Dancing to Foreign Rhythms, Making Them Our Own: The Nicaraguan Foxtrot on the Global Stage, 1919–1933

Abstract Music accompanied the US intervention in Nicaragua. Above all other genres, US popular music dominated Nicaraguan culture beginning in 1919. And it never left. This article examines the foxtrot, a wildly popular US music and social dance, as a lens for understanding how Nicaraguans saw themselves, how they negotiated the intervention, and how they acted upon the world. It argues that Nicaraguans developed new musical expressions, making foreign culture their own, despite the dominance of US intervention. Through transculturation, Nicaraguans maintained a sense of national identity. More than an entertainment, the foxtrot grew into a discourse for reckoning with US intervention and contesting Nicaraguan cultural values. Remarkably, the transnational circulation of the Nicaraguan foxtrot resonated beyond Central America, putting Nicaraguan music on the global stage. The first section traces the origins and transmission of the foxtrot during the ragtime era between the 1890s and 1917, followed by the early jazz period. The second section narrates the foxtrot’s 1919 arrival and rooting as a popular music in western Nicaragua. The third section surveys the foxtrot’s domestic and transnational dissemination via Nicaraguan entertainments and US recording companies from 1919 to 1933. The fourth section explores the cultural embrace of the foxtrot in Nicaragua during that same period. Conversely, the fifth section pursues its literary critiques. The sixth and final section examines Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo as a prominent advocate and critic of the foxtrot. The conclusion places the Nicaraguan foxtrot in context of greater Latin American production.