2007/11/23 by Daniel F. García · 21 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art #Art history #Comedy #Cuban History and Society #Dance #History #Latin American and Latino Studies #Literature #Music History and Culture #Musical #Visual arts
paper · doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdm006
published in The Musical Quarterly 89(4), 505-523 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2007/11/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Around 1950 a new music and dance craze called the mambo caught the attention of musicians, dancers, journalists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and others throughout the Americas. Writing about the dance in a 1951 issue of Dance Magazine, American dance critics and teachers Don Byrnes and Alice Swanson stated, “It is now the responsibility of the teacher to standardize, discipline and properly present this thrilling dance to make it acceptable.”1 That same year New York Daily News journalist Jess Stearn published an article on mambo dancing as he had observed it being performed at the popular Palladium dance hall in midtown Manhattan; his article was titled “Touch of Jungle Madness: Denizens of Broadway Go Slightly Primitive under Spell of the Wild Sweaty Mambo.”2 A year earlier, in 1950, the Mexican film Al son del mambo [To the Sound of Mambo] premiered. Directed by Chano Urueta, this musical comedy featured a group of Mexican sojourners, including a composer, who travel to “primitive” or rural Cuba to escape their disillusionment with modern urban life. The composer aspires to harness the primal sounds of nature into a new kind of music, which he eventually creates in collaboration with “the king of the mambo” himself, Dámaso Pérez Prado. Finally, in contrast to Urueta's portrayal of mambo, the eminent Venezuelan psychiatrist Raúl Ramos Calles railed that the “mambo is no more or less a product of Yankee tourism that invades Cuba … . The mambo has no musical value.”3 Ramos Calles was one of many Latin American professionals, academics, and writers who rejected the mambo, considering it an insidious form of both black American vulgarity as well as North American cultural imperialism and, as such, a threat to the racial and cultural integrity of their nations.