Marketing and School Materials: Representation/"Representation"?

[On Pointe]

9 hours ago, Tapfan said:

Mitt Romney whose name should be in the encyclopedia next to the term - "white guy "- angered SOME in the Latino community because he didn't claim his Latino roots when he ran for president. It seems his father having been born in a Mormon colony in Mexico,  made Mitt  Latino in the eyes of SOME Latinos  and they took it as an insult that he never mentioned that fact.   It was as if it was a source of shame. So if Mitt Romney is considered Latino due to his heritage, then it obviously is an ethnicity and not a race in the eyes of some folks.

Mitt Romney has no Latino heritage.  His parents spoke English,  and they kept their American citizenship,  which came in handy when their colony was run out of Mexico.  It would be phony for him to celebrate his non-existent Latin ethnicity.  Penelope Cruz is Hispanic but not Latina.  She's completely European.  The first Mexican woman to win an Oscar is Lupita N'yongo,  born in Mexico and Spanish speaking,  but with Black African parents,  she would never be cast as  a Latina.  (Even though there are millions of Black Latinos.). And of course race as a concept varies from country to country.  Many people who consider themselves white in Latino countries are not white in an American context.

But no need to get all tangled up in semantics.  The fact is that most American ballet companies have a healthy cohort of Latino and Brazilian dancers.  Not NYCB.  And there's no clear explanation why.

[Tapfan]

37 minutes ago, On Pointe said:

Mitt Romney has no Latino heritage.  His parents spoke English,  and they kept their American citizenship,  which came in handy when their colony was run out of Mexico.  It would be phony for him to celebrate his non-existent Latin ethnicity. 

I couldn't agree more. But some people twist themselves in to pretzels to claim him as Latino, I assume because he ran for president and they admire him.  

 

43 minutes ago, On Pointe said:

Penelope Cruz is Hispanic but not Latina.  She's completely European.

Of course. But I once got into a lengthy discussion with someone who seemed knowledgeable on the subject,  who insisted that you don't have to come from the Western hemisphere or have Latin American heritage to be Latino. Cruz comes from a Spanish-speaking country,  Spanish has its roots in Latin,  and all people whose primary  language derives from Latin are technically, Latinos, including French-speakers. This person was dismissive of the term "Hispanic" and felt it was a pejorative. 

 

1 hour ago, On Pointe said:

  The fact is that most American ballet companies have a healthy cohort of Latino and Brazilian dancers.  Not NYCB.  And there's no clear explanation why.

Yes, there's the rub. And the explanations that there ARE  and have been MANY non-white Latinos and other people-of-color at City Ballet is something that makes some of us wonder just what is meant by "many." 

53 minutes ago, On Pointe said:

  The first Mexican woman to win an Oscar is Lupita N'yongo,  born in Mexico and Spanish speaking,  but with Black African parents,  she would never be cast as  a Latina.  (Even though there are millions of Black Latinos.). 

I hadn't thought about that, but it's true. Lupita is a Mexican citizen so she's a Latina, but not in the way most Americans or even most Mexicans would think of Latinas.  

Navigating the complexities of Latino identity in a respectful way, is difficult even for people who ARE  Latino.  Imagine how difficult it is for the rest of us. 

[cubanmiamiboy]

11 hours ago, Tapfan said:

For instance, many Puerto Ricans who obviously have African ancestry still identify as white. So it depends on which country  or nationality in  the Latino community you're taliking about and even the individual person, when thinking about how people identify.

 

Of course generalizations are always a bad idea. For instance...I am Cuban by origin, just as my two parents and four grandparents, and I have successfully traced the origin of the families of the four of them back to the 1700's, having come to Cuba from France, Spain and England. On my maternal grandfather's side-( the English, Barnstaple, one)- they are all blue eyed blondes, a trait that went all the way down to my mother and the three of my first cousins. I only inherited the blonde. But...long story short, there's a difference between race,. ethnicity and COLOR. The notion of either "Latin or white" is ridiculous, because you can have the whitest skin and the bluest eyes and still be born in a Latin country and have three generations of Latins behind you in your family, particular in countries colonized and inhabited by an array of European nationalities.

[volcanohunter]

11 hours ago, Tapfan said:

Spanish has its roots in Latin,  and all people whose primary  language derives from Latin are technically, Latinos, including French-speakers.

These languages are nearly always referred to as the Romance languages, so there really is no confusion on the matter.

[Tapfan]

2 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

These languages are nearly always referred to as the Romance languages, so there really is no confusion on the matter.

Yes. But every time I think I have handle on this issue, someone from the Latin community comes in and tells  me something different. I hear contraditions from learned people all the time. Truly.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Tapfan

[Tapfan]

13 hours ago, cubanmiamiboy said:

 But...long story short, there's a difference between race,. ethnicity and COLOR. The notion of either "Latin or white" is ridiculous, because you can have the whitest skin and the bluest eyes and still be born in a Latin country and have three generations of Latins behind you in your family, particular in countries colonized and inhabited by an array of European nationalities.

Absolutely. No disagreement from me on that.  For instance, I know that Katherine of Aragon was a blue-eyed redhead.  And "Latino" as an indication of color and/or race  is meaningless, despite the fact that it's generally used as an identifier for brown people,  in the U.S.  And even in a country like  Mexico that many people in the U.S. assume is a population made up primarily of Mestizos, there are many  people who identify as white.  Look at the film "Roma" that went out of it's way to make sure the audience knew that the priviledged family that the main character worked for, was white and that she as an indigenous woman,  decidedly, wasn't.

When I mentioned the fact that some Puerto Ricans who obviously have African ancestry - I'm talking skin darker than mine AND dreads - identify as white, I wasn't saying that there are no white Puerto Ricans. There are white Puerto Ricans just like there are white and Asian  Jamaicans.  My point was that how one racially identifies isn't always based on how you look. It's personal.

So when people refer to a ballet company as being diverse in COLOR or RACE  based on the number of Latinos that they have, it isn't very accurate. 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Tapfan

[Helene]

I'm always reminded of the scene in Clueless where Cher asks Lucy speak to the gardener in Mexican, and Lucy storms out, responding "I'm not Mexican," with Josh telling Cher that Lucy is from El Salvador.   I also remember a documentary I saw years ago about Afro-Cuban social dance,  in which a Flamenco teacher looked down her nose at Afro-Cuban dance, while talking about the superiority of European-based Flamenco.  The exact origins of Flamenco are a bit murky like a lot of oral/song/dance traditions, but the mail influences were migration from India, the Roma in southern Spain, Sephardic Jews, and Moors, all of the Others (post-Moorish rule) in Spain, not the white, sanitized versions on Franco-sponsored Spanish TV.

The history of European colonization of the Americas, and the importation of slaves from Africa, is as fraught in the Caribbean, and Central and South America as it is in North America, in addition to modern national borders.. While there are two common dominant official languages, Spanish and Portuguese, that doesn't mean that there is cross-racial and cross-ethnic national identification, except maybe during the football World Cup, even when confronted with prejudice from a different dominant culture.  I think that's why for every two people who came from the Caribbean, Central, and/or South America, there are three opinions.  Few people want to be boxed into an affiliation or definition of someone else's choosing.

Almost every survey -- I don't remember the census specifically -- asks to differentiate Non-Hispanic Caucasian/White from Hispanic Caucasian/White.  It's up to the respondent to check the boxes. 

Edited to add:  and self-identification also extends to ballet.  There was a PNB Zoom call in which several PNB ballerinas spoke about their heritage, or the term Amanda Morgan used in this blog post* of interviews by Amanda Morgan, Latine:

https://www.pnb.org/blog/recognizing-hispanic-heritage-month-at-pnb/

(I cannot find the link to the recorded Zoom, and it might no longer be linked on the PNB site.)

Edited again:  the link to all of the PNB Is Listening recordings was on the bottom of the blog page:

PNB titled this blog post

Celebrating Our LatinX, Chicana, & Hispanic Dancers

I think Amanda Morgan articulates it best:

“Being an Afro-Indigenous woman I’ve found myself getting caught between how I can identify, and how people automatically identify me. My mother is from Dominican Republic and my father is Puerto Rican, so I’m full of many mixtures that originated on Caribbean islands. Growing up in Tacoma, there were not very many Puerto Ricans or Dominicans, so I always felt like I never fit in any mold. I wasn’t black enough to be black, was too black to be Latinx, and didn’t have indigenous ancestors from North America. Yet, with this revisitation of a civil rights movement, people are identifying fully how they want to, and learning their roots.

I’ve taken the time to learn mine, and it has influenced so much of my work and how I interact in my life. I have ancestors that were conquerors from Europe, some brought as slaves from Africa, and the indigenous people of my homeland, the Taíno and Arawak people. They all make up who I am, and I cannot identify as just one thing. Being able to have so much history and culture to identify with used to seem so overwhelming as a kid, but now I’m so grateful and proud to have come from so much. It’s a beautiful thing, and a beautiful thing about the Latinx community.”

At about 11:30, Clara Ruf Maldonado talks about tokenism, in companies and on posters.

 

[BalletontheRocks]

On 12/26/2023 at 3:09 PM, Tapfan said:

That's the reason I don't get the lack of diversity. Attending Summer Intensives should give the teachers access to a whole range of talented student dancers who are good enough to attend SAB, including many who are people of color and a particularly large number who are of Asian descent. Were  non-white students just not auditioning for SAB summer intensives all these years? Was City Ballet's repution for being excessively insular make students of color not want to try?

I honestly don't think there was some evil conspiracy to keep the company  overwhelmingly white despite there being talented dancers of color out there. But I DO think that for the longest time,  diversity just wan't a priority at NYCB. And I understand the feelings of those who say merit alone should be all that matters. But that assumes that there can be no talented people of color out there who could bloom if given the chance.  

When speaking about the low numbers of black females who attend SAB, Kay Mazzo said that was one of the reasons they were trying to get support to local  to ballet schools that train large numbers of minority students. She said that when it came auditioning, many black females just weren't where they needed to be. 

But  that doesn't explain the lack Asian females.  And a a few over several years isn't much.

Something I've wondered about for awhile--photos and videos from SAB make it clear that there is a high percentage of Asian dancers in the children's division, yet few to none have made it into the company. The racial makeup of SAB classes changes a lot when going through the years. 

[vipa]

12 minutes ago, BalletontheRocks said:

Something I've wondered about for awhile--photos and videos from SAB make it clear that there is a high percentage of Asian dancers in the children's division, yet few to none have made it into the company. The racial makeup of SAB classes changes a lot when going through the years. 

My understanding is that the younger children are those who are able to commute, and enroll in the SAB at an early age. There is  weeding out, and dropping out process and only some of them move on to the pre-professional division. There they are joined by students from summer intensives who have been invited to stay the year. 

[volcanohunter]

3 hours ago, BalletontheRocks said:

Something I've wondered about for awhile--photos and videos from SAB make it clear that there is a high percentage of Asian dancers in the children's division, yet few to none have made it into the company. The racial makeup of SAB classes changes a lot when going through the years. 

Although this is a slip into a cultural stereotype, some children may abandon ballet lessons in order to focus on academics and training for a more practical, secure and longer-lasting career. (I'll admit I'm thinking back to my days as a young string player and seeing a lot of prodigious musicians electing to become medical doctors or engineers.)

[uptowner]

I don’t think we have to frame that as cultural stereotype; most kids  don’t stay at SAB into high school because the ballet training becomes incompatible with rigorous academics (yes there are some examples of exceptions but it’s very hard to maintain both and a “traditional” school still won’t work). But the ~120 kids who are cast in nutcracker every year have this iconic, unforgettable nyc kid experience even if that’s as far as they go with it. 
 

Speaking of nutcracker: any reports from this last week?? 

[abatt]

Thanks for pointing out that Clara Ruf Maldonado  is with PNB.  I recall seeing her name at NYCB but then lost track of what happened to her.  

[Helene]

Almost no children in the non-professional track continue in ballet, whether by choice or because they are not accepted.  The children in the Nutcracker are usually too young to be on that track. This is true across company schools, where there can be parallel tracks for high-level, but non-professional teenagers.  That’s true at PNB, where the Professional Division is a 1-2 year program.

SAB starts asking kids from across the country to stay for the year-round, pre-professional program when they are young teenagers, which creates that division early. 

[cubanmiamiboy]

On 12/27/2023 at 5:59 PM, Helene said:

Almost every survey -- I don't remember the census specifically -- asks to differentiate Non-Hispanic Caucasian/White from Hispanic Caucasian/White.  It's up to the respondent to check the boxes. 

 

True. But because I dislike so much the usual narrative that Latin automatically disqualifies someone from being white-( the perennial "they were many Latinos at the party and a few whites")- without knowing that many of those whites ARE actually Latinos, I usually check "other", and write "Caucasian". It is up to them to figure what do I mean by that.😂