LAUSR

This article explores the world of the “on2” salsa dance scene in New York today. Building on long-term participant observation and interviews, I argue that Latinx salsa dancers contest and reconfigure the racialized commodification of salsa dance as a marketable product. They do this by foregrounding Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean cultural identity and by strategically claiming grassroots urbanity in the hyper-gentrified city. In doing so, dancers step into a nuanced but counter-hegemonic role in power struggles around the right to urban space. In this way, the salsa scene retains its social and political role as a space for Latinx cultural affirmation, community-building, and resistance to cultural erasure in the neoliberal city. The study of salsa dance in late neoliberal New York deepens our understanding of how Latinx creative communities interact with the environment—shaping and being shaped by the changing city while negotiating cultural meaning through on2 salsa as both practice and product.