Since she was an undergraduate, Petra Rivera-Rideau, associate professor of American studies at Wellesley, has been interested in closely examining aspects of popular culture, like fast-food chains and dance music. By analyzing them, she illuminates how our interactions with and perceptions of popular culture reflect systemic structures in American society, particularly those related to race.
In her new book, Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, Rivera-Rideau looks at the hit dance-fitness program Zumba, founded in 2001 by Beto Pérez, a dancer and choreographer born in Colombia. With 200,000 official locations in 180 countries, Zumba has grown tremendously since class instruction was introduced in 2012. While most research on Zumba focuses on its health benefits, in Fitness Fiesta!, Rivera-Rideau—a Zumba enthusiast herself—examines the vision of Latinness and Latin culture the program sells, expressed by five tropes: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love.
During her book launch, Rivera-Rideau discussed how each of these tropes came to her as significant cornerstones of the Zumba program and philosophy. She said that although the history the company describes as the basis for its rhythms has many inaccuracies, Zumba Fitness is highly invested in creating an image of authenticity.
In terms of “fiesta” and “fun,” Rivera-Rideau found that many of the people she spoke to or whose testimonies she came across in her research talked about losing themselves in Zumba and having a kind of fun they don’t have anywhere else. Zumba was a space where they said they could be “free.” In her book, Rivera-Rideau noted that this discourse about fun, though positive at first glance, actually reproduced a lot of racial stereotypes of exotic and hypersexual Latin cultures.
Rivera-Rideau also looked at the ways the Zumba narrative is tied up with dreams of success and making it in the United States, even though most Zumba instructors don’t earn much from teaching classes. She also noted that Zumba emphasizes multicultural love, community, and togetherness, but also uses “horrible racist tropes” to promote their classes (at one point calling a class on Chinese pop dance “Asian Invasion”), which play a role in reproducing racist stereotypes. She explores these conflicts between how Zumba operates and how the company presents itself to the rest of the world in her book.
Rivera-Rideau initially planned to focus primarily on Zumba’s connections to the Latin music industry, and she was surprised to learn that the industry regarded Zumba as a method of distribution. “It was a crossover mechanism—a way to get a buzz about the song before it came out,” she says. “So I thought that’s what the project was going to be about.”
Rivera-Rideau then realized that Zumba was about much more than she originally thought. She began thinking about the ways Zumba teachers were interacting with the messaging of the program, particularly as it related to racial dynamics: “I learned that there was a whole lot of other stuff going on in Zumba outside of the music, like the narrative of the model-minority immigrant person who makes it in the U.S. … [and] the emphasis on charity and giving back in these very neoliberal and post-race, colorblind ways.
“Zumba is this kind of weird world where there are multiple interpretations of Latin music happening simultaneously in these exercise classes … I got really interested in that, and what that said about how people understand what Latin culture is, or who Latinos are.”
Throughout her career, Rivera-Rideau has researched Latin pop music, particularly reggaetón, a genre of Latin music that rose to prominence in the 1980s and ’90s and blends elements of hip-hop, reggae, and dancehall music. In her first book, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, she examines the Black diasporic politics of reggaetón and says the genre “disrupt[s] dominant narratives of Puerto Ricanness that stress the island’s ties to Spain.” As far as she knows, Remixing Reggaetón, which came out in 2015, is still the only English-language monograph on reggaetón to be published. Since 2019, Rivera-Rideau has concentrated on one reggaetón artist in particular—Bad Bunny, known as the “King of Latin Trap.” She began teaching AMST 323: Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón, the first course on Bad Bunny in the United States, in spring 2022, and has since discussed the class in multiple media appearances. Bad Bunny himself said he wanted to take the class in an October 2023 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. In 2023, she worked with her colleague, Vanessa Díaz of Loyola Marymount University, to launch the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online educational resource based loosely on her course.
While working on Fitness Fiesta!, Rivera-Rideau developed a class that she is hoping to teach again next year, AMST 235: From Zumba to Taco Trucks: Consuming Latino/a Cultures. As an undergraduate, Rivera-Rideau says she was intimidated by the heavy-duty theory and reading assigned in her classes. With that in mind, she tries to give her students more confidence at the outset by starting with observations about familiar things, like taco trucks or Chipotle, then using them to “get at bigger questions” about the intersections between race and culture.
Rivera-Rideau encourages students to pursue their interests in popular culture, even if they fall outside academic expectations. Academia can be “fairly old-fashioned,” she says, so “it can be tough to get people to take these kinds of studies seriously,” but that just means one has to work a bit harder to demonstrate why studying these popular media matters.
Rivera-Rideau says Wellesley’s “teacher-scholar model” creates an environment that allows her to explore her research interests and incorporate them into her American studies classes. Whether they are analyzing Bad Bunny’s exploration of gender dynamics or Zumba’s representation of Latin culture, her students learn from class content and are exposed to her cutting-edge research, which broadens their horizons in a multitude of ways.