the young people's professor

I've always been impressed by my colleagues here in performance studies at NYU whose work is situated within a Latin American studies context. Some of the department's most exciting scholarship has come from students whose work is situated within these two frames. Berta Jottar's work is one example.

Berta's brilliant 2005 dissertation "Rumba in Exile: Irrational Noise, Zero Tolerance & the Poetics of Resistance in Central Park" is the first anthropological study of Rumba, an Afro-diasporic musical/dance form that is popular among the Afro-Cuban population of New York City. Berta's dissertation was chaired by Diana Taylor, Director of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and consisted of Jose Esteban Munoz, Barbara Browning, Tavia Nyong'o, and George Yudice.


In the dissertation, which she is currently revising as a book, Berta argues that Rumba in New York provides a performative "cartography of the Diaspora" ---an embodied mediation on the Africanization of the Americas. "What is interesting about the New York rumba," she explains, "is that it becomes [a] space of coalition between all the Afro-Latin diasporas, and all the Latin American migrants. This rumba is like a microcosm of what New York is, or the history of Latin American politics. But I'm interested in looking at the music, analyzing it from within the sounds and gestures, and seeing what it tells us about the performers, the history and the traveling of the performers. I'm interested in what rumba might be in the context of exile." [Source] I find her dissertation particularly provocative for the ways in which it highlights how afro-diasporic performance practices such as Rumba were aggressively policed during Rudolph Guilani's tenure as mayor.

As her dissertation abstract explains:

"This dissertation highlights Rumba, a Cuban cultural practice and music event. My investigation focuses on Rumba's exilic, grassroots performance in New York City's Central Park, the most established public Rumba scene in the United States and outside Cuba. For the last forty years, Central Park summer Rumbas have structured the intercultural interaction of an Afro-Latin diaspora, immigrants and refugees from continental America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean as well as Latinos/as from New York. I propose that Rumba's exilic condition is not particular to its practitioners' immigrant status but that Rumba in exile is an ontological condition in the U.S. and Cuba. The dissertation is organized in two sections. The first section analyzes the Rumba scene in the park from the late 1960's to early 1970's and then in the decade of the 1990's. Chapter 1 details the encounter between second and third generation Nuyoricans and African-Americans. Chapter 2 examines the Nuyoricans' encounter with Cuban Marielitos (the 1980 generation of Cuban immigrants to the U.S.) during the mid 1990's. The dissertation interrogates how Rumba demarcates and prompts a repertoire of transmissions of embodied knowledge and performative memories. In the second part of the dissertation (Chapters 3-6), I analyze Central Park Rumba's repression during ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration (1994-2001), particularly under his Quality-of-Life deterrence policies and in relationship to Zero Tolerance policing techniques. I further contextualize Rumba within the U.S. Law, the racialization of crime and the criminalization of Afrodescendant leisure and aesthetic practices such as jazz, rap and graffiti. In this section we study how Rumba functions as a resistance space against the State legal apparatus in its reproduction via spectacle, theatricality and simulacrum . Rumba's ethics and poetics make evident Zero Tolerance's scripted strategies and the Law's performativity. "


You can find out more about Rumba on Berta's gorgeous interactive website: click here. She is currently a professor of Latino Studies and Theatre Studies at Williams College.