Zumba zeal
Latin flavour spices up imperial recipes for physical perfection. Review: Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, Petra R Rivera-Rideau, by Georgina Jiménez
Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, Petra R Rivera-Rideau, 2024, Duke University Press
A sane mind in a sane body was the mantra of Olympians and Romans—and it is still the mantra of empires whose meditations conjure a Teutonic, slender, well-sculpted, youthful body, mostly of a proud male ideal for military service.
Meeting the desire to achieve perfection has always been a successful industry, with even national public health authorities pandering to demand with their gimmicks, such as Britain’s NHS providing free fitbits to tackle obesity.
The idea of a perfect body has never gone away, and even though methods to achieve perfection have changed from the calisthenics of the 1950s and 60s—and from Jane Fonda’s aerobics to the more digestible Zumba version—it seems that the aims are still the same.
It was a fluke that spiralled the class of Colombian fitness instructor Alberto “Beto” Pérez into a worldwide commercial brand. He forgot to take the music he usually put on for his routine in Cali, so needed something else. He played his favourite salsa hits instead—and the rest is history.
The students loved it and Pérez continued. Eventually, he ended up in Miami, where he began to teach what he had baptised as “Rumba-cise”.
Raquel Perlman, a fellow Colombian, attended this class and suggested Pérez meet her son (another Alberto) who had successfully promoted some Latin American internet start-ups before the dotcom bubble burst and was now living at home.
Alberto Perlman saw the potential of “Rumba-cise” and got together with a third Alberto (Aghion), a former business partner.
The name “Zumba” (a word that already existed in the Spanish dictionary as one of the conjugations of “buzzing”) was an invented concept based on a fusion of samba and rumba.
In 2002, the new team produced their own workout video for TV, and among other opportunities they were offered the chance of partnering with Kellogg’s, who put their DVDs in boxes of Special K.
Two years later, their infomercials were issued in Spanish, and a year after that the three Albertos created the Zumba Educational Division. In 2006, a Zumba Instructor Network (ZIN) was created, and from there the project exploded into an international brand of recognised instructors based on subscriptions.
It is a story steeped in the ideals of the American Dream: persistence, endurance, innovation and sacrifice. However, a new addition to this narrative is the insertion of Latin authenticity as a critical part of the brand, and how instructors view their own relationship with the programme.
Latin Americans will find that, as an exercise regime, Zumba is fun, but definitely not what they imagine as “the Latin universe”, where song lyrics will give their elders a heart attack and where the curvaceous bodies of women are mostly lightly tanned and often signal racial difference or a partnership amenable to males who want to improve themselves.
And if you didn’t think Zumba lent itself to be studied, there clearly exist people to do this for you.
In Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, Petra Rivera-Rideau analyses the one common attitude peddled throughout the West about fitness—that a fit body is the result of a person’s individual choice of foods, exercise, or use of stimulants such as coffee, alcohol or cigarettes, and the stigmatisation of other habits this implies.
Such assumptions do not take into account how physical ability is central to general conceptions of citizenship.
Assumptions that an individual or group’s capacity for rational thought and physical strength are based on what they look like are often used to exclude disabled people from civic spaces and diminish the citizenship rights of those who do not conform to ideal parameters as unworthy of national status.
Rivera-Rideau has found that even though the Zumba brand has been marketed as a space of inclusion and racial difference, the one objectionable thing that has been attached to it seems to be a commodified “tropicalised” concept of Latin America—an exotic, consumable, primitive “other” realm based on Anglo-Saxon projections of fear.
Sorry for spoiling your New Year’s good intentions or even your fun, but as Rivera-Rideau implies, if you think you are on a mini-holiday in an unrestrained environment outside US “modernity” you are very wrong.
Your Zumba class will give you a less boring workout—but if you are Latinx and seeking representation, it won’t give you the integration you crave.
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