Bámbula and Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba: Re-remembering the Place of Dance in Latinx Life

Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor

Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Her research interests include: Latinx theatre and performance, Dance Studies, nightlife, epistemologies of the body, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora. Dr. Power-Sotomayor is currently working on a monograph called ¡Habla!:Speaking Bodies in Latinx Dance and Performance in which she theorizes her concept of “embodied code-switching” across distinct “Latinx” social dance spaces. Publications can be found in TDR, Performance Matters, Latino Studies Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, The Oxford Handbook of Theatre and Dance and Theatre Journal (forthcoming). Her essays on the Fandango Fronterizo and on bomba dancing have been recognized with awards from the Dance Studies Association, American Society for Theatre Research, and the American Studies Association’s Sound Studies caucus. In 2019 she co-edited a special issue of CENTRO Journal: “Puerto Rican Bomba: Syncopating Bodies, Histories, Geographies” and collaborates on the Bomba Wiki project, a crowdsourced online bomba archive. She also works as a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego group Bomba Liberté. She is grateful to her many teachers and students for gifting her a lifelong experience of learning.