We live in a world against life. The true life.
That is made of joy, freedom and animal vigor.1
—Paulo Leminski
The world is everything that happens, they say. Outside the metro station closest to my house, every Saturday and Sunday between five in the afternoon and ten at night, what happens is a micro-dance. On a wide, crowded corner, where a subway and two bus lines connect, dancers gather around a small sound system run by an aging DJ. There are usually no more than fifty people and they are, for the most part, elderly people. Still, there is no lack of younger couples, families, and passers-by of every age who join briefly and dance a major cumbia or a rock classic with their backpacks on and their transport cards in their hands.2 Every time my travels coincide with that dance, I pause for a moment observing the interactions. The flashing gestures brighten my journey; they affect my own gesture. Inevitably, I smile.
That environment, the infrastructure of urban transport, swiftly unfolds to host other types of connections. Where haste prevailed, other possibilities rebel: those of sensory perception, of expressive exchange, and of coordinated movement. There, where function ruled, emotion suddenly wins. That fleeting encounter with a group of people who enjoy both the moment and the company of other people in such a simple and complete way, suddenly prompts a feeling of sweetness.3 The music, the shout-outs coming through the mic, the laughing couples, the choreographic attempts, the colors of the candy stalls, the bicycles carrying baskets with sweet bread and coffee thermoses, the flower vendors, the smell of nearby tacos, the red buses, the cars passing at full speed…The assemblage flares up, becomes activated like a fuller version of itself.4 Momentarily, the world is sensational. Mexico City, so fierce and so huge, feels, if only for a moment, infinitely kinder. It’s a small blow on reality, of the sweetest kind.
Micro-dances don’t just take place at my station; they also happen in an underpass next to Metro Oceanía, outside Metro Hidalgo, and inside Metro San Lázaro; they also take place in parks, sometimes one after another, as in the Alameda Central, where a dance gathers at nearly every fountain, drawing anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred people. These dances can include a small tent for the DJ booth with a table and a couple of chairs, but they can also be more minimal, limited to a set of speakers with a music player plugged into a USB port; they adapt to all circumstances and climates. Some have been summoning their audiences for several years now, but many are more recent. They arose after the Covid-19 pandemic as an antidote to the isolation of quarantine, as mimetic declarations of life’s persistence multiplying across the city.5
“I would have died of sadness had it not been for the dance group I started frequenting once the restrictions were eased,” my neighbor confesses one afternoon while I’m baking a cake in her oven. She is in her eighties, as vital as she is kind, always smiling with her bright red lips; she used to work in the subway system. “You dance, Lulú?” I ask, surprised, as I had assumed swimming was her thing. “Well, I might not be the best dancer, but I love meeting people of all sorts.” Of course she does. It reminds me of another woman whom I met during a cigarette break at a dance. She was telling me how she always loved to dance, but then had children, work to do, and no time to spare. “But right when the dances were starting again, my eldest son came and said to me out of the blue, ‘Mom, let’s go dance,’ and you know what? I came back to life,” she says through her red lips. A third red-lipped woman, Sonido Butterfly, introduces herself as “the elderly woman of dances.” She shares with her audience that she turned to DJing as a way to cope after the virus took her husband, Sonido Duende. Bridging the transition between a romantic salsa and a low-pitched cumbia, she speaks into the microphone: “Because everything that starts must come to an end, we might as well enjoy the moment.”
Attending dances speaks of a principle that places the value of living in relationships within the most tangible dimension of reality: that which has the body as an instrument for correspondence. It’s all about immediacy.
It is through embodiment that we can, once again, inhabit the world truly, fittingly: with joy. We experience and interpret reality through our senses, and when we gather together, we can also rearrange it, negotiate it, translate it.6 When this embodiment is shaped by rhythm and movement, and once the environment is full of vibrations, this understanding comes effortlessly. It is exciting. It is an event, and everything is in the process of becoming.7 Our sensuous selves are authentically present; we synchronize, we attune. It is an act of potency. The intensity of this state of correspondence demands to be felt thoroughly, and thus we see each other truly, we touch each other, we smell each other: we perceive each other completely. Collectively, we throb: thump, thump. We relish ourselves, others, the whole.8 And, for an instant, we look at each other, catching a glimpse of the purest part of each person, like a flash. However small the dance might be, this is the realm of the gift, of presence and reciprocity. Of abundance.
When the MC of my micro-dance takes the microphone to celebrate Women’s Day by honoring the grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the mothers searching for more than 130,000 disappeared persons in Mexico over the past two decades, and the mothers of the forty-three students who died in Ayotzinapa, the message resonates through every body present, through each attentive conscience. Two young women crossing the street, dressed in purple, touch their hearts, and I replicate the gesture, intuitively.
There is a political moment that marked a decisive turning point in the dissemination of these micro-dances. It happened in Santa María La Ribera, a historic neighborhood that still preserves much of the architecture from the Porfiriato, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In its central square, known for its beautiful Moorish-inspired kiosk (Kiosco Morisco), a group of seniors has gathered every Sunday for the last fifteen years to dance to vernacular rhythms of various genres, selected by Sonido Sincelejo, an old person himself. This tradition was interrupted in the spring of 2023 by an operation ordered by the local mayor, a controversial figure who, a few months earlier, had banned the display of the beautiful and colorful hand-painted signs that define Mexico’s popular commerce, replacing them with printed signs—gray on white only. This time, she alleged noise and public disorder in the square, of which she was a neighbor. What followed were seizures of sound equipment, beatings of elderly people, persecutions of neighbors who tried to intervene, and mediation attempts by human rights defenders. The confrontations continued for several weeks.
It was not the first time that dances in Mexico City faced government censorship. Years earlier, all market anniversary celebrations—festivities traditionally celebrated with live bands and sound systems, i.e., macro-dances—had been repressed with large deployments of riot police after a violent fight erupted during one of them. But Santa María La Ribera’s episode marked the first time citizens came out in defense of the dances, organizing acts of collective resistance and dancing protests. The conflict spread into the media, filling the front pages of newspapers and news broadcasts. Eventually, the mayor ended up backing down—even organizing her own dances with great pomp—though the widespread disgust towards her never quite dissipated.
The underdog triumphed, and triumphed even more overwhelmingly a few months later when the sonidero culture—the name given to the sound systems traditions in Mexico, whose influences are not limited to the country, but extend to transnational and transcultural exchange circuits that run from Peru to the United States—was declared by the city government as intangible cultural heritage of Mexico City, and enthroned where it historically belongs: the city’s public space.9 Although recent attention by artistic, cultural, and academic spheres and the opening of their venues and narratives is part of what paved the way for this long-awaited recognition, this exuberant culture was born in working-class neighborhoods, emerged as a cult, and consolidated as a movement on the streets, the mother of all urban subalternities. Despite overcoming the stigma and repression that have marked a good part of its history, sound systems still face a series of white, gray, and black mechanisms that restrict their access to public space—from the laws, regulations, and paperwork that determine its use to administrative corruption by local authorities and, not least, the management of territories that remains in the hands of organized crime. There is also a tendency towards the institutional occupation or the privatization of public space, which varies with the political orientation of the boroughs that make up the old Federal District, now Mexico City.
The declaration issued by the city government not only commends the soniderxs, the emblematic figures of this movement of movements who have introduced, modulated, validated, and hybridized tropical music from Latin America and the Caribbean on the metropolis’s dance floors. It also praises all the agents that make up this ecosystem, recognizing the contributions of large tropical orchestras, musical groups, record labels and vinyl merchants, promoters, sound technicians, staff, graphic designers, advertisers, radio programs, and internet platforms. And, of course, it acknowledges the dance clubs that organize autonomously to rehearse choreographies, design their outfits, attend the dances of their favorite sound systems, and circulate the content they create through social media.
When a dance club arrives at an event, the soniderx celebrates the moment with an effusive greeting, for it is the clubs who are the most valuable, certainly more than the thousands or millions of followers of the soniderx. Their presence makes the dance, and their absence can undo it. If the dance is too crowded, the club will carve out a circle in the middle of the sea of bodies with centrifugal motion: through its center the couples will circulate, exhibiting their best steps before the captive looks of the public. This is another dimension of the experience, one that involves not only the bodies that move but also those that surround them, who, with their admiration, endow the dancers with more strength and more brilliance. Perhaps that explains why the dancers of the first generations of the sonidero movement remain vividly present, why they keep intact not only the aura but also the swing and the swag; like the veteran soniderxs who still glow behind the DJ booths, the dancers are also around seventy, even eighty years old. But we still see them today dancing to salsa music, laughing. They have danced with every generation. They have competed with them. They have taught them.
El Venado Mayor, one of the dance’s living legends, carefully keeps the receipts of his life as a dancer—diplomas of recognition, event programs, newspaper clippings, and the autographed photos of Celia Cruz—in an apartment where there are hundreds of replica deer in metal, plastic, porcelain, embroidered, printed, drawn, etc. Yet the jewel of this small living museum is a handmade diorama holding miniature musicians with their instruments, the dancers, the tables, and the patrons. El Venado presses a button and the scene comes alive; the lights rotate and the music plays. Once again, the same feeling of sweetness appears, lodged in the materiality of this plaything crafted with such dexterity, dedication, and detail.10
Another great legend, Maestro Arau, comes to my house one night accompanied by Alejandro, his most faithful dance partner, to recount decades of turns on the city’s dance floors as leader of the Calirumba club and, as he defines himself, as a gay icon of urban dance. He makes me laugh when he recalls his beginnings as a teenager, captivated by the exuberance of the transvestites who danced at night in the city's variety theaters (the names he calls them by are over the top!). Although music had been instilled in him by his parents—seafood merchants who loved jazz, mambo, and Cuban son—his incursion into the world of dances remained secret until much later. It crystallized in a specific moment: the day when, after school, he saw Lalo, known in the circles as La China, dancing in a market: very tall, dressed with bell-bottom pants, making the dust shimmer with an indescribable swing.
When El Venado Mayor or Maestro Arau go to a dance, they do it dressed to the nines. The former wears vests bearing a golden deer motif that he embroiders on them himself; the latter, with custom-made flamboyant suits. Both wear classic dancers’ shoes, handmade by specialized shoemakers.
Unlike the large sound systems, which charge significant fees for macro-dances attended by thousands of people, or the small sound systems that pass the hat around among attendees, dance clubs sustain themselves by their mere desire to exist and to shine, to attract and to enjoy. But before that goal, there is always a path—and the journey is equally important. Each club is a sort of family that strives to celebrate its members’ birthdays, organize group trips, offer classes to the community, and care for one another when someone needs it. Like a good Mexican family, it is made up of several families: there are older mothers who go along with their grown children, limber youngsters, children already standing out as dancers—earning nicknames like “the wonder boy” or “the girl with the beautiful smile”— as well as couples, friends, and friends of friends who arrived by chance and ended up staying forever.
Recently, I asked several dance clubs what kept them dancing. Dulce and Alex, an older couple who especially enjoy giving dance demonstrations in hospitals, told me: “Dancing fills us with life, lets us forget about illnesses, pains, and worries: it's like being in another world.” César, another veteran, said: “It’s the excitement of the events, the joy I carry home, and the satisfaction of seeing people form a circle around us to watch us dance.” The leader of the Ilusión Danzonera club summarized: “Health. Exercise. Discipline.” Lalo, the leader of Club del Montón and a dear friend, reflected: “An important reason to dance is to promote dance culture, so that it is not lost. It is a cultural heritage we will leave as a legacy for our children, our grandchildren.” The motto of his club reads: “We are the club of the bunch, there are no differences here, we are all equal: no one is more, no one is less, we are all one.” The possibility of this kind of joy is open to anyone willing to experience it.
Paulo Leminski, Inutensilio, 1986, trans. Juan Schulz and published in Altura desprendida, August 24, 2025, ➝.
“Dance, in other words, enables us to rediscover and rework the plural, performative skills of the city, stimulating both a greater sense of extant situations, and a glimpse of new styles of urban living which might simultaneously produce new senses of how the world is.” Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 145.
“Gentleness summons the body” writes Anne Dufourmantelle; it is “an occasion for sensory celebration.” Sweetness draws from potency {puissance} and resistance to call upon the body, and the body reciprocates fully, as if life itself depended on this exchange. “Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. Because it demonstrates a relationship to the world that sublimates astonishment, possible violence, capture, and pure compliance out of fear, it may alter everything and every being. It is an understanding of the relationship with the other, and tenderness is the epitome of this relationship.” Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 7, 14.
Deleuze and Guattari think that “the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates … to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society.” This precise state, in the context of bodies, necessarily corresponds to a precise moment. This moment becomes precious when the participants realize they are part of something—or, rather, feel it. Here it is, complete, the Spinozian ability to affect and be affected. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
Although I reference mimesis only this once, the concept and its function are of the highest importance for this essay. The inspiration comes from Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses by Michael Taussig, who in turn dialogues with Walter Benjamin. I seek the achievement of the ethnographer who “concentrates on image-ful particularity in such a way that … creates like a magical reproduction itself, a sensuous sense of the real, mimetically at one with what she attempts to represent. In other words, can’t we say that to give an example, to instantiate, to be concrete, are all examples of the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented?”. I am interested in the “corporeal understanding” offered by the mimetic faculty, and in providing yet another example of its current resurgence, which relies on a “palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.” An ancient, primitive, and almost extinct act for Benjamin, and concomitantly modern for Taussig. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 16, 21.
In his text “The Politics and Aesthetics of Attraction in the Gran Poder Festival: Reflections on a ‘Methodology of Affect’” and with greater detail in his book Cuando el baile mueve montañas: Religión y economía cholo-mestizas en La Paz, Bolivia, Nico Tassi argues that affect, derived from the abundance of sensory stimulation in folkloric festivities, is the privileged domain for “redressing the conflict,” and “reciprocal corporeal understanding.” It is in that place of emotion and attraction, in that “unacknowledged zone of shared pleasure,” where negotiations with the Other take place, from which new meanings and identities result. His “methodology of affect” challenges the ethnographer “to figure out a mode of giving voice to the force and intent of embodied meanings.” Fortunately, I can rely on Lalo, the leader of Club del Montón, to help me verbalize these understandings through hours-long conversations that span every possible theme and produce numerous poetic and mimetic proclamations. Nico Tassi, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Attraction in the Gran Poder Festival: Reflections on a ‘Methodology of Affect’,” Anthropology Matters Journal 9, no. 1 (2007), ➝.
In “The Event in Deleuze,” Alain Badiou extracts four Deleuzean axioms from The Logic of Sense. I’d like to bring forth the first axiom, as I think it is on par with this essay’s intent: “Unlimited becoming becomes the events itself”. Badiou adds: “The event is the ontological realisation of the eternal truth of the One, the infinite power {puissance} of Life. It is in no way a void, or a stupor, separated from what becomes. To the contrary, it is the concentration of the continuity of life, its intensification. The event is that which donates the One to the concatenation of multiplicities. We could advance the following formula: in becomings, the event is the proof of the One of which these becomings are the expression. This is why there is no contradiction between the limitless of becoming and the singularity of the event. The event reveals in an immanent way the One of becomings, it makes becoming this One. The event is the becoming of becoming: the becoming(-One) of (unlimited) becoming.” Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” trans. John Roffe, Parrhesia, no. 2 (2007): 38, ➝.
Brian Massumi defines affect as “synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another.” I extend this concept to its maximum effect: in dance, the culmination of all these interactions is relish. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 35.
Decree declaring “Cultura sonidera” as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Mexico City, Official Gazette of Mexico City, October 6, 2023, ➝.
Again, Dufourmantelle: “Refinement coincides with gentleness, particularly in craftsmanship… Gentleness seems to be inlaid with the gesture, joined to it within the material.” Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness, 36.
