Danzón Days

Winner of the 2024 BFE Book Prize (British Forum for Ethnomusicology) Older people negotiating dance routines, intimacy, and racialized differences provide a focal point for an ethnography of danzan in Veracruz, the Mexican city closely associated with the music-dance genre. Hettie Malcomson draws upon on-site research with semi-professional musicians and amateur dancers to reveal how danzan connects, and does not connect, to blackness, joyousness, nostalgia, ageing, and romance. Challenging pervasive utopian views of danzan, Malcomson uses the idea of ambivalence to explore the frictions and opportunities created by seemingly contrary sentiments, ideas, sensations, and impulses. Interspersed with experimental ethnographic vignettes, her account takes readers into black and mestizo elements of local identity in Veracruz, nostalgic and newer styles of music and dance, and the friendships, romances, and rivalries at the heart of regular danzan performance and its complex social world. Fine-grained and evocative, Danzan Days journeys to one of the genre's essential cities to provide new perspectives on aging and romance and new explorations of nostalgia and ambivalence.