Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 240 pages. $24.95 softcover.

Gustavo Ponce
Independent Scholar


Sydney Hutchinson’s From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture is a riveting and award-worthy study. This book is simply brilliant. Hutchinson takes on the quebradita/tecnobanda dance craze of the mid 1990s. This dance style was particularly popular among Latino youth in Los Angeles and Tucson and, by 2006, it evolved into pasito duranguense in Chicago. Hutchinson presents an insightful social and critical analysis of how mainstream American culture has repeatedly failed to incorporate these subaltern groups into its political, social, and economic apparatus. (more…)