Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's "Fitness Fiesta!"

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, has three screenshots from a commercial called “Let it Move You.” This 2014 marketing campaign advertised Zumba Fitness, a Latin-based dance-fitness program. Many people lauded “Let It Move You” as a progressive campaign featuring people with diverse body types and backgrounds. The three stills on page 99 show a traffic cop, a food truck customer, and an office worker who all spontaneously start to do their Zumba moves at inappropriate times.

Most US fitness programs embrace a “feel the burn” mentality and muscular physique. In contrast, Zumba Fitness’s slogan is “Ditch the workout, join the party!” Page 99 is in a chapter called “Selling Fun” that shows how “fun” in Zumba is intimately tied to racial hierarchies that depict whiteness as disciplined and intelligent, and racial others as instinctual and primitive. Fitness Fiesta! analyzes “tropicalized Latinness,” that is, a top-down construction of “Latin” culture as something carefree, exotic, and hypersexual. In this context, the trope of fun presents Zumba as a space where anything goes, thus implying that Latin culture is completely uninhibited and different from the US mainstream.

The three photos on page 99 illustrate this perfectly. The premise of the commercial is that Zumba Fitness is so irresistible that you won’t be able to stop moving and having fun, even if it is inconvenient or dangerous. One photo on page 99 shows the traffic cop abandoning her duties to dance causing a car wreck. The other two photos show women dancing provocatively. A woman at a food truck does a “booty pop” where she juts out her behind and jumps backwards, disrupting the orderly line. Lastly, the office worker climbs on top of the conference table and slides across it, grabbing her male coworker’s tie and staring lustily into his eyes. These moves conform to the hypersexualized “Latin lover” stereotype that has been endemic throughout US popular culture for decades.

Overall, the photos on page 99 demonstrate an important part of my argument that Latinness is constructed as foreign, exotic, and primitive. But they do not capture a central tenet of the book. Zumba Fitness presents cultural appreciation as central to its ethos even though it also embraces stereotypes of Latinos and Latin culture. Fitness Fiesta! argues that this contradiction mirrors the dangerous assumption that the US is a “postracial” society devoid of racism, when in actuality systemic racism remains pervasive. Page 99 doesn’t grasp this full argument, but it is a good visual representation of tropicalized Latinness in the Zumba Fitness universe.

Learn more about Fitness Fiesta! at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue