Chamber Cumbias: Dancing with Race on the Argentine Contemporary Dance Stage

Buenos Aires-based choreographer Julia Gómez’s 2016 work Chamber Cumbia explores cumbia culture through contemporary dance vocabulary, an ostensibly odd pairing. Cumbia, a popular music and dance form with diverse influences originating in Colombia, gained immense commercial popularity across the Americas in the late 20th century. In Argentina, a version known as cumbia villera emerged during the 1990s in the context of deep structural inequalities that left millions of Argentines and migrants from neighboring countries living in poverty in villas or urban shantytowns. In Argentina, cumbia generally and cumbia villera specifically are associated with racialized, working-class, and often migrant bodies, despite broad commercial appeal. Contemporary dance, in contrast, continues to be situated in the realm of ‘high’ art and is frequently understood to be racially unmarked and universal in its themes. Where, then, do we locate Gómez’s particular mix of high/low and racially unmarked/marked work within Argentine dance history? More broadly, what does this work signal in the context of pervasive academic, artistic, and public discourses that continue to situate Argentina as exceptionally white and European among Latin American nations, an enduring project perpetually haunted by its own incompleteness? Cumbia de cámara, I contend, makes visible tensions and contradictions inherent in Argentine racial projects that simultaneously rest on and refuse acknowledgment of racial difference. This article nuances a small but growing body of scholarship about cultural production that challenges Argentine Whiteness and Europeanness through its focus on dance.