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Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos From Lisbon to Newark. By Kimberly DaCosta Holton. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press., 2005. Pp. xvi + 296, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, maps, illustrations, tables, musical notation, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper)
As a public folklorist in Long Island, I once worked with a Portuguese community in Mineola for whom folk dance was vitally important. Every Wednesday the sounds of accordions, drums, scrapers, and cavaquinhos resounded in their cultural center. As children rehearsed in the ballroom, fathers watched satellite news of Portugal and discussed soccer over vinho in the basement. The adult dancers' commitment was impressive: at their own expense they traveled throughout New England visiting other Portuguese folk dance groups (ranchos folcloricos) and spent months on end learning new repertoire in Portugal. They told me about dances-vira, malhao, shula-and about ranchos by the dozen along the northeastern seaboard. This is great stuff, I thought; someone should write a book about it. At last, someone has.
Kimberly DaCosta Holton's book, Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos From Lisbon to Newark, based on fieldwork among ranchos in Portugal and New Jersey, is flavored by the autiior's own identity as a LusoAmerican. She sets out to discover why in both locales ranchos have continued to proliferate despite their origin under the Estado Novo (1933-1974) regime...