conversation. We almost miss the road to Luckenbach – later I learn that this is because souvenir hunters are constantly stealing the road signs – but Thom quickly looks it up on his phone and redirects us onto a dirt road with just a little street sign, and we drive down this for a while, past a few houses, and then turn left and then a quick right, and then we’re there. We park in a little patch of gravel near the dance hall and walk over to a group of low buildings lit only with strings of tiny white lights and the occasional floodlight. The dance hall was built in the 1930s, well before air conditioning, and its louvered windows are all open so that we can hear the Moonpies playing and see the dancers from the little intersection at the center of town. There’s an old, well-lit general store across the street from the dance hall, with people wandering in and out, and to its left is a little stand like at a fair, with a short line of people waiting for beer. Between the two buildings are picnic tables; behind them is a floodlit washer court with a few people throwing washers and yelling. Standing in line at the beer stand, Thom looks around and says this is like a country theme park. I grin and tell him I’m going to go find me a cowboy to dance with, then, and turn around to head into the dance hall. Luckenbach, Texas, a tiny ghost town turned tourist destination in Gillespie County, is about an hour and a half from Austin and just 10 minutes from nearby Fredericksburg, the old heart and tourist center of the German Hill Country. Though

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Luckenbach is ostensibly a town, it has operated as a country music tourist attraction since 1971, when three Gillespie County residents, Hondo Crouch, Kathy Morgan, and Guich Koock, bought it for $30,000 from Benno Engel, the town’s postmaster and the grandson of the town’s founders.339 Seeking to attract visitors like themselves while preserving the town’s few remaining buildings, they shaped the venue’s image to appeal to those who both sought a pure, authentic Texas culture uncorrupted by outside civilization and well understood that authenticity itself is a myth. Crouch declared himself the mayor and “clown prince” of Luckenbach, they wrote humorous press releases about Luckenbach, population 3, they tapped friends in urban media outlets to write articles about the town, and they combined weekly dances with larger events like an all-women chili cook-off, the annual Mud Daubers Festival, and a hug-in for Valentine’s Day.340 This strategy paid off quickly. In 1972, the First Annual Luckenbach World’s Fair drew 20,000 visitors, including Willie Nelson, and they went through 9,000 cases of beer.341 The next year, Jerry Jeff Walker recorded !Viva Terlingua! at Luckenbach, thus associating the town with the birth of Austin’s progressive country scene.342 And three years after that, in 1976, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson recorded “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” a national outlaw country hit that linked Luckenbach with returning to a simpler time.343 Once a trading post linking native American, Anglo, Mexican, and German residents, Luckenbach was back at the intersection of

339 Glen E. Lich and Brandy Schnautz, “Luckenbach, TX,” Handbook of Texas Online, October 26, 2011, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hnl48; Douglas Rogers, “The Best Tunes in Texas: Where the Locals Love to Two-Step,” The Sunday Telegraph, June 11, 2006, sec. Travel. 340 John Davidson, “The Man Who Dreamed Up Luckenbach,” Texas Monthly, July 1984, http://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/the-man-who-dreamed-up-luckenbach/; Cain Burdeau, “Laid- Back in Luckenbach,” Sunday Herald Sun, March 27, 2005, sec. Travel. 341 Davidson, “The Man Who Dreamed Up Luckenbach.” 342 John Spong, “That 70’s Show,” Texas Monthly, April 2012, http://www.texasmonthly.com/the- culture/that-70s-show/; Geoffrey Himes, “Walker Goes Back to Luckenbach,” The Washington Post, May 6, 1994, Final edition, sec. Weekend. 343 On the historical importance of “Luckenbach, Texas” to the town of Luckenbach, see Spong, “That 70’s Show”; Joe Nick Patoski, “The Ultimate Hill Country Tour,” Texas Monthly, April 1996, http://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/the-ultimate-hill-country-tour/.

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local and global relations, this time as a tourist town that articulated a national cultural emphasis on roots and heritage with a tiny town in the Texas Hill Country. Though Luckenbach now has over forty years of its own history rooting it in place, few, if any, people actually live in the town. Nearly everyone is a tourist on their way to and from somewhere else, so that the “feeling” of togetherness for which Luckenbach is known is almost entirely contingent upon the practices, beliefs, and interactions not between tourists and locals but among tourists themselves. Accordingly, while the honkytonks and bars in Austin provide dancers and tourists with opportunities to “fix” scalar relations into more or less nested hierarchical units, the dance hall at Luckenbach presents a much more open field for the construction of a politics of scale. While some tourists may approach the dance floor in an earnest search for authentic local culture, what they more often find is a hybrid, heterogeneous, contingent space, where the local is all but indistinguishable from the global flows that interpenetrate it. Here, hierarchical scale collapses into itself, and space is, as Massey writes, an “open and ongoing production,” contingent upon the interpersonal relationships formed and unformed on the dance floor.344 Scale is thus constructed not through vertical relationships among “differently sized and bounded spaces” but through horizontal networks that “span space rather than covering it, transgressing the boundaries that separate and define these political entities.”345 While Luckenbach is deeply embedded in Austin country music history, culture, and mythology and is thus hardly an unbound, historyless space, the rather placeless experience of dancing as a tourist among tourists can make it feel that way. In response to this rootless, seemingly unbounded space, dancers either interact as strangers belonging to different but equal, scalar networks, or they engage in practices that reflect the fluidity of the space in which they interact.

344 Massey, For Space, 55. Cited in Allen and Cochrane, “Beyond the Territorial Fix: Regional Assemblages, Politics and Power,” 1162. 345 Leitner, “The Politics of Scale and Networks of Spatial Connectivity: Transnational Interurban Networks and the Rescaling of Political Governance in Europe,” 237.

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The possibility of an anonymous tourist space where “everybody is somebody,” constituted as much from without as from within, is in many ways a product of global capitalism. Scale, as Neil Smith argues, is “intrinsic to capitalism in a way unprecedented in previous modes of production” because “[t]he establishment of capitalism was from the start a construction of scales and scale differences, its uneven development is premised on the ability to construct and dismantle scales…, and every restructuring of capital is a social and political restructuring of scale.”346 While scale is not only a product of capitalism, capitalism is very much reliant on scale, so that shifts in capitalism result in shifts in the production of scale as well. This means that “[t]he collapse of scale is often the collapse of certain forms of political power in favour of others;” it also means that the construction of new scalar epistemologies may reflect emergent sociopolitical structures.347 Further, as Allen and Cochrane argue, scalar units are neither anchored in specific territory nor necessarily fixed in any particular political arrangement; instead, they function as “spatial assemblages,” a “looser, more negotiable, set of political arrangements that take their shape from the networks of relations that stretch across and beyond given regional boundaries.”348 From this perspective, scale, like capitalism more generally, is only practices, negotiations, interactions, relationships; it is constantly becoming. In its emphasis on practices, this horizontal conception of scale is similar to the hierarchical or vertical conception. But unlike hierarchical scale, which is still based on a previous generation’s “scalar fix,” horizontal scale entirely displaces older territory-based scalar epistemologies. As Amin writes, the “spatial stretching and territorial perforation” associated with globalization has resulted in “the displacement of a world order of nested territorial formations composed of a discernable inside and outside, by a world of heterogeneous spatial arrangement in terms of geographical

346 Neil Smith, “Scale Bending and the Fate of the National,” in Scale & Geographic Inquiry, ed. Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 194. 347 Smith, “Scale,” 726. 348 Allen and Cochrane, “Beyond the Territorial Fix: Regional Assemblages, Politics and Power,” 1163.

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shape, reach, influence and duration.”349 Deterritorialized and unmoored, the new world order thus collapses and supplants the old one. For dance tourists at Luckenbach, this emphasis on practices means that the local dance floor really is “more of a feeling than a showplace:” the local is something a new group of dancers recreates each night, not a pre-existing physical place. Many a travel writer, arriving at Luckenbach during the day, when the buildings are all closed and the “locals” are nowhere to be found, has commented on this phenomenon: without music or dancers, the buildings seem small, shabby, unimpressive. This is because the dance floor at Luckenbach is merely a node in the seemingly undifferentiated field of “heterogeneous spatial arrangements;” where nearly everyone is a tourist, the dance floor is constituted by what Cindy Garcia calls “crossings,” which include “the crossings of a geopolitical or class border, the crossings of the city, crossover consumers, and the step that curves around and crosses back.”350 For Garcia, dance is “action, but more precisely…interaction,” so that geographical scales like city, nation, and class collapse into the interactions among dancing bodies on the dance floor.351 In the absence of any scalar hierarchy or terrestrial attachments, the active, tourist-filled dance floor at Luckenbach “come[s] with no automatic promise of territorial or systemic integrity,” since it is “made through the spatiality of flow, juxtaposition, porosity and relational connectivity.”352 The town’s existence and its power to “go back to the basics of love” is entirely contingent upon dancers showing up and dancing, talking, and otherwise interacting with one another, so that the dance floor is not so much a terrestrial location as a node in a network of places that offer similar escapes from the rat race of global capitalism. As such it is more ephemeral than more terrestrial scalar units. Yet because places like Luckenbach depend entirely on the embodied

349 Ash Amin, “Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 33. 350 Garcia, Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles, 7. 351 Ibid. 352 Amin, “Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place,” 34.

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practices of individuals, they offer a space for agency in a way that other scalar epistemologies might not. Rather than be embedded in, and potentially controlled by, these larger scalar units, tourist-oriented dance floors like the one at Luckenbach consist of what Marston et al call “self-organizing systems,” where “the dynamic properties of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations and singularities that sometimes lead to the creation of new, unique events and entities.”353 While tourist interactions on the dance floor are more often of the mundane variety, the possibility of creating something new exists, and the romantic desire to make an unexpectedly deep connection on the dance floor is what brings many tourists here in the first place. Without any real terrestrial anchors, dancers have more influence over the production of scale, so that a kind of scalar maneuvering informs their interactions with one another and the local place that those interactions create. Here, dancers draw on and create what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges,” which are “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating… the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”354 Being deprived of social connections, traditions, and behavioral norms doesn’t mean that dancers have no reference points or that they somehow approach the dance floor “from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.” Rather, they themselves, working from the perspective of their “complex, contradictory, structuring and structured” bodies, are the referents. And in negotiation with other dancers, they produce, navigate, question, and reconstruct the scale of the local and their role within it. This maneuvering is most often tactical, a temporary bid for a shift in local politics. Neil Smith calls this kind of move “scale jumping,” wherein “political claims and power established at one geographic scale can be expanded to another.”355 Dancers engaged in scale

353 Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 422. 354 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 195. Cited in Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 422. 355 Smith, “Scale,” 726.

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jumping attempt to situate themselves in multiple scalar constructs, so that the multiple, shifting, and heterogeneous “space of flows” in which the local is situated provides dancers with a malleable context that could conceivably be shaped to suit their needs. And in Luckenbach, danced interactions among tourists reveal the multiple, shifting, and deterritorialized nature of the tourist dance floor. When I step inside the dance hall, the lighting is warm, and the rich wood – the floor, the stage, the long picnic tables, the exposed rafter wrapped in white string lights – makes the large space feel cozy and close, even though the only people I know here are the dancers I came with and the musicians on stage. At the back of the hall, a small group of dancers is travelling in a circle. I want to dance with people besides Tim and Matt and Thom, but even after watching the floor, I still can’t quite get a handle on the rules at Luckenbach: I know from experience that asking unfamiliar men to dance in a rural hall is often met with suspicion, but few people seem to be changing partners here at all, so it’s difficult to determine the proper exchange. This is likely due, of course, to the large tourist population: because they don’t know anyone else, many couples dance only with each other. Thankfully, halfway through the evening, a stocky middle-aged man in boots and a black t-shirt compliments my dancing, so I ask him if he would like to dance, and though he says “you best not make me look a fool,” he leads me out onto the floor and into the circle, where we travel, no turns, him going backward, me going forward. He introduces himself as David and asks if I come here often and I say no, it’s my first time, and he says mine too – I’m from Oklahoma, we’re here on a ride. I ask what kind of ride and he looks at me quizzically and says Motorcycles , so I say Well hell, I don’t know. He asks what I do, and when I tell him I’m an American Studies grad student at UT, he chuckles and says I have to ask: How you gonna make money with that? I tell him I have a few years to figure it out and he says Well, I’ve got three degrees: accounting, finance, and international relations, and I say Well I would ask how you’re gonna make money with that, but that’s basically the business of money, and he laughs. To my ears, his accent is thick, like he’s talking with

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marbles in his mouth, and he uses a hold I’ve never see in Austin, with his right hand on my shoulder rather than on my waist. I’m not sure what to do with my left hand – do I put it on his shoulder? On his waist? But when I ask him he says I can do whatever I want, and by his tone I can tell that he’s reading sexual innuendos into my questions about form. Neither of us is from here, nor are we familiar with the norms in each other’s regular dance communities or scenes, nor are we even on the same page as to what dancing means; without referents, our entire interaction is disjointed, a production of difference as each tries to figure out how the other person moves and what the other person wants. Other interactions that evening also contribute to the production of difference in a heterogeneous field. Different groups of people are dressed differently: several couples on the dance floor who use the same hold as David’s are dressed in black Harley t-shirts, jeans, and boots; a group of men at the furthest picnic table is dressed in button-down shirts tucked into carefully pressed Wranglers, with the well-shined boots of a Saturday night out; a bachelorette party at the opposite end of the room, with a bride who looks to be in her early twenties, sports the short dresses, cowboy boots, and tulle of a hill country last hurrah. In a room full of strangers, there is no norm beyond a vaguely country aesthetic, and there appears to be little connection beyond polite copresence, all of us here for the music and the promise of the “feeling” of Luckenbach. Yet in several instances, my group gets marked as different, which suggests that interactions among other groups might be similar. I’m wearing a black and white 1950s dress with a big red petticoat, which would make sense on a dance floor in Austin but which seems out of place here. A woman confirms this early in the evening when, after Thom and I have finished a dance, she runs out onto the dance floor, taps me on the shoulder, says I love your dress but I could never wear anything like that, and then runs back to her seat before I can thank her. Our dancing seems out of place also. Unlike the rather subdued, travelling two-step of most of the other dancers, my fellow Austin dancers and I have a flashy, swing-based style, with less emphasis on travelling

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smoothly through space and more emphasis on complex turns and directional changes. Toward the end of the evening, I’m dancing with Thom when another lead accidentally kicks me, and his follow, looking at him out of slanted eyes, says Stop it! You’re running us into the pros! In both cases, though the comments are complimentary, they signal the Austin dancers out as being different, as though our clothes and dance style mark us as outsiders, even though nearly everyone else is an outsider as well. The emphasis on difference in these interactions points to the horizontal scalar relations at play in the dance hall. With so many different groups of tourists watching and interacting with one another and no one group predominating, the production of scale seems to operate via what Judith Butler calls “practices of translation,” in which competing worldviews interact with, but never manage to co- opt, one another.356 When I danced with David, neither of us granted the other any ground: I am a PhD student in the humanities, he has three degrees and the time and money to go on a group ride; he seemed to think I asked him to dance to hit on him, I was more interested in the formal aspects of his dancing. We come from different worlds, and the dance was the point of intersection between them. Similarly, although others’ comments on our clothing and dance style suggest that we are too flashy, too “pro” for Luckenbach, the dancers from Austin were just one of many groups at the dance hall that evening. Unlike a hierarchy in which there is one cosmopolitan and many locals, here there are multiple cosmopolitans, multiple people who have come from elsewhere and only intend to stay in Luckenbach temporarily before moving on. Far form serving as an anchor for a local context, the dance floor is, as Cindy Garcia argues, a site for the multiple “crossings” and intersections of global flows. The local, from this perspective, is produced through the embodied interactions of dancers who have chosen to pause on their way from one place to another, and in some sense it is random, contingent upon the situated

356 Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Phronesis (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 167.

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knowledges of the unique mix of people who have decided to come to Luckenbach today. But while these interactions suggest that the scale of the local is a matter of practices of translation among competing universals, other interactions suggest that scalar constructs are malleable and that dancers can, and do, manipulate them. When the band goes on break, the hall empties out and I walk outside to find Margaret, Matt, Tim, and a few band members laughing and chatting with a tall thin man in Wranglers and boots and a pearl snap shirt; it turns out his name is Walker and he dances at the Broken Spoke a lot, which explains why he looks so familiar. David, the guy from Oklahoma, is pacing inside the dance hall and staring in my direction, and I’m doing my best to ignore him until someone says Well, that’s what you get for asking bikers to dance with you, and I blush as everyone laughs. Walker says he’s actually from not too far from here, a family ranch in Mason, and sometimes the guys from Mason come down here looking for single ladies to dance with that they aren’t related to – and then he stops himself and says But what am I talking about! I’m related to everyone for five counties around! We laugh, but the implications are clear: though Walker dances at the Broken Spoke along with the rest of the Austin dancers, here, he isn’t exactly one of us. Told to a group of outsider-Austinites, his joke allows him to position himself as a local, with the kind of situated knowledge that only people from around here have, and a cosmopolite who understands the particular pleasure we as outsiders might get from this expression of local belonging as a form of differentiation. His ability to knit together multiple perspectives reflects a kind of scale jumping, an intentional integration of the local with a cosmopolitan perspective that appeals to our touristic sensibilities. When the laughter dies down, Margaret seizes the opportunity to connect with Walker as a fellow traveller. I know Margaret as a Brown-educated visual artist, a well-travelled, quirkily-dressed painter who owns a house in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood but spends much of her time elsewhere. Yet here, like Walker, Margaret positions herself not within the global space of flows but squarely within

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the central Texas hill country. She tells him she grew up near here, too, and no sooner have they exchanged information about where they are from than they delve into a conversation about Austin’s growth that focuses not on the skyscrapers downtown or the rising rent on the East Side but on the way the city is taking over smaller towns like Hutto and Manor, so that, as Margaret says, Buda is really just South Austin now. Here, Margaret is not a mobile, creative-class urbanite but a Texan, despite the fact that she lives in a coveted part of Austin and is, like me, wearing a vintage dress that contrasts sharply with the jeans and boots and t-shirts of most of the women here. And perhaps drawing on the ways that Margaret and Walker are crossing back and forth between local and global, insider and outsider perspectives, the group returns to a topic Walker brought up earlier: how Luckenbach isn’t really a country dance hall at all, but a honkytonk fantasyland for Austinites. As if to prove that they have not succumbed to the fantasy, members of the group then critique it as a dance space rather than as an authentic site for the production of rural Texas dance hall culture, peeling back the “feeling” and just looking at the function. Walker says he doesn’t like that the tables are right in front of the band, the floor isn’t as slick; Tim says he feels like we’re disconnected from the band, they can’t see us, they probably don’t even know we’re here. Walker, evincing more of his insider knowledge, says he thinks the tables are that way because Ray Wylie Hubbard played earlier and he’s more of a listening, storytelling act, and maybe the Moonpies didn’t ask them to change it. Supported by the rest of the group, Walker and Margaret jump back and forth between a cosmopolitan, urban perspective and their rural, situated one, so that Luckenbach becomes a complex place somewhere at the intersection of local and global flows. As both Walker and Margaret show, operating simultaneously from inside and outside of Austin and from inside and outside of Luckenbach is largely a tactical maneuver. It is tactical in the sense that combining these different perspectives allows them to claim authority in a way that those of us not from Texas – Tim, Matt, and I – cannot. In Austin, our knowledge of and participation in the Austin dance

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scene differentiates us from other transplants who have no interest in learning about “local” Texas culture, but from the perspective of people who grew up in the hill country, we are from Austin, not Texas; we are no more Texan than the bikers from Oklahoma. They are the true locals because they are from here, and this situated knowledge allows them to see what most tourists cannot: that Luckenbach is a fantasyland, a construct designed to make outsiders feel at home. Yet even Walker and Margaret are not willing to say that they are from Luckenbach, and they take pains to show that this rural, Texan, hill country perspective is not the only one they have: Walker dances at the Broken Spoke, Margaret went to Brown and dresses more hipster than country; they can both navigate Austin’s culture and values as well as this one. For them, the scale of the local and the scale of the cosmopolitan are different but interconnected, and they position themselves differently within these interconnections based on who they are interacting with and where the interactions are taking place. Thus, even though these positionings are tactical, they also reflect a strategic dimension, especially in Luckenbach, where no one is from here but everybody is somebody. In Luckenbach, where the majority of dancers on a Saturday night are tourists rather than locals, the interactions among bikers, local(ish) folks in rural Western styles, and Austin dancers and musicians constitute a sense of the local that is thoroughly integrated with the global economy and its associated cosmopolitan outlook. Unlike dance halls and honkytonks where a strong local culture predominates, the dance floor on Saturday nights at Luckenbach is shaped mostly by the unique mix of tourists who decide to stop in and stay awhile. Some interactions between tourists consist of practices of translation between competing universals, where neither side is able to incorporate the other into his or her worldview, such that the production of scale seems to be more about highlighting difference than about creating a sense of togetherness or community through dance. But other dancers reconfigure the relationships between global and local, insider and outsider, parochial and cosmopolitan with each interaction, creating temporary

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allegiances across scalar networks that vary depending on who is trying to impress who. Where hierarchical politics of scale can seem relatively fixed in both social and terrestrial space, the production of scale on the tourist-dominated dance floor at Luckenbach suggests that scale is network-based and malleable, such that the scale of the local is contingent upon the particular flows that interact within it. Reshaping scalar relations so that the local and the global are interconnected is the larger project of Luckenbach itself. It is, after all, a concert venue and dance hall that retains the look and feel of a tiny Texas town in the center of the hill country. Yet while this scalar epistemology more adequately reflects the affinity-based networks along which many sociospatial relationships operate, it is, like hierarchical scale, only partial. A conception of scale that includes both networks and hierarchical, terrestrial spatial units provides a more complete picture of how scale operates on the two-step dance floor and also reveals the class politics embedded within it.

Two-step in Translation Rosencrantz: Consistency is all I ask! Guildenstern: Give us this day our daily mask. - Tom Stoppard357

It’s a Saturday afternoon at the White Horse, a few minutes before six, and Houston and I are drumming up students for the two-step lessons we’ll be teaching in a few minutes. We’ve recruited a few couples and are about to work on a table full of women when I see them: seated at a few tables pushed together in the middle of the bar are 12 grinning guys, in blue and light-striped button-downs, their hair neat, their faces clean-shaven, a litter of beer glasses and Miller Light bottles in front of them. In the dingy atmosphere of the bar, they look markedly out of place, as though they are on a temporary excursion from their usual haunts. I walk up to them and chat with them a bit and a tall thin blonde man who bears a striking resemblance to Neal Patrick Harris jumps up and introduces himself as Chris: they

357 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 39.

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are a bachelor party, here from California to get a little taste of Texas culture. I tell them I’m glad they’re here but inwardly I’m cringing: 12 guys? Two-step is a partner dance, and even though we are careful to say “leads” and “follows” rather than “men” and “women,” the students almost always choose positions based on traditional gender roles, and men are rarely interested in dancing with other men. The guys do not seem to understand the bind their presence has put us in. I retreat to the corner by the sound booth and start texting furiously, and by the time we start the lesson at 6:15 more women have arrived, so that when we separate them into leads and follows we find that we have a small class of relatively even numbers, probably 26 or 30 people, with only one extra lead. Houston and I look at each other and heave sighs of relief, but there are other problems. We attempt to teach the same class we usually do, with a basic step, a section on leading and following, and a basic turn, but most of the guys in the bachelor party are drunk and loud – they are on vacation and this is a show for them, not the serious business of training new dancers that it is for us. Houston is getting increasingly frustrated, so that when one of the guys keeps trying and failing to turn his follow, Houston stops the class and yells “If y’all would listen to what we’re trying to say, you might learn something.” The guy stops in his tracks, his follow’s arm distended, and I, only half-jokingly, say “don’t poke the bear.” The room shifts: we are back in control. They apologize and we finish out the lesson without incident, though our plea to come to our other classes falls on deaf ears, since the guys are all from California and the other students are only half paying attention. But they tip extremely well: we make $65 a piece. As Houston counts the money he says “That bachelor party threw down – I never have more than one $20 in here,” as though this much-needed cash makes up for their disruptive behavior. Some dance spaces lend themselves to an interpretation of scale as a purely practice-based production, and some seem to operate on a purely hierarchical basis. But more often, vertical hierarchies and horizontal networks interpenetrate one another to create dance floor geographies that are at once spatially fixed and

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situationally contingent, so that they both span space and cover it.358 Dancers and tourists, each with her or his own movement traditions, beliefs, skills and allegiances, bring all of this baggage to the dance floor; they are hardly engaged in creating new situated knowledges in a boundaryless, traditionless field every single time they watch dancers or ask someone to dance. Nor, thanks to the internet and the ever-increasing mobility of people, information, and products, are their tastes, dance styles, and friend groups necessarily bound to the terrestrial locations in which they live, work, and visit. And, as Marston et al suggest, the complex, hybrid scalar forms that come out of these overlapping epistemologies do offer the possibility of more democratic local spaces or perhaps a global culture that is unconstrained by terrestrial politics of scale.359 But a closer look at interactions in Austin’s dance spaces, particularly among tourists and those “locals” who serve as teachers, guides, and interpreters of the local dance scene, shows that these utopian aspirations are only available to people who can afford to travel, to visit, and to be local by choice rather than by necessity. Although two-step is imaginatively associated with working class Texan culture, the production of the local on Austin’s dance floors and through interactions among dancers, tourists, and guides is largely a project of the middle class. The overlap between horizontal and vertical scalar constructs is largely, but not entirely, due to shifts in capitalist modes of production. Because scale is, as Neil Smith argues, a capitalist process, changes in the ways that corporations, governments, non-profits, small businesses and individuals interact with one another result in different scalar formations.360 Allen and Cochrane, for instance, show that new forms of governance, where governments increasingly rely on networks of non-governmental organizations rather than attempting to service

358 “networks span space rather than covering it,” Leitner, “The Politics of Scale and Networks of Spatial Connectivity: Transnational Interurban Networks and the Rescaling of Political Governance in Europe,” 237. 359 Marston, Jones III, and Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” 422. 360 Smith, “Scale Bending and the Fate of the National,” 194.

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constituents themselves, have resulted in the growth in the power of the region and a concomitant disempowerment at the scales of the state and the city.361 Yet if we are indeed moving away from hierarchies and toward horizontal, network-based politics of scale, the transformation is still partial at best; as Leitner argues, “the increasing importance of transnational networks in shaping contemporary life and governance does not result, however, in a deterritorialization of governance and politics – that is, it does not result in the replacement of the space of places with spaces of flows.362 In other words, while networks may be gaining strength, they are still horizontal organizations operating in a vertical world. Further, human attachments to local places don't just evaporate overnight, nor do all people suddenly throw locality to the wind, pack a few belongings, and spend their lives wafting through the abstractions of global space. Rather, as Escobar argues, most people “continue to construct some sort of boundaries around their places, however permeable, and to be grounded in local socio-natural practices, no matter how changing and hybridised those grounds and practices might turn out to be.”363 Even though changes in capitalism mean that hierarchical scales may in fact be withering away or transforming into new network-based scalar constructs, interactions in Austin’s honkytonks and dance halls suggest that the old hierarchical, terrestrial system continues to matter, so that relationships between hierarchies and networks play out across the dance floor. Precisely how hierarchical scale continues to matter, and to whom, suggests that the new horizontal, network-based spatial organizations still have a politics to them and still operate in a hierarchical fashion. In an argument for the deterritorialization of scale, Manuel Castells posits that the “space of places” is being replaced by a “space of flows,” a “new spatial form” composed of “purposeful,

361 Allen and Cochrane, “Beyond the Territorial Fix: Regional Assemblages, Politics and Power.” 362 Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard, “Networks, Governance, and the Politics of Scale: Inter-Urban Networks and the European Union,” 297–8. 363 Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” 147.

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repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of society.”364 The space of flows is a purely contingent network that operates as if globalization has, in fact, annihilated space by time, as if decontextualized interactions are, truly, all that matters. But this global space of flows is not accessible to everyone: rather, it is a class project, a “logic of domination” based on “articulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses.”365 Elites, who have the money and time to travel and experience the world as a whole – who are, in a sense, always already tourists – interact at a cosmopolitan scale, while “people are local,” their situated knowledges, local attachments, and the “necessity of their terrestrial location” devalued and shunted off into the old hierarchical space of places.366 While mobile elites may still value the local as a site of authentic cultural production, they do so only insofar as localization is a choice, and even then, the local is only considered authentic when it fits into their romanticized expectations of what local culture should be. This neolocalism may stem from a genuine desire to form attachments to place, and certainly some of the interactions on Austin’s dance floors reflect a self- conscious attempt to create a sense of local community, especially as the vast majority of “local” dancers are themselves members of the elites or the mobile middle class and are not “from” Austin any more than the tourists are.367 But despite these dancers’ and tourists’ fascination with local culture, actual local “people,” the inhabitants of the old “space of places,” are not entirely welcome in neolocal spaces. In his study of traditional country musician Justin Trevino, Aaron Fox suggests that this is because middle-class people pretending to be working class don’t want actual working-class people around to destroy their cosmopolitan

364 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 442. 365 Ibid., 445–6. 366 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst, Globalization and Belonging. 367 Schnell, “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” 56.

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fantasies of the local. According to Fox, Justin Trevino is little-known in Austin partly because, “as with all forms of minstrelsy – Austin’s alt country scene [is]… uncomfortable admitting an actual working-class rural musician – a great virtuoso, no less… with a nonironic relationship to country into its inner circles of celebrity and renown.”368 Like many working-class Austinites, Trevino does not belong to the space of flows, and his presence in Austin’s alt country scene reminds its mobile middle-class members that they are merely playing at localization, and, perhaps, that their horizontal understanding of space is still supported by a vertical hierarchy. In Austin’s dance spaces, the tension between cosmopolitan elites’ desires to experience local culture and their discomfort at having that desire revealed to be “minstrelsy” is mitigated through guides: dance instructors, self-styled tour guides, promoters, and others who translate local dance culture into the language tourists and their fellow-travelers want to hear. As tourists on an (ironized) quest for authentic local culture, these elites want to interact with locals, but only those locals who speak their language, people who can translate the local into cosmopolitan terms, people who can speak to what Lucy Lippard calls the “lure of the local,” the “geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation” that plagues these placeless elites.369 To an extent, these guides provide access to what MacCannell calls the “backstage region” of the tourist space, giving visitors the inside scoop on how the local dance culture works, introducing them to dance partners, and titillating them with local lore.370 The presence of guides suggests the need to understand, as Don Mitchell points out, “how we both live in and always transcend the politics of place,” both as local hosts and as cosmopolitan visitors.371 Yet within the changing capitalist system, in some

368 Fox, “Beyond Austin’s City Limits: Justin Trevino and the Boundaries of ‘Alternative’ Country,” 89. 369 Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 7. 370 MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 94. 371 Mitchell appears to be speaking only to the middle class “we” here… Mitchell, “The Lure of the Local: Landscape Studies at the End of a Troubled Century,” 271.

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ways the guided, interpreted local dance floor is only a “siren song, a seeming retreat from the hectic world of the modern, and yet still only a lure, ready to hook the unwary.”372 The local, sustained by but largely separated from the everyday lives of local working-class people, is still a complex, hybrid process wherein the space of places and the space of flows overlap. From the perspective of a dance instructor teaching a bachelor party from California how to two-step and as a tourist in a group of middle-class cosmopolites guided by a fellow dancer, in the remainder of this chapter I examine the class politics of overlapping scales through the role of the guide. Although we originally intended our two-step lessons to grow Austin’s dance scene by teaching locals how to dance, our students at the White Horse are mostly tourists like the guys in the bachelor party: well-dressed younger people from major cities like San Francisco and New York and Melbourne. Houston and I have been teaching this class at the White Horse for over three years, and in that time we’ve crafted an introduction to Austin’s two-step culture that is tailored to this hip, urban, usually educated and generally liberal clientele – a decidedly neolocal departure from the emphasis on “old Texas, real Texas” at the Broken Spoke. We employ three major strategies to make our students feel at home in the otherwise unfamiliar (and often intimidating) space of the dance floor. First, we position ourselves as politically progressive with regard to gender politics. In addition to ridding our class of any gender-specific language, we explicitly differentiate between the roles of the dance and the gender politics associated with those roles: when discussing leading and following, for instance, we point out that the roles are functional rather than gender-specific, and that we are well aware that women can move themselves through space without any help from men. Second, rather than claiming that we teach the “authentic” or “real” Texas two-step, we appeal to our students’ cosmopolitan perspectives by providing a brief geography of two-step in Texas that constructs the “Austin” style as one of many local variants across the

372 Ibid., 272.

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state. We originally developed this narrative to defuse concerns among local dancers that what we were teaching was not two-step, but for students not from Austin, it also suggests that we respect their ability to see through flimsy tourist schemes and their desire for a uniquely local experience. And third, we do not romanticize the two-step or treat it as a time-honored Texas tradition. The language we use to describe movements in the dance – and, since our students are frequently not dancers, this is an extremely verbal lesson – is deliberately humorous and peppered with pop culture references, as though we are viewing it from the outside along with our students. We encourage our students to relax and have fun, to pretend they have Lego hands and T-rex arms, to spin like pretty pretty princesses, and, in Houston’s terms, not to “be an asshole and throw your follow to the other end of the club.” Rather than impress upon them the importance of dancing RIGHT in OUR space, we attempt to help them figure out the dance for themselves, to take ownership of it, and to see us as one of them. Since many of these people will not be joining the dance scene, much of this translation is admittedly economically motivated: the lesson is technically strong, but connecting with our students as fellow members of the space of flows, when done well, is what results in substantially higher tips. And sometimes, like tonight, it also generates a sense of intimacy, so that the students assume that we share their cosmopolitan middle class perspective. Immediately after the lesson, when Dave Insley and the band are setting up on stage, one of the guys comes up to me, grabs my hands, and peppers me with questions: am I leading this turn right? What happens with the hands here? What other turns can I do? As his guide, I show him the lead, correct his grip, add an inside turn to the outside one he is slowly mastering; he seems eager to learn the dance and to do it well. But our conversation suggests that he is interested in two-step not as an experience or a world-view – a perspective held by many local two-steppers – but as a symbol of Texas. He’s from California, he tells me, but he’s engaged to a girl from Houston, and since they’re getting married in L.A., her family got him a nice pair of cowboy boots that he’s

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going to wear in the wedding as a nod to her Texas heritage. And wouldn’t it be great if he could two-step, too? I tell him that it would be a sweet thing to do for a first dance, a way to bring a piece of Texas back to LA. In this exchange, two-step is not a living culture but a symbol of Texanness, an experiential commodity that can be bought (by him) and sold (by me) and also transplanted intact to California, where his bride-to-be will recognize his bodily movements as respect for her Texas heritage. And throughout, perhaps because I just taught a lesson that divorced two- step from the Texas cultural references and gender stereotypes in which it is usually couched, he tells me this not as if I am a local yokel at the bottom of the scalar hierarchy but as if we share the same cosmopolitan viewpoint. Because I have packaged and presented the embodied culture of the dance scene as an easily transportable bit of local Texas flavor, he acts as though I, like him, actually believe that it is, in fact, a commodity and not a living local culture. In some ways, this slippage between tourist and local host should not be surprising. Noel Salazar argues that tour guides “play a Janus-faced role, in the sense that they are not only supposed to know the heritage and culture they interpret, but to understand the tourists visiting from other cultural backgrounds, too.”373 Tour guides, in other words, are always engaged in translation, always putting their own cultural knowledge into the language of the other. And for tourists interested in peeking behind the façade and into what MacCannell calls the “back region” of a host culture, whether in “native” dance, “folk” dance, “ethnic” dance, or even “local” dance, dance classes provide structured opportunities to experience that culture firsthand, complete with a translator to interpret its movements.374 Further, as Jane Desmond argues, dance also allows upper and middle class whites to move in “what are deemed slightly risqué ways,” so that dance tourism can look and feel like slumming – “a temporary excursion across

373 Noel B. Salazar, “‘Enough Stories!’ Asian Tourism Redefining the Roles of Asian Tour Guides,” Civilisations, TOURISME, MOBILITÉS ET ALTÉRITÉS CONTEMPORAINES, 57, no. 1/2 (2008): 213. 374 MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 93–94.

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class lines dividing social classes in the search for pleasure.”375 Thus, like tour guides, social dance instructors have a long history of translating working-class dance cultures into movements deemed “appropriate” for middle-class bodies as a way of shoring up middle-class identity. Tim Cresswell documents ballroom instructors’ elimination of “freak steps” derived from working-class and African- American dance halls in the 1910s, for instance, and Tim Lawrence shows how the hustle was developed as a conservative, middle-class response to the queer African- American practice of “dancing with the crowd.”376 In the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Murray studios famously systematized and smoothed out swing dances to make them more like European-style ballroom dances and thus more “appropriate” for middle class dancers.377 By systematizing two-step and locating it within a cultural framework that is familiar to many of our students, we are similarly translating a local knowledge into “appropriate” forms, though in our case it is the ironic distancing from the dancing, rather than any major changes in the dance itself, that allows us to bring the space of places into the space of flows and thus ingratiate ourselves with our students. That our students mistake us for one of their own means that we’re doing our jobs well. But sometimes we do our jobs too well, so that tourists, forgetting that we are performing a role, themselves expose the discontinuities in the performance. Later that evening, Chris, the leader of the group, thanks me again for teaching such an unruly bunch and asked me to dance. The band is playing a polka, so he asks if I can teach him to do it, and I say yes, can you count a 4/4 beat? He says he can and starts counting to the music, so I say it starts on your lead foot, and you take little shuffling steps, 1-and-2, 3-and-4, so he counts it out and then I show him the footwork and he gets it almost immediately. He’s got a strong frame and we whirl around a couple of

375 Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” 37. 376 Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor”; Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle: 1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture, and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer.” 377 McMains, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry, chap. 2.

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times, and then he asks about the turns, and I say they’re the same, you just do them on the 1, 2, 3, 4, so he tries and nails the turn on the first try, and does it a few more times after that, tweaking it. He has clearly had formal dance training before: the way he is assimilating information is logical, systematic, practice-based. When the song ends he hugs me and says Thank you, and I say Hey, you did good, and he says Thanks! And then he tells me he’s a percussionist in Blue Man Group, and I look him in the eye and say really? And he says yeah, but I’ve only learned the counting since I’ve been in the show the past couple of years – they cast actors first and then teach you the percussion. I ask if they just assume everyone has rhythm then, and he nods awkwardly, like even rhythm can be taught, everything can be learned, everything is constructed. And then I ask him what they’re doing after this and he says they’re heading to Rainey Street, a strip of bars near downtown where their neat button- down shirts and clean-cut demeanors will be more in place. This whole trip to the White Horse, then, was just a novelty, a quick dip into kitschy local Texas culture before the real action on Rainey. But then Chris looks at me and asks What are you doing later? I say I’ll probably stick around here because the midnight band is a lot of fun – they’re a great dance band and they play a lot of country covers of punk songs. He looks surprised for a moment and then recovers and says Great, maybe we’ll come back, even though we both know he doesn’t mean it. For him, this is a local backwater, a novelty. Why I would choose to stay here, despite being one of them, is a mystery to him. The complexities of this relationship between the bachelor party guys and me in my role as their instructor, translator, and guide to a purportedly Texan cultural institution reveal the class politics within which hierarchical and horizontal scale overlap on the honkytonk dance floor. As mobile, cosmopolitan tourists consuming a Texas novelty before they move on to the more placeless party atmosphere of Rainy Street, the guys get drunk before taking the lesson and disrupt it to the point where Houston yells at them to be quiet, both actions that suggest they don’t take the experience seriously – this is a game for them, a performance, a

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show. This post-tourist approach is reinforced in both of the interactions I have with the guys who want to learn more about the dancing: the first wants to learn to dance as a symbolic gesture toward his fiancée’s Texan heritage, and the second is interested in learning dance almost as a decontextualized system: if any actor can be hired and taught the complex rhythms of the Blue Man Group, surely anyone can come in and pick up the two-step or the polka just as easily. For the guys in the bachelor party, the class is merely a novelty, and the dance is a set of steps, not a whole living culture. Of course, Houston and I have actively contributed to this interpretation of the two-step. As dance instructors, we reduce the dance from culture to steps in order to teach it; as Arthur Murray proved long ago, codifying dances into steps and movements makes them much easier to transmit to people unfamiliar with the cultural context of the movements.378 Further deterritorializing the dance by using placeless pop culture references to describe movements makes it more accessible to people who find themselves out of place in the Texas-styled space of the White Horse. This codification and deterritorialization of the two-step is an appeal, and a successful one, to mobile, middle-class tourists operating within a networked sense of scale. Because the mobile elites have their own aesthetics, tastes, and cosmopolitan desire for the neolocal, belonging in the space of flows is as much about performing these preferences and perspectives as it is about actually holding them. Further, in a way, I am one of them: I am educated, I am white, I have no tattoos, I speak their language, and while I am dressed in 50s-style attire, that could be attributed to my role as guide, rather than a way of connecting myself to the local dance culture. But I am also local, while they are just visiting, and the look on Chris’ face when he realizes that for me, the real action is here in this local space, provides a glimpse into the hierarchical relationship between the space of flows and the space of places.

378 Ibid.

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Teaching dancing is not the only place where guides mediate a hierarchical relationship between mobile elites and local people; translations of scale happen among dancers as well. In March of 2014, shortly before SXSW, I found myself in a car with the same dancers who took me to Luckenbach, on our way to Mercer Street Dance Hall in Dripping Springs to see the same band, Mike and the Moonpies. Matt, an art professor at Baylor, offered to drive, and when he came to pick me up at the White Horse shortly after my lesson, the car was already full: Margaret; Tim, a painter and a rafting tour guide in Colorado in the summer; and Thom, an attorney. Unlike the majority of in-town dancing I’ve done, where people choose shows based on where their friends will be, this is an excursion to see how people dance in other places, even though we know quite a few people from Austin will be there. It is an anthropological mission of sorts. And unlike most of the conversations I have at shows, the conversation we’re having on the way down is strangely cosmopolitan. They seem to approach the dancing like the guys in the bachelor party, like we teach it, as if through translation. They talk about dancing: not gossip, but dancing, and they’re interested in going to lots of different dance halls and seeing how people dance in different places. Dancing for them seems to be a verbal phenomenon, or perhaps an intellectual one. Matt talks about how he wants to do an art project that includes video footage and interviews with people about dancing: there are no words for it, he says, but the way people search for words and the words they find are always beautiful and eloquent. He’s interested in the dance as a product of translation; he loves the experience of dancing, but what he wants to do is translate it, capture it, make it into images, turn it into words, somehow make that experience accessible to a non-dancing audience, commodify it the same way we do with teaching. It sounds like he wants to enter it into the space of flows. As we talk, I wonder if that’s why Matt likes Tim so much. Tim is always experimenting with the relationship between dance and music, always doing new but somehow musically intelligible things with the dance. He is always learning. When we get to Mercer Street, most of us dance with people we know, but Tim

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spends the evening trying to dance with people he doesn’t know, trying to learn more about dancing and how other people dance. At the end of the evening, when we’re all discussing our research and art-making plans (another strange conversation to be having on the dance floor), Matt says “I asked Tim what he thought about dancing and he said pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear.” This is awkward because Tim is standing next to him when he says it, silent, looking straight ahead, and I find myself looking at Tim while Matt is talking about authenticity and the experience of dance, and his face remains expressionless, as though he accepts, for the moment anyway, his role as an object of study. And then I remember that Tim is, like me, a tour guide, although of a different sort, so perhaps he is used to being the object of study, the only “native” in a group of tourists. Much later, I’m having a conversation with Tim about how he paints that reminds me of this moment: he tells me that he does a sketch, and then he translates the sketch into zones of dark and light, and then he paints the canvas like a paint-by-numbers, a codified, systematized copy of his original idea. He himself is interested in translation, and perhaps this is the key to Matt’s admiration. Tim is skilled at translating the felt experience of dance into the verbal language that Matt understands; like a dance teacher, he can commodify movement into words. Although my teaching dance and Tim’s verbalization of the pleasure of dancing involve translating different things, they are both about making the dancing body legible to elite, mobile post-tourists like the guys in the bachelor party or to recent transplants like Matt, who lives in Austin but still calls New York home. As Matt’s proposed art project suggests, in their ironic search for authenticity many of these folks actually do crave the intimacy and unmediated pleasure they associate with authentic local places. But given their temporary, often superficial involvement with local dance practices and their attachment to the aesthetics and cosmopolitan perspective of the space of flows, they can only access emplaced local culture in mediated form. At Mercer Street, while most of us dance with other Austinites, Tim makes an effort to dance with strangers, to meet new people and see

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what he can learn from dancers in this seemingly more rural, less cosmopolitan, perhaps more Texan place. And then while he integrates bits of this knowledge into his own dancing – this is itself a form of touristic consumption – he comes back and describes it for Matt, who then does not even have to leave his comfort zone to learn about the “natives.” As with the bachelor party at the White Horse, many of the denizens of the space of flows – even when they are members of Austin’s local dance scene – prefer to experience “local” cultures in translation. The class politics at the intersections of horizontal and hierarchical scalar epistemologies are evident in the relationships between guides and tourists at both the White Horse and Mercer Street. While Manuel Castells argues that “elites are cosmopolitan, people are local,” these dance floor interactions suggest that the production of scale is actually far more complex.379 At the White Horse, my co- instructor and I teach a dance lesson that deterritorializes the two-step in a way that appeals to middle-class tourists seeking the neolocal romance of “authentic” local culture. Those moments when our students realize that this is partly - but not entirely – a performance reveals their belief in a hierarchy in which network conceptions of scale, or what Castells calls the space of flows, are superior to the terrestrially-based space of places, so that the cosmopolitan and the global still dominate the local. Similarly, at Mercer Street, Tim translates his experiences with dancing into verbal language for Matt, who, though he too takes great pleasure in dancing, processes it more effectively as a verbal phenomenon rather than an embodied culture. This distancing renders him an outsider in an emplaced situated dance culture and allows him to enjoy it without relinquishing his cosmopolitan perspective. Although scale theorists have called for a deterritorialized, network- based conception of scale since the early 2000s, from the perspective of the honkytonk dance floor, hierarchical scale and its associated politics of scale are still alive and well. Attempting to read spatial relations solely in terms of networks and

379 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 445.

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practices does not adequately account for the class politics at work in the points of contact between the two epistemologies.

Conclusion Produced through interactions among dancers, tourists, and guides in the dance halls and honkytonks in and around Austin, the local is an uneasy negotiation between two different scalar epistemologies. Hierarchical scale, the older of the two, is characterized by an emphasis on terrestrial fixity, nested geographic units, and a politics of scale that correlates size with power. Although it is associated with a previous generation’s scalar fix, hierarchical scale is still produced in interactions between tourists and dancers on Austin’s dance floors, so that two-steppers in Austin are subordinated to both the cultural and political influences of Texas and to tourists intent on shaping the tourist experience to suit their cosmopolitan worldview. By contrast, network-based scalar epistemologies situate the production of scale entirely in the practices, interactions, and crossings of different actors; detached from both physical location and the hierarchical politics of scale, scalar relations are contingent, extraverted, and placeless. Rather than be subordinated to larger scales, the local becomes a privileged site of cultural production, and the tourist-filled dance floors at Luckenbach or Ginny’s Chickenshit Bingo have the potential to foster a more egalitarian spatial politics. This potential is rarely realized, however; interactions between guides and the mobile elite at the White Horse and Mercer Street Dance Hall suggest that the utopian potential of the local in the placeless space of flows is only accessible to those with the money and time to travel. Those who live locally by necessity rather than by choice are relegated to the older hierarchical space of place. Though the mobile elite find these locals fascinating, they prefer to access them through translation, lest the truth of their minstrelsy be revealed. Scale is thus a complex hybrid of practices, politics, terrestrial locations, and class-based ideologies, and the local is the site of its production.

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Interpreting the two-step dance floor as a site of contestation between two competing scalar epistemologies reveals a contradiction at the heart of the local. While local dancers differentiate themselves from tourists through their interpersonal connections with other dancers and their intimate knowledge of local dance spaces, practices, and norms, many dancers also differentiate themselves from “true” locals, the working class people who live locally based on necessity rather than choice. While it is based on and supported by Austin’s working class, the dance scene is just as much a neolocal space as a local one. In response to the perceived threat of neoliberal globalization, dancers use two-step to create a local scene that is everything the global is not: it is embodied, socially produced, shot through with tradition, and deeply, if imaginatively, rooted in place. The local, as a scalar construct, is always already global. It even has tour guides for the uninitiated.

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Conclusion: Another Night in the Same Old Bar380 Quick-quick slow, slow, quick-quick slow, slow… - Dale Watson

The Austin two-step is a uniquely local cultural form. It is local because it integrates the cosmopolitan romance of local lifeways with the felt attachments to place and people that characterize a life lived locally, and it does so in a way that is unique to Austin. While the honkytonks and dance halls favored by dancers are key nodes in the city’s Texas tourism trade, they are also places that dancers claim for themselves through their repeated interactions on the dance floor. The dance scene, and the larger alt-country scene of which it is a subset, are at once performances of a conservative nostalgia for the local and very real parts of the city’s economy and culture. Though this conservative nostalgia is performative, it is not just a performance; dancers enacted a raced, classed, and gendered politics on the dance floor, so that two-step is also a way of determining who belongs in the local and who does not. In Austin’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, two-step is thus sometimes the gentrified and sometimes the gentrifier. Two-step can play these dual roles because the local context, in Austin and other “creative” cities, is at the intersection of two overlapping scales, one that imagines the city rooted in the culture of its geographic region and the other that locates it within a network of creative class cities. For most dancers, two-step is an assertion that locally-produced, vernacular culture matters. For some, two-step is the backbone of a social dance community, the form that structures the pleasure of keeping together in time night after night. The local for them is lodged in practices, connections, the pleasure of the dance, and the places shaped by their experiences. For others it is a way to preserve long-held traditions and to maintain a direct line to the past. These dancers see dancing as a way to reclaim a lost or disappearing Austin, to inscribe its memory on the

380 Dave Insley, Drinkin’ for Two, vol. West Texas Wine (Austin, TX: Crawl Daddy Music, 2008).

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landscape and in the counterclockwise swirl of the bodies on the dance floor. In both cases, dancers’ participation in an alt-country scene suggests that their culture is produced and lived locally in direct response to the placeless and increasingly de- humanized sounds coming out of Nashville. Similarly, their nightly presence in Austin’s honkytonks and dance halls shows that they value these human, vernacular spaces over the placeless, multi-use complexes that are increasingly threatening them. Here, at least, they can shape culture rather than being shaped by it. However, while Austin’s local two-step scene, in its resistance to the onward march of global culture, could be a site for progressive political action, dancers instead tend toward a politics of the local that is steeped in conservative nostalgia. Part of this conservatism comes from the structure of the dance itself: with a male lead and a female follow, traditional performances of masculinity and femininity are built into the dance. That dancers enforce these gender roles both on and off the dance floor suggests that the scene provides a safe space for people who believe in, or at least want to perform, gender inequality. Other forms of policing suggest that the dance scene espouses a racial politics as well: the scene is largely white, and Texas-Mexicans are only welcome insofar as they are willing and able to perform whiteness. These racial politics are so ingrained in the dance scene that dancers sometimes find themselves dancing for gentrification rather than against it: at the White Horse, in Texas-Mexican East Austin, two-steppers dancing to honkytonk actively displace working-class Tejanos dancing to conjunto. These exclusions suggest that retrenchment in the local is ultimately a conservative project. While many dancers do find the togetherness, inclusion, and felt attachments associated with the local in the dance scene, they do so by excluding people and places who do not fit their conservative vision. This emphasis on exclusion suggests that the local is constructed as much by those it excludes as by those it includes. Interactions between dancers and tourists show that these processes of inclusion and exclusion also have a class politics. Although Austin is a liberal, tech-oriented, creative city that has more in common

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culturally and demographically with cities like Seattle or Portland, it is physically located in Texas, and Austin’s honkytonk scene is a tourist attraction for people seeking the “old Texas, real Texas” that differentiates Austin from other creative cities. In interactions with tourists, two-steppers also often find themselves aligned with mobile middle-class interests, despite their embodiment of country music’s “plain white folk” in their leisure time. The dance scene may constitute the entirety of many dancers’ social lives, but there is a difference between living locally by choice and living locally by necessity. Those who live locally tend to support the scene rather than dance in it. In a sense, the conservative, white, gender-normative, middle-class politics of the two-step scene could only exist in this way in the weird, liberal, no-majority city of Austin. As much as the local is directed inward, it is still heavily dependent on context. Dancing the local is a matter of embodying these inclusions and exclusions together on the dance floor, of performing belonging (and be-longing) with every step, whether there is an audience or not. It is a matter of accepting the cosmopolitan perspective at the heart of the parochial. But dancing the local is also a matter of truly feeling that you belong here, in this place, with this partner, doing these steps to this music. It is a genuine felt attachment to people and place and a valuation of these people and this place over other ways of being in the world. From the perspective of the dance scene, the local is global, but it is also very close to home.

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