White Girl / Red Dress

I. Color

I am a white girl in a red dress.

Sometimes I wear a black dress, but I am still a white girl.

The Church is full of Latinos, especially downstairs. Downstairs the floor is gray vinyl (upstairs it is old hardwood), and they are playing cumbia (upstairs they are playing reggaeton and hip-hop after the salsa lesson). It is too loud for English or Spanish.

I wait on a metal stool for a man to ask me to dance.

First a forty-ish white man touches my arm from behind. We dance and I conclude the following information:

1. He has taken many salsa lessons.

2. It does not matter to him that the music is not salsa.

3. He knows exactly what patterns he wants me to perform.

Then a young Indian man appears with a big smile. We dance and I conclude the following information:

1. He has taken a few salsa lessons.

2. He would like to communicate, through dance, that he is available for sex.

3. He should be upstairs.

After this I wait a little longer. Then a middle-aged Latino man with a white button-down shirt and a large brown face extends his hand.

We dance for a long time.

Some people experience a sensory phenomenon called synesthesia. This means that they perceive with several, or different senses what most of us perceive with only one. For example, one such person might see colors while listening to music, or taste softness.

I have never experienced synesthesia. While I am dancing, I don't see anything. I suppose the white shirt, the gray floor, the black shoes are still there, but I don’t know for sure. I just know that either

a) I am not in good hands or

b) I am happy.

A dancer has no language, position, or family context. This is not racial commentary. It is social commentary. On the dance floor we are just bodies.

II. The Salsa-Cumbia Conundrum

In my years of dancing in clubs and studios I have noticed a paradox:

Part 1. Potential dancers who wish to learn Latin dances may enroll in rumba, cha-cha, and samba classes at ballroom studios. These studios now often have salsa classes as well, as do many clubs where salsa gets played. They used to tell us at the studio, if we had students who lacked the coordination to jump into salsa, to teach them rumba first. But if you teach at a club I guess you just keep going.

Part 2. At the Church, after the salsa lesson, there is no salsa. Clubs that play

Latin dance music tend to play cumbia, merengue, and bachata at least as much as salsa, and in this case more, to a degree of infinity. Forget about rumba. But in the various studios where I studied and danced, I never came across a single cumbia lesson, or the merest intimation of the existence of slow-rocking bachata. Incidentally, my automatic spell-check doesn’t even recognize these terms (though it lets pass “salsa” and “rumba”), underlining them with its tiny furious red zigzag to say, “fix this! this isn’t your language!”

Whence come these cumbia dancers, who teaches bachata, and what are all those hopeful students doing with their elementary salsa and their clumsy rumba?

That is the curiosity of these parts. I live in Colorado now but it was the same in

Los Angeles, where I learned to dance. On the one side, trickling up from the south, come these cumbia people who pack together on the vinyl floor and go slow, quick, quick in a rocking clockwise spiral. On the other side, converging from the east and the north, come the hopeful non-dancers trying to become dancers. They want to speak the dance language but the slot patterns of salsa (quick, quick, slow) do not match and that means the cumbia dancers and the salsa novices are confused by each other.

That is why it is most interesting to be a white girl on the Latino floor. Because both parties—the salsa novices, who can see from my skin I am not a cumbia native, and the cumbia natives, who can see from my shoes that I am not one of the novices—think maybe I can understand them.

The other interesting thing is, we are all displaced here. This is not Cumbia Land, or Salsa Land. Maybe these people—now I'm just imagining, mind you, because dancers don't know anything about each other except whether they are good dancers or not— maybe these people can't speak to each other in the daytime, either. Maybe Man #1 is a middle-management guy from just-outside-of-Boston who came here because the mountains are pretty and it's sort of affordable to live in Denver, and Man #2 is a grad student in engineering whose family moved here from Mumbai and Man #3 drives a Caterpillar on a construction site and crossed a lot of desert before he got to these mountains. They might never talk to each other.

I would never talk to them.

Not for any principle, but for awkwardness, or lack of circumstance.

Resolution: dances are not like languages. Maybe the steps could be considered grammar but you can throw out the steps, and the dance is still there, and they all happen the same way. The patterns are not overlaid on top of music. The patterns emerge from the dancers themselves. The man creates the space for the shape of the dance and the woman fills the shape. Or I guess if you prefer, it could be the other way, or two women, or two men, but that doesn't change anything in terms of the dance.

III. Conclusion

I did say, by way of apology for future missteps, "I don't know this dance, I've only learned salsa."

And he, that is, Man #3, said, "You should teach me, I always thought salsa was nice."

That happened sometime in the first song. When my feet couldn't bear my own weight any longer, I also said, "thank you very much for the dance."