When Melgily Valdez ’09, Harold Flores ’09 and Emmanuel Vega ’08.5 entered the stage to host last Saturday’s Expresiones de Latinos at Crowell Music Hall, something was amiss. Valdez and Vega were wearing normal clothing, but Flores was in a Peruvian shawl and hat. He looked at his fellow hosts in confusion.
“I thought we were supposed to come out in our traditional garments,” he joked, setting the tone for a performance that was at once a celebration of cultural roots and, at times, also a pointed critique of the prevalence of racial stereotypes.
Expresiones, a showcase of student dance, music and spoken word, is an annual event organized by Ajúa Campos, a student group dedicated to celebrating Latino culture. The night featured dances from Caliente and the Sigma Chapter of La Unidad Latina, spoken word by Maya Odim ’10, Kpanlogo Drumming and an Afro-Brazilian dance called Lemanja.
The show opened with a partnered salsa dance, performed by Caliente. The dance involved complicated turns and was well-synchronized. The performers’ enjoyment was contagious. Caliente presented three other dances throughout the night: Bachata, Punta and Merengue. Although each piece was skillfully performed, the most exciting part of all four dances occurred when one girl, who teal-green satin bows hanging off her sides, spin around her partner in four inch high-heels. (As the old compliment goes, “Ginger Roberts did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.”)
For “Esa Verdad,” Odim gracefully danced on stage, bending her arms and knees as she began to recite a spoken word piece that was primarily in Spanish but mixed in a few English words. Odim is a joy to watch and, even though it was hard to understand all of the words in her piece, one came away from it with a sense of her excitement for the words themselves. Her love of language was apparent, along with a sense that her poem was trying to reconcile her bilingualism by giving voice—literally—to the tension between two languages.
For many, the most stunning part of Expresiones was the Lambda Upsilon Lambda step team. After a short skit, the fraternity brothers began a routine that amazed the audience. In the performance, the step team slapped their arms and legs to one rhythm, then stomped on the ground in loud unison to create a thunderous and energetic beat, all the while moving quickly across the stage in a tight line. The team had obviously rehearsed for many, many hours, because the piece was flawless.
As the show’s program and hosts informed the audience, the theme of Expresiones was “The Many Faces of Latinos.” Overall, the showcase presented Latino culture as diverse and beautiful, and showed that Wesleyan’s Latino community is made of students of many backgrounds. At the end of the night, all three hosts thanked their families and friends for supporting them throughout their Wesleyan careers. The goodbye was emotional, but filled with gratitude. Harold Flores explicitly thanked students of color at Wesleyan, and congratulated the Latino students on their performances.
“Shows like this show what we can do,” he said.
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