Shake your assets: Dance and the performance of Latina sexuality in Hollywood film

"Shake Your Assets" argues that dance is crucial to Latina fame in Hollywood film. Through dance, Hollywood has racialized and sexualized the Latina performer's body and persona. The dancing Latina---where one Latina symbolizes all Latinas, regardless of her national origin---becomes a fluid embodiment of race, gender and sexuality against which an ever-shifting ideal of the US citizen is visualized. Yet, the Latina celebrity has capitalized on these roles for stardom and career.;To identify how Latina representation fluxes with the shifting racial formations of the United States, I chronicle the careers of Lupe Velez in the 1920s, Dolores Del Rio in the 1930s, Carmen Miranda and Rita Hayworth (Rita Cansino) in the 1940s and Jennifer Lopez in the present. My dissertation combines the theories of Media Studies, Performance Studies and American Studies with primary sources, archival work and textual analyses (film, print publicity, choreography) to show how Hollywood has historically naturalized dance on the Latina body, constructing this performance as an inherently and purportedly cultural ability.