SPAN 106 Spanish For You

Joy Prior
Spanish 106
Spanish for You
To further explore and understand Hispanic culture I joined a local nonprofit organization called Remembering Our Culture that encourages minority students to attend college. Every Tuesday and Thursday for four hours we practice different cultural dances including: Asian, Native American, African, Polynesian, Indian, and Latin American. For this paper I would like to mention why I feel being a member of Remembering Our Culture will help me in the future and the various Latin American dances that I have learned.
The mission statement is: “We believe in excellence and achieve it through education. We take pride in who we are and celebrate each other’s differences. We are many races but united in one belief. That awareness brings acceptance and diversity makes us strong.” All of the members have to be striving for a secular education. Not only that how we achieve our mission statement is to preform across the western United States; most of our performances are catered towards the local elementary schools students. Our goal is to be an example of culturally diverse students who are obtaining a college education and embracing cultural heritage. I would like to become a kindergarten teacher and help students at an early age begin to care about their education. My hope is that speaking Spanish will help me encourage all of my students no matter their cultural background to obtain a higher education.
One of the first dances that we learned was Jalisco. This was such a difficult dance for me to learn. It is a common dance in Mexico, and I have seen it performed before. To me it is the big skirt dance. The men all dress up in black with these wide sombreros on and the women are in brightly colored skirts made with yards of fabric. When the couples dance together the girl can make giant circles and turns around the boy with her skirt while they dance. Before I tried to dance Jalisco I had no idea how difficult all of the foot work was, and then on top of that having to keep your arms up even with all of the weight from the skirt. The shoes help to create a crisper tapping sound. It was hard for me to do all of the rapid toe steps while I was wearing the special shoes, but it felt impossible to keep up with the rhythm without the shoes.
Another dance that I enjoyed learning was Aztec. This dance was really a great workout I decided, because the entire time I felt like I was jumping. In this dance the men have shields and the women have shakers. The dancers also have large headdresses. It is important to keep your back straight and your neck up while you dance or else the headdress will fall off. There were lots of steps that were fun in this dance. One of my favorite steps was the grapevine move. Although the foot work was similar to the grapevine the mood or form was different. When you got to the left or right side you turned to the side and did a little prick or hop move with your foot and then jumped back into the other side. One of the steps that I really struggled with was what I call the bicycle step. You stay were you are during this step, but the entire time you are lifting your legs up and down. At first when I tried to learn the step I was doing high knees, and then I learned I have to keep my foot all the way on the ground until at the last moment I pick it and pull it back. When I tried to do that I was doing a lot of ballet movements and I made the step look to “pretty” and soft. To this day I struggle making the real step.
It has been so much fun to learn about how unique and difficult other cultural dances are. Before I joined I considered myself a really talented dancer. I could do ballet, jazz, waltz, and other dances that I was failure with. Learning the different cultural dances has taught me how uniquely beautiful each culture is, and I enjoyed the opportunity to not only observe different cultures but to learn and understand new cultures.