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Under colonial repression and the rationalizing ideals of Enlightenment thought, one practice has long carried the pulse of resistance: dance.
Habla! explores how the dancing body speaks—how, through movement, sound, and rhythm, Latinx American communities enact forms of knowing and being that “talk back” to colonial modernity. Centering the traditions of Puerto Rican bomba, Mexican son jarocho, and the global phenomenon of perreo, Jade Power-Sotomayor reveals how these practices transform the body into a site of worldbuilding, social critique, and survival.
Introducing the concept of “embodied code-switching”—the corporeal strategies people use to move across cultural, linguistic, and affective registers—Power-Sotomayor traces how dancing navigates and disrupts the logics of separability, ownership, and extraction that underpin Western colonial thought. From bomba’s dialogue between dancer and drummer to perreo’s unapologetic assertion of a pleasure and power rooted in interdependence, Habla! shows how these embodied traditions sustain collective life and offer new grammars of relation.
Through performance, community practice, and activist projects, ¡Habla! demonstrates how the dancing, sounding body continues to generate meaning, connection, and possibility. In its motion—rooted and mobile at once—the dancing body speaks beyond words, carrying forward the histories and futures of Latinx América, and remapping the contours of Our América.
"Rigorously researched and poetically rendered, Habla! attests to Power-Sotomayor's sophisticated ability to weave words, movements, their corresponding sounds and knowledges-- intellectual and corporeal—into a critical powerhouse of a book. The book exudes the love and ethical care Power-Sotomayor has for the worldbuilding practices that emerge from bomba, son jarocho, and perreo. A true testament to her sophisticated capacity as a dancer-scholar-activist, Habla! helps us to see, hear, and think deeper about Latinx dances. Power-Sotomayor's focus on the communities she both dances and studies with models her political, historical, and aesthetic commitments towards theorizing how speaking through our bodies is a necessary and liberatory practice for people still enduring the legacies of coloniality in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and beyond. This is stellar, field-expanding scholarship in dance, performance, and Latinx cultural studies."