Rumba in exile: Irrational noise, zero tolerance and the poetics of resistance in Central Park (New York City)

This dissertation highlights Rumba, a Cuban cultural practice and music event. My investigation focuses on Rumba's exilic, grassroots performance in New York City's Central Park, the most established public Rumba scene in the United States and outside Cuba. For the last forty years, Central Park summer Rumbas have structured the intercultural interaction of an Afro-Latin diaspora, immigrants and refugees from continental America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean as well as Latinos/as from New York. I propose that Rumba's exilic condition is not particular to its practitioners' immigrant status but that Rumba in exile is an ontological condition in the U.S. and Cuba. The dissertation is organized in two sections. The first section analyzes the Rumba scene in the park from the late 1960's to early 1970's and then in the decade of the 1990's. Chapter 1 details the encounter between second and third generation Nuyoricans and African-Americans. Chapter 2 examines the Nuyoricans' encounter with Cuban Marielitos (the 1980 generation of Cuban immigrants to the U.S.) during the mid 1990's. The dissertation interrogates how Rumba demarcates and prompts a repertoire of transmissions of embodied knowledge and performative memories. In the second part of the dissertation (Chapters 3--6), I analyze Central Park Rumba's repression during ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration (1994--2001), particularly under his Quality-of-Life deterrence policies and in relationship to Zero Tolerance policing techniques. I further contextualize Rumba within the U.S. Law, the racialization of crime and the criminalization of Afrodescendant leisure and aesthetic practices such as jazz, rap and graffiti. In this section we study how Rumba functions as a resistance space against the State legal apparatus in its reproduction via spectacle, theatricality and simulacrum. Rumba's ethics and poetics make evident Zero Tolerance's scripted strategies and the Law's performativity.