Dancing Out of the Labyrinth: From Solitude to Communion in la Yunai

Two weeks ago, I traveled to McAllen, Texas, right on the border with Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to participate in the conference Philosophy Across the Americas. The experience of being at the border has had such a strong effect on me, that I still cannot write about it. I need to process the various layers of experience.  

For now, I want to share an excerpt from my book, Loving Immigrants in America, that I read at the conference. My last blog entry was on dance as a form of political and cultural resistance. This chapter, “Dancing Out of the Labyrinth,” in my book is about dance as a way to create and cultivate community. 

“An unsettling feeling of disconnection from the peoples and cultures of Latin America and a longing to reconnect with them pervaded my college years in Arkansas. By the time I was a senior, the sense of isolation and the longing for communion had become very intense. As far as I could tell, the few Central American students on campus constituted the only Latin community in our small town and perhaps in all of Central Arkansas. In my walks and Southern road-trips, I had never seen a restaurant from, say, México, El Salvador, or Perú, or a Dominican dance joint, or Colombian food market. I had not had any significant contact with Latinos. I had looked, but outside of campus I had not found anyone or any place for re-connection.  

So it was up to us as students to create a community, and we devised some strategies spontaneously from a desire to enjoy our cultures. During my senior year, the Central American students were invited to put on a presentation during a week dedicated to celebrating international cultures on campus. We seized upon the chance and rehearsed a dance to “El punto guanacasteco,” a folkloric composition from northwestern Costa Rica. Over my four years in Arkansas, I had brought several tapes of folkloric music from various regions of Costa Rica. I had enough tapes that we could select from among many rhythms and compositions. As a kindergarten and elementary school kid, I had learned how to dance and choreograph some classic pieces from Guanacaste with several classmates in order to present them for school festivities. Other Costa Rican students had also learned several dances in their schools, so we could call upon our “vast” experience as schoolchildren. Meanwhile, our friends from other countries wanted to learn the choreography and have a good time dancing in the process. All of them could listen to and move in sync with the rhythm of marimbas, the main instrument—a wooden percussion idiophone of South African origin and Central American evolution—in folkloric orchestras from Guanacaste, which often also include guitars, brass such as trumpets and trombones, and other percussion instruments such as maracas and güiros. We discovered marimba percussion to be a common musical reference for all of us, from Guatemala through Central America all the way to Ciudad de Panamá. And very importantly, we could all move to its rhythm. So after listening to several pieces and trying to choreograph them, we collectively chose El punto guanacasteco for our presentation.”

– Excerpted from Daniel Campos, Loving Immigrants in America (Lexington Books, 2017).