Habla!

Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América

Jade Power-Sotomayor

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781479802067
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479804597
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Speaking Bodies Dancing Our América
• Part I. Bomba’s Plots
• Part II. Sounding Our Dancing
• Coda: Dancing in Non-English at the Grammys
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author