Fitness Fiesta!

Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture Through Zumba

Hardback (27 Sep 2024)

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Publisher's Synopsis

As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In Fitness Fiesta! Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that's tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable "south of the border"-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America, but what that means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today.

Book information

ISBN: 9781478026570
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Imprint: Duke University Press
Pub date:
Language: English
Number of pages: 248
Weight: 572g
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm