Origin of Latin Dance

Many dances popular around the world have originated in Latin America, for example the Bolero, Carimbo, Conga, Cueca, Cumbia, Joropo, Lambada, Macarena, Mambo, Merengue, Rueda, and the Salsa. Three such dances : the Samba, Rumba, and Cha Cha, plus the Paso Doble from Europe and the Jive from North America, have been singled out and are now performed all over the world as Latin-American dances in international DanceSport competitions, as well as being danced socially. These dances are for couples, usually each consisting of a man and a lady. The holds vary from figure to figure in these dances, sometimes in closed ballroom hold, sometimes with the partners holding each other with only one hand. The figures in these dances are standardised and categorised into various levels for teaching, with internationally agreed vocabularies, techniques, rhythms and tempos. But it was not always so. These 'Latin-American' dances were only been introduced into Western-European society in the twentieth century, and have some diverse origins in previous eras.

The three dances from Latin America evolved as a fusion of Indigenous, European and Negro forms. The European conquerors imported Negro slaves from various parts of West Africa into a large part of the Americas at an early stage, mainly because of the difficulty the Europeans had in persuading the Indigenes to work for them. The African slaves were imported in such number that by 1553, they outnumbered the Europeans in Mexico, and the Viceroy, Luis de Velasco, urged Charles V of Spain to prohibit further influx.

Dancing played a substantial part in all three component cultures: European, Negro and Indigenous. In 1569, the Viceroy of Mexico ordered the Aztec Calendar Stone to be buried because the main recreation of the Negroes had become dancing around it. Subsequently, Velasco decreed that dancing be confined to Sundays and feast days only, and then only in the afternoons between the hours of noon and 6 p.m.