Danzón in Mexico and Veracruz

The danzón is Cuba's official genre and dance — and a living tradition in the United States and Puerto Rico besides — but across the Gulf of Mexico it found a durable second home in the port of Veracruz and, inland, in Mexico City.^[1] Written in duple meter, it is a slow, formal partner dance: the footwork is set, turning around syncopated beats, and at intervals the couple breaks off to stand in place and listen while a charanga or típica ensemble plays a virtuoso instrumental passage.^[3] Those traits travelled the maritime routes binding Havana to the Mexican coast, and Veracruz — long oriented toward the Caribbean — absorbed them readily.

Cuban roots

The danzón had crystallized as a distinct genre in Cuba by 1879, when Miguel Failde's "Las alturas de Simpson" was first performed in Matanzas — the culmination of its growth out of the contradanza and the habanera.^[2] Those antecedents were the Cuban descendants of the European country dance and contredanse, carried to the island across centuries of Spanish rule and given a Creole syncopation by Haitian refugees of the 1791–1804 revolution; African rhythmic practice on the island then reshaped the whole into a genuine European-African fusion.

Veracruz: the plaza danzón

Veracruz had the geography to receive such an exchange. A major port on the Gulf, it is the oldest, largest, and historically most significant harbor in Mexico, developed during Spanish colonization.^[4] Its culture fuses indigenous, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean strands, an inheritance most audible in the city's food and music.^[5] There the danzón became a ritual of the plaza and the dance hall rather than a stage spectacle: couples still gather on the zócalo to dance it on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings, and onlookers are free to step in — a sociability well matched to a port long accustomed to layered Caribbean influence.

Mexico City and post-revolutionary intimacy

Mexico City formed the danzón's second pole. The historian Robert Buffington has examined the dance's hold on the capital and the way its dance halls reworked the codes of intimacy in post-revolutionary Mexico City, where the salón de baile became a regulated arena for public courtship.^[6] The genre thus carried distinct meanings in the two centers — a badge of provincial Caribbean identity on the Gulf, and a negotiated modern sociability in the metropolis.

Beyond the dance hall: screen and symphony

Cinema renewed the genre's national profile at the start of the 1990s. The craze that gathered around María Novaro's 1991 feature film Danzón drew broad attention, even though the dance had remained most familiar to aficionados from Veracruz or Mexico City.^[7] The film recast a form often regarded as the preserve of older couples into a subject of wide cultural interest.

Concert music carried the danzón further still. The Mexican composer Arturo Márquez wrote Danzón No. 2 — the most celebrated of a series of nine pieces bearing that title — on a commission from the National Autonomous University of Mexico; the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM gave the premiere under Francisco Savín on 5 March 1994 in Mexico City.^[8] On the work's twentieth anniversary the Mexican government named it the second most famous work of Mexican concert music, behind only José Pablo Moncayo's Huapango, and it is colloquially treated as a kind of second national anthem.^[9] Its reach widened abroad after the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, programmed it on a 2007 tour, carrying a dance rooted in Veracruz and Havana onto symphonic stages worldwide.^[10]