Transatlantic Malaguenas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance: Spaniards, Natives, Africans, Roma

Transatlantic Malaguenas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malaguenas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.