Remembering/Contesting “El Balcon’s” Tragedy: Latino Youth Subjectivity, Spacemaking, and Collectivities on New Jersey Dance Floors, 1980s-1990s.

• In Event: Latina/o Community-Building and Resistance Narratives: Radio, Music, Media Coverage, and Inter-Ethnic Relationships

Abstract

In 1994, four Latino and African American youth were crushed to death by a stampede at El Balcon’s Nightclub in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Journalists simplistically reported on the tragic event portraying young Latino clubgoers as individual(istic) consumers of the nightclub who are innately violent, masculinist, heterosexist, and underachieving. My dissertation is a counternarrative project that refutes dominant media texts about Latino youth who came of age in Elizabeth, a uniquely diverse U.S. secondary city in terms of its racial, ethnic, and socio-economic characteristics. In 2013, I collected an ethnographic interview sample of 20 Latinos who came of age there. These interviews stand in stark contrast to these texts, revealing youths’ subjectivity, spacemaking, and collectivities. In this paper, I examine the El Balcon tragedy to show how local and national journalists depicted Latino youth through dominant neoliberal and liberal multicultural ideologies that not only policed their race/ethnicity/citizenship but also isolated them from racial, ethnic, sexually plural and gender variant groupings. I argue that my informants, in certain moments, contest the “El Balcon” narrative by articulating multiple subject positionings and collectivities across race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality they experienced in both “good” neoliberal dance spaces such as civic clubs or non-heteronormative dance spaces such as privately owned nightclubs or youth-built spaces that played house, disco, and freestyle music. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on the queerness and multiplicities of Latinos.

Author

• Yamil Avivi, University of Michigan