American Jewish History

In the 1950s, the mambo was all the rage in New York City. The Afro-Cuban music form and dance practice attracted participants from across cultural and class strata. Star musicians such as Tito Puente and Celia Cruz performed with big bands in dancehalls, including New York's Palladium Ballroom on 53rd and Broadway. These musicians played to eager, full crowds of people mixing swing dance's virtuosic tricks with polyrhythmic hip swivels while their feet tapped out patterns driven by clave sticks. Mambo drew an intercultural crowd of practitioners, especially American Jews. These "mamboniks" (emphasis on the first syllable), self-described mambo lovers, are the focus of Lex Gillespie's feature-length documentary The Mamboniks. The film traces a handful of these dancers' histories practicing mambo from their time as young people to their current experiences as retirees. By shuttling back and forth between New York, Miami, and Havana, and between the 1950s and the present day, the film gives a sense of the transnational circulation of mambo (and mamboniks) as well as its intersecting diasporic contexts between the Jewish, African American, Italian, and Latinx communities in the United States.

Meeting the cast of characters gives a lived sense for the 1950s mambo scene. Spinning between Greenwich Village stoops, Jewish delis, hair salons, Miami/South Beach, Coconut Creek's Gold Coast Ballroom, and Havana's Tropicana nightclub, practitioners recount their 1950s world of mambo by visiting and narrating old haunts. The film gives a sense of mambo's longevity through these mamboniks' embodied histories. The mamboniks' experiences dancing and playing music, then at the Palladium Ballroom and now at the Gold Coast Ballroom, fosters their memories of their own lived histories by using their bodily practices to connect to their past.

Gillespie situates the mambo craze within the historical context of the United States' relationship with Cuba in the 1950s. Cuba was a popular postwar Caribbean destination for American tourists before [End Page 313] Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959. The US embargo on Cuba following the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion confrontation between the US and Soviet Union severed ties between the United States and Cuba. Cutting this contact stemmed the flow of Cuban material culture into the US. Mamboniks remember the difficulty trying to hear Cuban short-wave radio stations in New York to which they previously tuned. After the embargo, according to dancer and musician Joe Marchese, "The Cuban music just stopped coming here." He recalls driving down to Key West, Florida, tape recorder in hand, to record Cuban radio from there. The combination of the Cuban embargo, the rise of rock and roll, and the 1966 closing of the Palladium Ballroom, the mamboniks explain, greatly decreased the practice of American mambo. Yet, Gillespie also highlights how the intercultural mixing of the Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and African American communities in the Palladium offered a respite from antisemitism and racism outside its walls, alongside the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. This is an important area of inquiry that is ripe for further investigation.

The Mamboniks shows how the mambo, in turn, became a deeply embedded postwar Jewish cultural practice in New York. Many of the mamboniks anecdotally draw connections between the rhythms of klezmer and mambo as a way to explain Jewish practitioners' attraction to mambo rhythms in music and dance, but the connection seems broader than that since klezmer and mambo are otherwise musically distinct. The mambo became ubiquitous in New York-based Jewish culture in the 1950s. Mambo bands played weddings and bar mitzvahs, and swing dance nights at the 92^nd Street Young Men's/Young Women's Hebrew Association (YM/YWHA) on the Upper East Side turned into mambo nights when Tito Puente entered the scene. Mambo also traveled through Jewish channels between Cuba, Florida, and New York. Jewish families vacationing in Miami Beach luxuriated in Cuban music and dance by way of hotels featuring mambo lessons and dance nights; these vacationers brought their interests back to New York. Significantly, Jewish social life in the Catskills mountains...