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This first section of the book introduces the central issues of contracting out by asking ‘Why make when you can buy?’ This chapter begins by outlining a handful of contracting examples, most of which have been successful (Microsoft customer support, USA; Mambo Graphics, Australia; Marks & Spencer, UK), but one outright failure is also included (vehicle maintenance in Fairfax County, Virginia, USA). The chapter goes on to suggest what may have been the crucial elements of contracting decisions that resulted in success or failure. This provides an initial glimpse of the themes, the development of which is the main purpose of the book. The chapter also outlines the approach that will be taken in the book, which is not a contracting out manual, but an analytical tool to facilitate strategic thinking about contracting out.

This chapter examines Dunham’s work on Botta e risposta (1950) and Mambo (1954) to highlight the substantial creative freedom that midcentury European cinema granted to a Black woman choreographer. The Dunham company’s portrayal in these films suggests that her troupe’s fame in postwar Europe was filtered through the same crude ideas about Black cultures that informed Baker’s career. And yet within such a framework, Dunham was afforded authorial control over her dance scenes to an extent not possible in Hollywood and, like Baker, used these scenes to present a culturally complex vision of Black womanhood that countered racist misconceptions. The chapter establishes Dunham as a coauthor of Mambo by showing that her choreography is central to its artistic vision.

Cuba is a famously musical country and Matanzas is arguably Cuba's most musical city. Throughout history, the gentle hills of Matanzas have been alive with the sound of music. Some of Cuba's earliest décimas were written in Matanzas. Afro-Cuban liturgical music and drumming were carefully and lovingly preserved. Numerous Cuban musical genres had their origins in Matanzas or were created by matanceros, including varieties of rumba, guaguancó, danzón, danzonete, and mambo. This chapter explores the city's rich musical heritage since the eighteenth century.

This chapter reflects on the author’s personal experiences dancing in two different communities—among aging mambo dancers at Florida’s Gold Coast Ballroom and with young salsa dancers in Seattle. These vignettes lead into reflection on some of the themes of the book, including the generational divide between mambo and salsa dancers, the relationship between live music and dance, and the multicultural makeup of salsa communities that build social capital across lines of difference.

This chapter considers anatomo-politics through an examination of Eric Garcia's biopunk novel The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Miguel Sapochnik's film Repo Men (2010). The two texts illuminate different aspects of biocapitalistic consumption and biopolitical existence, describing a complex system of circulating biocapital, and the social life of biocommodities — artiforgs (artificial organs). Together and against each other, they grasp Foucault's anatomo-politics, and understand what Baudrillard means when he suggests that consumption has emerged as a form of control. Just as R.U.R. linked industrial production to overproduction, these texts link consumerism to biocapitalistic overconsumption through a cluster of interconnected, contagious forms that form an assemblage of contradictions: the decaying urban landscape and vigorous property development, pharmaceutical therapies and drug addiction, and cancerous organs and the artiforgs that replace them.

This chapter focuses on Cuban stage and film star Ninón Sevilla, and one of the most beloved icons of Cuban popular music Beny Moré. Sevilla helps revive all those venues shared between Cuban and Mexican performers, between Mexico City and Havana before, during, and after the world wars. The movement between these cities was not linear, nor did it follow a predictable path. It was more a dynamic intersection that held Los Angeles as part of its junction. Moré recorded some of the most important mambos with the mambo genre's “King,” Dámaso Pérez Prado. Although his reputation on the island was always formidable, it was only after Moré spent almost a decade in Mexico as its rising star that he became a celebrity in and for Cuba.

This chapter examines Caribbean popular dances that undergo transformations over time and across borders, with particular emphasis on Cuban community rumba and how it evolved into commercial rhumba. It first considers intra-Caribbean dances and their dance music mixtures before turning to Cuban rumba to illustrate how popular dance changes shape and identities and travels across old and new borders, from local to transnational. It also discusses mixing and (con)fusion that characterize Cuban popular dances by citing the case of mambo, a descendant of son. Finally, it describes quindembo, a mixture of dance movement vocabulary that keeps refreshing itself with new trends, and the concept of liberation within Caribbean popular dance.

Although often danced to the same music and called by the same name, mambo dancing at New York’s Palladium Ballroom in the 1950s differed significantly from commercialized New York salsa/mambo of the 1990s and 2000s. This chapter examines the technical differences that separate the dance styles of these two generations of mambo dancers, highlighting the older style’s closer reliance on Africanist aesthetics. The author argues that technical differences in vocabulary, syntax, gendered dynamic, connection, use of space, and rhythm emerged as a result of salsa dance commercialization. A further argument is that the changing aesthetic priorities of the dance emerge from a growing separation of the dance from the music for which it was named, a phenomenon the author calls “kineschizophonia.”

This chapter compares the history, culture, and aesthetic priorities of 1990s salsa in Los Angeles and in New York. It examines the technical and aesthetic differences between dancing on the two coasts, revealing how the contrasting formal characteristics of salsa in each locale express the culture, demographics, and history of each city. The chapter also includes a history of mambo in Los Angeles, revealing that many of the defining features of the L.A.-style salsa of the 1990s had roots in the city’s Latin dance culture dating back to at least the 1950s.

This chapter turns away from social dancing and salsa dance as business to look at the art of mambo and salsa choreography. Palladium-era mambo shows of the 1950s and ’60s are compared to salsa congress performances of the 1990s and 2000s, showing that many of the strategies used by modern salsa performers had already been employed by mambo acts, including use of vocabulary and technique from other dance genres, expansive use of stage space, and incorporation of narrative. However, key differences between the two periods are also revealed, including expanded performing opportunities for salsa dancers, which while enriching their creative explorations have simultaneously isolated them from other performing artists and audiences.

Two generations span the decades between 1930 and 1960 made up of immigrant Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians, attracted to New York City because of the burgeoning entertainment and recording industries, and the growing Latino migration and community formations of those years. This first period, ranging from the later 1920s through the mid-1940s, was characterized by the prolific composition and performance of traditional Latin American musical genres like the bolero, the son, and the guaracha. The second period, extending through the 1950s, is the illustrious mambo and Cubop era, which saw the emergence of a full-scale Latin entertainment circuit in midtown Manhattan and a lively musical life in the city’s Latino neighborhoods.