Danzón in Veracruz and Mexico City

The danzón is a slow, ceremonious partner dance in 2/4 time, in which couples work through prescribed footwork around syncopated accents and then pause, standing, to listen as the band plays its virtuoso instrumental passages.^[4] Cuba recognizes the form as its official genre and national dance,^[1] yet one of its most durable homes lay across the Gulf of Mexico, in the port of Veracruz and in Mexico City, where the dance was performed and reinvented for more than a century. So completely did it settle into those two centers that, by the late twentieth century, dancers from Veracruz and Mexico City were treated as among the form's few remaining native practitioners,^[3] while scholarship on its Mexican reception has concentrated on post-Revolutionary Mexico City, where the danzón became bound up with shifting codes of public intimacy and urban leisure.^[2]

The danzón's musical lineage runs back through the Spanish Caribbean. It descended from the Cuban contradanza, the salon dance also known as the habanera — itself a creole reworking of the European country dance and French contredanse that the Spanish, rulers of the island for almost four centuries (1511–1898), had carried to Cuba; the form may have been seeded further during the brief British occupation of Havana in 1762 and again by Haitian refugees of the 1791–1804 revolution, whose French-Haitian kontradans contributed its own Creole syncopation, before fusing on the island with African rhythm and dance into a genuine blend of European and African streams.^[5] The genre had crystallized into a recognizable form by 1879, when Miguel Failde introduced his 'Las alturas de Simpson' in Matanzas, an event later scholarship treats as a conventional point of origin.^[6] Its characteristic timbre belonged to the charanga or típica ensemble, whose instrumental episodes the dancers honored with those listening pauses.^[4]

What chiefly distinguished the danzón's Mexican career from its Cuban one was the freight of social meaning it took on. Veracruz — long Mexico's oldest and historically most significant port on the Gulf of Mexico — and the capital became the form's twin Mexican anchors, and their dancers retained a fluency with it that observers elsewhere in the country did not share.^[3] Studies of the dance in post-Revolutionary Mexico City read its halls as arenas in which urban men and women negotiated intimacy and respectability amid a modernizing capital.^[2] That regional concentration helps explain the surprise with which commentators met a renewed national enthusiasm for the dance late in the century — a wave of interest that crested around María Novaro's 1991 film Danzón.^[8]

The danzón also proved generative for the Caribbean genres that followed it. In Cuba it fed, by way of the danzón-mambo, directly into the formation of the mambo and the cha-cha-chá,^[7] and it persisted as an active musical form beyond the island, in the United States and Puerto Rico. Seen this way, the Mexican danzón was never an isolated provincial survival but one node in a broad hemispheric circulation of Cuban dance music whose reach extended well past the halls of Veracruz and Mexico City.

The genre's prestige in Mexico is nowhere clearer than in its passage into the concert hall. Arturo Márquez's orchestral Danzón No. 2, commissioned by the Department of Musical Activities of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was premiered in 1994 in Mexico City by the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM under the conductor Francisco Savín.^[9] It became one of the most frequently performed works of Mexican concert music and is so tightly identified with national feeling that it is informally called the country's second national anthem.^[10] Its reach widened still further after the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, led by Gustavo Dudamel, carried it abroad on a 2007 tour of Europe and the Americas, completing the danzón's journey from the dance floors of Veracruz and Mexico City to the international symphonic repertoire.^[11]