One, two, three… one, two, three.
Dance was Manuel Cuellar’s first language, and the form of expression became a surrogate for English as he assimilated to the United States when his family moved to Los Angeles from Chihuahua, Mexico. Intimacy, longing, relating, belonging, that’s all most people want. Exposed to dance in Mexico, he carried his forte with him to Los Angeles where he found these ways of being in touch with his surroundings he yearned for. On an otherwise ordinary day walking his younger sister to elementary school, Cuellar’s mother got in touch with a local dance studio. Soon enough, he was volunteering in an after-school program for local youth as a dance instructor, and Los Angeles gradually felt more like a home. “One, two, three… one, two, three” was the first English he felt self-motivated to learn, and he has never forgotten how volunteering helped him find a sense of community and belonging.
Cuellar’s new book on the political implications of dance, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation, was recently celebrated at a book launch hosted by the GW Cisneros Institute, the Mexican Cultural Institute, and the Department of Romance, German, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. The book explores the meaning behind dance; the musical culture of sound and movement; the art that connected people from all backgrounds in post-revolutionary Mexico and across the Mexican diaspora in the United States. As Cuellar stated, when “brown bodies” have been feared, they have turned to dance to express themselves and create communities of their own.
“For me, the main idea is that my research on the impact of Mexican dance in the configuration of a sense of identity and belonging in Mexico and across the Mexican diaspora draws directly from my experience as a dancer, instructor, and choreographer,” Cuellar said in an email. “It focuses on bodily movement because it asks readers to consider other ways of creating knowledge and transmitting it beyond the written word.”
Cuellar continues to participate in the non-profit dance company Corazón Folklórico in D.C. to give back to the community that has so prevalently tapped into his enthusiasm for dance. In fact, following the panel discussion portion of the book launch event, he delighted the crowd by performing with the company. Using his research as reference, Cuellar brings his awareness of embodied expression from dance into the classroom.
Cuellar earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley and is now an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at GW. His purposefully designed GW courses, such as SPAN 4480 “Studies in Latinx Cultural Production” or SPAN 3550 “Queer Latin America,” link his mastery of dance and interest in embodied knowledges with identity, cultural production, and community service.
Given the important role that volunteerism played in his own life, Cuellar encourages his GW students to engage in the local community as well. Students in SPAN 4480, for instance, are given a choice for one of the assignments: either a traditional research paper, or a more hands-on community partnership project with a local group – such as the Latino Student Fund and the Latin American Youth Center – serving the Spanish-speaking community in D.C. At the end of the semester, the students give a class presentation reflecting on their experience, connecting it to course themes.
As many continue to recognize his interdisciplinary research, panelist Bridget Christine Arce at the recent GW book launch event went into depth about Cuellar’s inspirational words that provided meaning beyond what dance looks like on the surface.
“Cuellar reminds us of how movement, rhythm, and sounds are not just performances for the stage, but for the home,” Arce said. “How they create a kinesthetic intimacy for feeling, for kinship and national identity, but most importantly for belonging.”
