Book Launch Party for Petra Rivera-Rideau

Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture Through Zumba

As fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fanbase of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In her new book, Fitness Fiesta!, Petra Rivera-Rideau (Associate Professor of American Studies) analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music to create and sell a vision of Latinness that's tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love.

Closely examining the videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable "south of the border"-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racial and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilites of multicultural citizenship today.