This dissertation examines fandango practice in Seattle and its transnational collaborations in Mexico within a larger trajectory of participatory traditions as decolonial pedagogies that help to build spaces of dialogue, critical consciousness, and transborder solidarities. These trajectories, of Indigenous and Chicane activism, are reinforced by prior translocal organizing of Mexican immigrants in Seattle since the 1990’s with Grupo Cultural Oaxaqueño. I analyze fandango practice, including its music, as a community space that supports critical consciousness and in turn becomes a support in shaping transnational fandango spaces. Through a decolonial feminist praxis my analysis of fandango explores how women dancers - bailadoras - contribute to the collective fandango soundscape by creating percussive sounds with their bodies, when their rhythmic stomping, or zapateado might be otherwise bypassed by a more standard analysis that would focus only on the fandango music that is played with instruments. As a practitioner, I also know that the music of fandango, and specifically of dancers, involves acute listening to others in the percussive field. Inspired by fandango’s sensorial pedagogies and the learning de a oido, I introduce the concept “radical relational listening” to explore listening on the tarima, platform drum center staged of fandangos, as a decolonial method oriented towards embodying relations––with the community and a larger human and non-human existence. This radical listening is animated by felt epistemologies or sentipensares; the acting of the heart using the head (Botero Gomez, 2019: 302). Bailadoras find pleasure in listening via feminist intimacy and through a willful enactment of collectivity through rhythms. In my study, I use the Indigenous concept of sentipensar to bridge radical relational listening with decolonial temporality. the tarima is a temporal and conceptual space where the ancestral memory of women gathers in the presence of community (human and non-human). As I argue, the cyclical footwork that bailadoras embody on the tarima, is the materialization of a decolonial temporality because, in addition to keeping time in music, the foot percussion that women embody on the tarima is not oriented towards capitalist individualism, but instead invites us to synchronize our bodies in horizontal relationships to one another and the land. In this way, the decolonial temporality that bailadoras sound out on the tarima through our zapateado disrupts colonial logics of consumption and individualized progress marked by the hegemony and monotonous single beat of a clock. Zapateado fandanguero is oriented towards building these relations in real-time and in the present by activating a collective memory that is ancestral and felt. Relational listening conceptualized on the tarima provides a point of entry to engage in dialogue, which is also the foundation of convivencia.
I consider the bailadoras’ contributions to fandango not only in terms of the music, but also in fandango’s community building in their roles as the main organizers of the Seattle Fandango Project (SFP). By centering the analytical lens on the tarima, platform drum located at the center of the community music space, I highlight how by providing structure to the music through their cyclical foot percussion, bailadoras also influence the gender politics of the space and our collective consciousness.
Lastly, the collective foot percussion of bailadoras provides me with the theoretical platform to explore fandango practice as a catalyst for expanding critical consciousness by building community across borders, which provides a foundation for strategically deploying technologies that counter state violence in Mexico and the US. Through a Women of Color and Indigenous feminist framework, my study of participatory traditions in Seattle’s Grupo Cultural Oaxaqueño and the Seattle Fandango Project––seeks to bring visibility to the strategic organizing of Mexican immigrants and Chicanes fandango practitioners. Translocal fandango communities provide an opportunity to study embodied knowledge, affect, and joy as epistemological tools that facilitate transborder solidarity in response to state violence and capitalist oppression. By making visible fandango’s oppositional pedagogies, this dissertation reconsiders the depoliticization of AfroIndigenous participatory music traditions in the liberal university, and its conventional discourses that frame oppositional movements as exclusively conflictual and disruptive. I argue instead that building communities of social awareness around joy and dignity is a revolutionary act.