Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Poetics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic

“From Angola to the world”, from the world to Lisbon and Paris:
T
How structural inequalities shaped the global kizomba dance
industry
Livia Jiménez Sedano
National Distance Education University (UNED), Spain

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: A form of couple dance popular since the eighties in urban contexts of Portuguese-speaking
Kizomba Africa was commodified in Lisbon in the late nineties under the label kizomba, pointing to Angola
Globalization as its original source. It met with unexpectedly great success in dance schools all over Portugal
Commodification and, in a few years, became a global phenomenon following on salsa circuits so that nowadays it
Dance
is possible to find a kizomba dance school in almost every corner of the world. The objective of
Transnationalism
Africa
this paper is to analyse how structural inequalities shaped the global kizomba industry, imposing
conditions on its professional circuits, redirecting the movements of people, moulding its symbols
and reorienting the circulation of capital from the peripheries towards hegemonic centres. Within
this objective, I provide empirical descriptions of how kizomba was commodified and how the
global circuits were constituted. I propose that the debates on authenticity and African-ness
across the global kizomba community make sense in this specific context of inequalities, before
concluding that this case constitutes an example of how the metaphor of “flow” proves in-
appropriate for accounting for global culture circulation.

1. Introduction1

Starting in the 1980s, zouk music from the West Indies (Guilbault, 1993) became popular in the urban contexts of Portuguese-
speaking Africa, where many artists created derived styles (Cidra, 2010). The informal couple dancing associated to these beats
attracted the attention of “world dances” producers who used to attend the so-called “African discos” of Lisbon, a city that con-
centrates immigration from all the PALOPs.2 In the late 1990s, the multiple informal ways of dancing went under commodification as
a single and packed style labelled kizomba. Even though its origin myth, perpetuated through dance schools, situates its birthplace in
Angola and then draws a linear history, “from Angola to the world”, these couple dance practices actually emerged out of a deep
history of transoceanic, inter-African and transnational connections (Jiménez, in press a; Kabir, 2014, 2015, 2018).
From the perspective of middle class kizomba consumers, one of its most appealing features consists of a proxemics that is unusual
in the world of commodified genres: the two partners dance in a close embrace allowing for tight body contact, a characteristic often
interpreted as ‘too sexual’ by many external observers. The romantic beat of the music is accompanied with coordinated slow and
sinuous rhythmic movements that sometimes end up with navel shocks and sometimes turn into almost imperceptible slow-motion

E-mail address: liviajs@fsof.uned.es.

1
I wish to thank professor Nancy Konvalinka for her insightful comments on a previous version of this paper.
2
PALOPs stands for “African countries of official Portuguese language” in Portuguese. This acronym will be used to refer to the Portuguese-
speaking Africa throughout the paper.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.04.001
Received 30 April 2018; Received in revised form 24 March 2019; Accepted 1 April 2019
Available online 13 May 2019
0304-422X/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

moves. These traits, combined with the aficionados´ habit of closing their eyes on the dance floor, turn the dancing into a quite
intimate experience frequently shared with unknown partners. Throughout the commodification process, teachers gradually in-
troduced new acrobatic and complex steps stemming from other ballroom styles such as salsa, tango and bachata.3 As a result, the
kinetic languages of commodified kizomba dance floors evolved along diverging paths.
This commodified kizomba product was met with unexpectedly great success in dance schools all over Portugal before some
individuals tried to export it beyond the borders. In less than a decade, it had spread virtually all over the world in the wake of the
global salsa circuits and gained visibility on Internet platforms such as YouTube and Facebook (Soares, 2015). Building on the
concept of the “global salsa industry” (Hutchinson, 2014; McMains, 2016) we might say that the “global kizomba industry” was born.
This globalization process was so fast that nowadays it is possible to find a kizomba dance school in almost every corner of the world
(Kabir, 2013). Its success relied on its ability to adopt multiple meanings in each different context, what Goertzen and Azzi (1999) call
“semantic flexibility” when analysing the spread of the tango, a characteristic that all effective symbols share (Velasco, 2007). In this
way, the dance adapted to local kinetic cultures, learning processes and dance floor etiquettes, as also happened with salsa
(Hosokawa, 1997; Hutchinson, 2014). Summing up, just like salsa, we can claim that kizomba “epitomizes many of the features that
have been associated with globalization: hybridity, deterritorialization, commodification and cosmopolitanism” (Hutchinson, 2014:
14). Interestingly, in the context of Europe, the global kizomba industry achieved its deepest economic impact in the postcolonial
cities of Lisbon and Paris, turning them into the main “hubs” (Glick-Schiller & Meinhof, 2011) for the transnational community. In
this sense, I would assert that the global echo moved “from the world to Lisbon and Paris," at least for aficionados living in Europe. In
addition, in the case of Portugal, kizomba´s success was only confirmed through this global validation. A practice regarded with
suspicion and associated with the stigmatized African discos of Lisbon came back metamorphosed in a successful and attractive
“global taste” (Lavie and Varriale, in this volume) shared by a transnational community (Levitt, 2001; Marion, 2008) of European
cosmopolitan middle-class world dance consumers. Interestingly enough, the commodified kizomba dance craze developed in Europe
has also spread through the African continent, so that dance schools and festivals following previous salsa circuits can be found in
cities such as Cairo, Dakar, Accra, Johannesburg, Zanzibar, Libreville and Cape Town.4
The kizomba phenomenon represents an especially interesting and atypical case for the analysis of the globalization of culture.
First, it may be taken as an example of “contra-flow” (Thussu, 2007) that challenges the Americanization paradigm (Tomlinson,
1991), directing our attention to the agency, cosmopolitanism and modernity of contemporary African societies. Instead of portraying
them as passive consumers of cultural products coming from hegemonic centres, it demonstrates how they appropriate multiple
recent influences from all over the world to creatively produce their own original music and dance cultures able to captivate in-
ternational attention (Moorman, 2008: 111). Second, it represents an uncommon case in the literature of dance globalization, as
commodification and institutionalization took place in a semi-peripheral South European city (Lisbon) instead of an hegemonic
“global city” (Sassen, 2005) such as New York, London or Paris.5 Third, correspondingly, the kizomba case provides us with an
empirical example that is quite helpful for understanding how structural inequalities operate in global markets, reorienting the
circulation of cultural, economic and “kinetic capital” (Hutchinson, 2014) and thus reinforcing to some extent the existing im-
balances at several levels. The field of ethnomusicology has been fertile in providing a line of critical analysis regarding the unequal
politics of “world music” global circulation (Erlmann, 1993; Feld, 2000; Garofalo, 1993; Goodwin & Gore, 1990). In this sense, we
may conclude that the neoliberal utopia of democratization through globalization (Scholte, 2004; Woods, 1998) does not resist an
empirical test (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001; Harvey, 2005; Jameson, 1984). These new rhetorical constructions on “globalization”
and their neutralizing terminologies (Pratt, 2006; Tsing, 2000) make sense in the specific context of the contemporary postcolonial
world (Inglis & Robertson, 2005) hiding its darker side. As I will try to demonstrate through the empirical case of kizomba, even
though the “flow” metaphor has spread through key authors such as Appadurai, 1996 and Castells (2000), “global culture” (including
kizomba) does not “flow” throughout the world.
This paper stems from my postdoctoral project “Dancing ethnicities in a transnational world6, which contains the general ob-
jective of exploring the diverse ways in which ethnicity is constructed out of social dance contexts. The theoretical framework
straddles the crossroads between Anthropology and Ethnomusicology while the research methodology derives from ethnography.
Between 2013 and 2015, I carried out fieldwork in kizomba dancing contexts in Spain and Portugal: mainly, participant observation
in the so-called African7 discos, kizomba dance schools and kizomba international festivals. It involved taking lessons, socializing with
aficionados and party-goers, dancing with informants, having a good deal of informal conversations, combining strategies of more
(i.e., intensive dancing nights) or less (i.e., observing from the DJ´s place or behind the bar) participant observation and keeping
dense fieldwork diaries throughout three years. Some problems of doing night fieldwork proved to be exhaustion, sexual harassment
as an unaccompanied female ethnographer, and difficulties in filming situations that involved invading the privacy of participants
(García, 2013). Moreover, the rather ambitious multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) I had planned led me to strenuous efforts for

3
In order to provide the reader with a visual example of the commodified version of the dance, I suggest watching the following youtube video.
Performed by the teachers Albir Rojas and Sara López in 2012, it became rather popular among kizomba aficionados during fieldwork: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=29DT-71bk-M
4
I wish to thank my colleagues Elina Djebbari and Alice Aterianus for sharing their knowledge on the spread of kizomba throughout the African
continent with me.
5
See for example: Hutchinson (2014) for salsa, Savigliano (1995) for tango, or Buckland (2011) for British ballroom.
6
This postdoctoral project was funded by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Government of Portugal).
7
Ethnic and ethno-national categories are considered objects of analysis and not scientific categories (Jiménez, in press c; Brubaker, 2002; Díaz de
Rada, 2014). For this reason, they appear in italics.

2
L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

achieving integration into multiple fields in a short time and getting integrated in multiple social groups. During the first year of
fieldwork, I followed the weekly circuit of aficionados in Madrid, arriving at the opening time and staying until the end of the party.
In the second year, I tried to reproduce this strategy in Lisbon, but the field of African nightlife was so incredibly wide and varied that
I had to make choices among the many clubs established within the metropolitan area. I based my selection on three criteria: the
clubs that research participants considered the best, those they deemed well-known meeting points, and as much varied as possible in
what refers to the ethnic labels associated to their clientele (Angolan, Guinean, and Cape Verdean discos). Participant observation was
complemented by 33 in-depth interviews with informants of diverse ethnic backgrounds: DJs, musicians, dance teachers, dance
students, security staff, nightclub owners and promotors behind kizomba events as well as their public relations staff. In order to
document the global spread of the dance, I searched for and transcribed a total of 109 public interviews with kizomba artists and
teachers working in diverse countries available from diverse websites, the radio (mainly RTP Africa, a Portuguese channel focused on
the PALOPs and their presence in Portugal) and television (mainly TPA, the Angolan public television channel). I interpret these
secondary sources as discourses produced for an audience of potential and real aficionados, in which performers try to position
themselves advantageously in the global market according to emic criteria. In order to enrich the analysis, I also collected videos and
debates posted and commented on from Facebook and YouTube, the two Internet platforms that proved especially relevant to the
global development of kizomba.
The objective of this paper is to analyse how structural inequalities have shaped kizomba commodification and globalization at
least at three levels, which provide the three axes that structure the text: the symbolic, the international labour market and the global
economy level. In the next section, I focus on the symbolic level, analysing how the global circulation of kinetic signifiers has
improved the image of “African culture” associating it with modernity and cosmopolitanism but reinforcing previous negative ste-
reotypes at the same time. Section three focuses on the level of international labour markets, pointing out how actors labelled African
living in Europe have not always been the ones to benefit the most from the globalization of kizomba, especially in the case of
women. As I will argue, the position and experience in the global salsa industry proves more relevant for defining, producing and
spreading global kizomba than having embodied the dancing habitus (Bourdieu, 1995) appropriate in social contexts labelled African.
The fourth section explores the level of the global economy, analysing how the Portuguese-speaking Africa benefited less from the
kizomba global industry than Europe, at least in the beginning. Moreover, Paris, a city better positioned in the global economy
(Parilla, Marchio, & Trujillo, 2016), was more successful than Lisbon, the favourite destination for European aficionados, in attracting
dance crowds. In the closing section, I reflect critically on the concept of “flow” (Pratt, 2006) and the “space of flows” (Castells, 2000;
Rumford, 2006) as discursive tools that hide the way globalization helps reinforce structural inequalities.

2. Symbolic level: from colonial stigma to global taste

In Europe, and more intensively in the specific context of Lisbon, the commodified kizomba dance culture helped to spread a
positive image of African culture, associated with modernity, cosmopolitism and sophistication, while also simultaneously reinforcing
previously existing negative stereotypes that justified ethnic hierarchies (McMains, 2016). Indeed, the simple association of African
dances with a form of immoral sexuality and primitivism dates back to colonial times, a period rich in dance descriptions written from
an ethnocentric male colonial point of view (Castro Ribeiro, 2012; Ortiz, 1985; Travassos, 2003). For the specific case of kizomba, we
can find an example of a scandalized colonial description in texts written by the anthropologist Chatelein in the 19th century. He
defined kizombas as “social groups” or “lodges” that structured society into groups of belonging and organized members´ funeral
ceremonies.
According to him, the mourning ritual might last from one to four weeks, and during this time guests were entertained and given
free food, drink, dancing, and what he described as “orgies frequently ending in gross immorality” (Chatelein, 1896: 17). Ortiz (1985)
and Travassos (2004) discuss the multi-layered complexity of these dances, which express ideas about sexuality, as well as about
kinship (Grau, 1988), maternity, social institutions, politics (Browning, 1995; Quintero, 2009) and cosmology (Daniel, 2005) through
movement; they show how these dances were ethnocentrically perceived in the colonial era as a pure mimesis of sexual intercourse
for entertaining and exciting the observer. For this reason and for the political risk involved in their capacity for gathering people
around them, colonial officers tried to control them or even banned them (Castro Ribeiro, 2012; Quintero, 2009; Vieira Nery, 2001).
This aura of moral panic from the external observer´s perspective never disappeared completely and is still present in postcolonial
Europe. Nevertheless, the market of “world dances” fostered a process of resignification in the formation of “global tastes”.
In the twenty-first century, kizomba music and dance took the leap from being marginalized styles regarded with moral suspicion
in a postcolonial context to entering mainstream Portuguese culture in less than one decade. Unlike salsa, which took more than
twenty years to make a similar journey in the USA (McMains, 2016: 490), the kizomba phenomenon advanced swiftly and intensively,
integrating into the daily soundscapes of Lisbon in a very short period of time. Undoubtedly, globalization had a huge impact on this
fast cultural change in perception through a mirror effect, what Goertzen and Azzi (1999) call “validation through visibility”.
Nevertheless, negative stereotypes about African culture and people were also reinforced, such as the idea of hyper-sexuality and lack
of self-control (Marcon, Jiménez & Raposo, 2018), which also happened with the tango (Savigliano, 1995) and salsa (Hosokawa,
1997; McMains, 2016). Even though it gained some respectability, kizomba never lost its sexual connotations and its association with
wild behaviour usually ascribed to “hot African people”, sometimes turning the dance into a caricature,8 a phenomenon we also find

8
There is a clear representation of this stereotype in the following performance for the TV Show “Dancing with the Stars”: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=fJFq8dEMwfs

3
L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

in other commodified dances such as salsa (McMains, 2016). This stereotype proved to be more than an abstract idea and had
concrete effects on my informants´ lives. For example, a Portuguese kizomba aficionada who worked as a teacher in a private Catholic
school told me that she had to ask her dance partner to stop posting pictures of them dancing on Facebook. The school head had
reported parents´ complaints to her and had warned her that she would be fired if she continued to set this “bad example” to children.
Colonial ghosts were still alive in 2014 postcolonial society.
In order to account for the impact that kizomba globalization had in the context of postcolonial Lisbon, I will start by providing a
brief historical context of the transformation from stigma to fashion that African music and dance have experienced in Portugal since
the 1990s. According to Almeida et al., the immigrant population labelled African suffers the highest levels of poverty, as well as
economic and social vulnerability within the city´s context (Vale de Almeida et al., 1992: 87–90). The prevailing negative stereotypes
of African people also affected such symbols as popular music, dance and nightlife. Nevertheless, during the nineties these cultural
expressions were resignified through two processes. First, a re-contextualization of “tribal dances” in the global market of “traditional
world dances”. Second, a re-contextualization of popular social dance in the global market of “modern world dances” under the label
“kizomba”, linking it symbolically to a prestigious couple dance disconnected from direct postcolonial conflict in the imaginary of
Lisbon citizens: salsa.
During the 1990s, the period when the Portuguese economy was in expansion and immigration rates to the country were growing,
the social actors who would become the first kizomba teachers arrived in Portugal. Even though they share immigration processes
from Portuguese-speaking African countries and personal dance-related histories, their trajectories prove to be diversified. For ex-
ample, António Bandeira arrived in 1991 as a full time member of the Angolan Armed Forces with a fellowship for studying piloting
in Lisbon. In 1992, Tomas Keita arrived from Guinea Bissau as a football player. In 1994, Avelino Chantre was selected for the troupe
that would perform the show “Dançar Cabo Verde” (“Dancing Cape Verde”) in Clara Andermatt’s9 contemporary dance company in
Lisbon. In 1996, Kwenda Lima came from Cape Verde to study aeronautical engineering at Lisbon University, while Petchú arrived
from Angola after touring throughout Europe with his traditional Angolan dance company “Ballet Kilandukilu”. In 1998, Zé Barbosa
travelled from Cape Verde after receiving an invitation to participate in the theatre project “Preto no Branco” (“Black in White”).
Hence, a heterogeneous group of people with diversified individual trajectories arrived in Lisbon throughout the 1990s and formed
what will be called the “velha guarda” (“old guard”) of commodified kizomba dance.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the Portuguese economy expanded, a growing middle class wished to participate in mod-
ernity by sharing a cosmopolitan ethos, and they turned into a perfect target for the emerging leisure markets. In this context, the
“world dance” market flourished in the country, challenging negative postcolonial stereotypes. The new fashionable dance called
kizomba appeared as one more component of this “modernity pack” (Marcon et al., 2018). In the summer of 1996, the first “world
dances” Andanças10 Festival took place in Portugal organized by the association Pé Do Chumbo.11 Pavilions representing the five
continents were set up and some organization members searched for teachers of African traditional rhythms among their immigrant
neighbours. For example, Petchú recalled in an interview that he was recruited by chance when a staff member who was distributing
fliers for the event saw him and his troupe performing African traditional dances in the metro. Some members of the “old guard”, such
as Petchú and Zé Barbosa, worked giving workshops and performing in shows for the first editions of the Andanças Festival. There,
they had the opportunity to meet one of the event’s producers, a Portuguese man called Quim, who was also organizing regular
workshops in “modern world dances” outside the festival context. When he entered in contact with them, he came up with the
inspired idea of introducing the type of social dance he had witnessed and tried out in some of Lisbon’s African nightclubs as one
more “exotic” discipline along with belly dancing, flamenco, salsa, and others. In this way, African dances underwent a process of
resignification in the new cosmopolitan context of “world dances”. The next step towards social acceptance consisted of connecting
the social dance labelled kizomba with the salsa world, an already well-established signifier of cosmopolitanism and positively spicy
exotic couple dance.12
Petchú recalls that Quim proposed this project to him for the Andanças Festival. One year later, he and other teachers accepted the
challenge. Quim chose “Kizomba” as the market label and ran classes in two dance schools where he developed his projects in the late
1990s: Dance Factory and Ateneu. The close of the last century represented an experimental period for kizomba commodification, and
the first group of teachers would become the official authorities at the national and international level some years later. The “old
guard” was composed of a group of artists that included Petchú, Zé Barbosa, Waty Barbosa, Gazuza, Kwenda Lima, Tomás Keita,
Avelino Chantre, António Bandeira and Hélio Santos. Nevertheless, in this period, they did not consider it to be as something serious
in commercial or artistic terms. Correspondingly the ambience, as they remember, was informal and relaxed.
In order to make the style marketable, it had to go through a process of rationalization (Weber, 1958). The implicit way of
learning and performing that made sense in informal settings proved inappropriate for the classroom context. Therefore, the shape of
movement, direction, aesthetics, proxemics, legitimacy criteria and the whole dance event changed dramatically. The first teachers
had to engage in an exercise of abstraction that resulted in the introduction of geometric principles that involved counting steps and
the explicit planning of directions, something alien to the informal practice. In order to obtain the steps they would teach, they
needed to isolate sequences of movements from the continuous flux experienced on the dance floor. Throughout this process of

9
A well-known Portuguese choreographer. The project was commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and featured the participation
of Paulo Ribeiro, another famous choreographer.
10
“Wanderings”, this contains a play on words as the last part of the word means “dances”.
11
“Heavy feet”, an idiom to mockingly describe people who have limited dancing skills.
12
This idea is further developed in the next section.

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

rationalization, not only was the shape of movement transformed but also the whole ethos of the dance, just as had happened with
previously commodified dance styles such as ragtime (Robinson, 2010: 185). The logics of “right” and “wrong”, which made no sense
on African dance floors, entered the world of dance lessons. Moreover, teachers modified the proxemics to make the couple dance
acceptable to middle class consumers. As I was able to observe during fieldwork, there was huge diversity in the ways of performing
kizomba and, with the distances considered normal between partners depending on the club, it is correspondingly impossible to
provide a single description of the dance that is valid and applicable to all of them. For example, while the Angolan elites used to
perform with great distance and with an upward body position rather similar to British ballroom dancing, in the more popular Cape
Verdean-owned clubs, partners used to press their torsos together and moved with great physical connection in a way deemed too
sexual for a conservative Portuguese society used to other bodily conventions. For this reason, most teachers found a balance and
offered a single version of the dance that could fulfill the “African culture” expectations of students and that they could experience as
spicy while not disturbing. As Savigliano states for the case of tango commodification, African teachers had to accept a politics of self-
exoticization in order to succeed in the dance market, in such a way that the dance was moulded according to the exoticizer´s desire
(Savigliano, 1991: 205). Another set of changes stemmed from students beginning to demand new repertoire: each teacher found a
way of bringing new steps into the classroom by virtue of combining the existing elements, creatively inventing new movements, or
even mixing them with other dance styles. This process of interchanging steps from one dance to another is similar to what Robinson
called “variation” for the case of ragtime (Robison 2010:188). Summing up, the dance was simplified, homogenized, “sanitized”,
cleaned and de-politicized through commodification, a process that many Latin dances had previously undergone (Goertzen & Azzi,
1999; Hutchinson, 2014; McMains, 2006; Savigliano, 1995).
In the following years, the “old guard” teachers witnessed in astonishment at how the number of students grew exponentially,
constituting the beginning of the “kizomba boom” in Portugal. The number of teachers, producers, parties and students rose dra-
matically, as I was able to confirm from my ethnographic material. The combination of the looming financial crisis in Portugal and
the unexpected global success of kizomba turned it into a scenario featuring both hard competition over attracting students, in which
European teachers better connected to salsa circuits often succeeded even more than their African teachers. In these structural
conditions of severe disempowerment, their strategy for keeping some control over the global market consists of maintaining the
tension around the definition of “authentic kizomba” and reserving themselves the prerogative to define what “African culture”
means (Cohen, 1969; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009) depending on the situation (Díaz de Rada, 2008; Jenkins, 1994; Okamura, 1981).
While some claimed that it was an Angolan dance (i.e., Petchú), others portrayed it as Cape-Verdean (i.e., Hélio Santos), African (i.e.,
Zé Barbosa) or just global (i.e., Afrolatin Connection). As we shall see in the next section, this conflict makes sense in the context of a
market that reproduced structural inequalities, so that non-Africans inside the salsa industry succeeded more easily than African
performers coming from outside this world.

3. The international labour market: access and success through salsa circuits

Nowadays, we can find kizomba dance in virtually every corner of the world, from Poland to Australia, from Buenos Aires to
Taiwan, Cairo, Tunisia, New York, Miami, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, Japan and Kazakhstan (Kabir, 2013; Soares, 2015). Since
2006, having already turned into a successful commodity in Lisbon, the dance has spread throughout the globe in just a short time
period. One key factor that may help explain this rapid dissemination is the fact that kizomba preyed upon global salsa circuits. The
first and most remarkable point is that kizomba did not need to establish its own international market structures from the outset, as it
integrated into and followed the already existing global salsa circuits and networks. The dance was made available in salsa schools,
venues, and international salsa congresses13 and often by salsa teachers. As many aficionados switched from salsa to the new dance, I
can conclude that kizomba not only entered but also preyed upon salsa networks for its development. Correspondingly, market
competition broke out between the teachers, DJs and promoters of each style. In this context, DJ Nuno Melo regretted having
promoted kizomba in his salsa venues in Lisbon and expressed himself in this way:
“At this moment, I am trying to separate what I tried to put together in the beginning (…). I think this is the only way for surviving
(….). There have to be separate places (…). If they get together, salsa loses (…). (K)izomba looks for people in the salsa scene14 .”
(Interview with DJ Nuno Melo, 25th March 2014)
While competing with salsa for attracting students, kizomba had the comparative advantage of being considered “easier” by
potential students, and correspondingly as leading to faster social integration into the dance floor. This perceived “easiness” does not
relate to the inner characteristics of the dance but to the different historical trajectories of each genre. In other words, its comparative
“simplicity” is probably due to the fact that kizomba finds itself at an earlier stage of commodification-globalization and corre-
sponding complexification than global salsa (Hutchinson, 2014: 12). As a result, two dancing communities, salseros and kizombeiros.
partially overlapped in events, venues and schools. It was only when the movement acquired a dimension that allowed it to become
independent that the first African festivals, venues and events developed. For example, the popular yearly Benidorm salsa festival
(Spain), in which organizers provided a small room for hosting both bachata lovers and an emergent group of kizomba aficionados,

13
The event model, created for the First World Salsa Congress in Puerto Rico in 1996 (Hutchinson, 2014: 6-7; McMains, 2016), includes
workshops, an international competition, professional performances, social dance venues and the merchandising of products such as shoes, clothes,
CDs or DVDs.
14
Translated from Portuguese by the author.

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

split into two different events: the Benidorm salsa festival and the Benidorm BK (bachata and kizomba) festival. Nevertheless, the
structural connections between the global salsa and kizomba industries remained. Indeed, as I will argue in the following lines, this
proves to be the key that put many African actors in disadvantage for competing in an already structured market (salsa) alien to most
of them.
Even though kizomba is imagined and sold as “authentically African”, flesh-and-blood people labelled Africans are not always
those who have most benefited from this dance market. Unlike the global salsa industry, in which Latinos control the market ac-
cording to McMains (2016: 490), in the case of kizomba the situation is far more complex. Even though many of them have embodied
dancing skills during a long enculturation process, only a minority show an interest in the commodified world, invest in this “kinetic
capital” and become “studio dancers”, as Hutchinson describes for salsa (Hutchinson, 2014: 13). Moreover, the peak of the financial
crisis in Portugal coincided with the kizomba boom, driving the decisions of many Portuguese students to become teachers in order to
gain an income in a situation of economic vulnerability. In many cases, unemployment led to having more leisure time, spending long
hours dancing and eventually trying to get an income from this practice (Jiménez. L, in press b). This only intensified the conflict and
the controversies over legitimacy (Jiménez. L, in pressd). In other European contexts, the dance was capitalized on by already existing
ethnic minorities involved in the dance industry. For example, in Spain, most kizomba teachers were Spaniards and Latinos, such as
Albir (from Panama) or Pablo Vilches, an Argentinian teacher of bachata and tango. In France, some artists from Martinique entered
the world of commodified kizomba, such as Anais Millon, Isabelle or Ruddy. In these cases, the connections between kizomba and zouk
usually make up part of the legitimacy discourse.15
In many cases, non-African performers who belong to global salsa circuits have been the pioneers in introducing kizomba to new
countries and have gained control over those national markets. For example, in 2006, one of the first countries to receive the dance
was Poland. Ola Leszczewick, a Polish salsa producer and teacher who happened to travel frequently to Lisbon as a tourist guide,
discovered kizomba by coincidence when going out to dance salsa in the Portuguese capital. When back in Poland, she met Benjamin,
a Portuguese immigrant who had taken lessons with the “old guard” and asked him to teach the style at her academy16 . Another
example of this type is João Rocha, a Portuguese dance teacher and producer, who opened the kizomba market in Sweden in 2013. He
formed a professional dance couple with Giedre Lapaite, his Swedish partner, and developed the project “Kizomba feber”.17
In the case of Spain, kizomba first reached the country through some Portuguese salsa teachers, such as Nuno and Vanda or
Afrolatin Connection, who were invited to salsa events in Spain in the early years of this century. On these occasions, they took
advantage of the situation to try to introduce kizomba into the Spanish market but met with only modest success. It was only in 2007,
some years later, when Albir Rojas, a hip hop and salsa teacher from Panama living in Madrid, succeeded in creating the first
community of devoted aficionados. He came into contact with the style around 2005, again by coincidence, when one of his salsa
students from Portuguese-speaking Africa exposed him to the music for the first time. After an Internet search, he found the names of
some of the “old guard” members and discovered that they lived and taught in Lisbon and so he started travelling regularly to the
neighbouring city to take lessons with Petchú, Zé Barbosa, Tomás Keita and Kwenda, among others. In 2007, he started offering
kizomba workshops and recruiting students from his own salsa and bachata class groups. He went into a successful partnership with
the Spanish salsa dancer Sara López and the couple became the reference in the country, in which it was hard to find Africans among
the growing number of kizomba teachers, at least during my fieldwork period. However, African actors are not totally absent from the
industry: for example, Tomas Keita moved to Barcelona and became the kizomba reference in the city. Also, DJ Pappy´s and the salsa
promotor Kevin, both from Guinea Bissau, proved central to the structuring of kizomba nights in Madrid.
France would become a reference in the global kizomba industry, in part due to the vibrant African nightlife that already existed in
Paris (Steil, 2015) built on the significant presence of immigrants from francophone Africa in a postcolonial context. However, Victor
Sousa and Coralie, a non-African couple, are the ones generally referred to as the introducer of kizomba in France in 2008. Some of the
best-known teachers came from Angola, including Morenasso, who arrived in Portugal and later landed in France as a football player.
Interestingly, he chose a dance partner connected to the global salsa industry: Anais Millon, from Martinique, who had a sister
involved in the Parisian salsa scene.
Nevertheless, we can also find examples in which African teachers became central to the globalization process, as it is the case
with Kwenda Lima, a dance teacher from Cape Verde belonging to the “old guard” and, most importantly, with previous experience in
the salsa world. He went to London in 2004 to take a PhD in aeronautical engineering. In order to get some income and improve his
English, he started running a kizomba workshop at Richmond Club. According to Kwenda, he later received support from Iris De
Brito, an Angolan dancer already integrated into the London salsa scene. On August 2005, she agreed to do a public presentation of
kizomba, performing on stage with him during a salsa congress.18 Later, Kwenda continued dancing with other partners, such as Maria
(from Sweden) and Rikita (Portuguese-Angolan). These first workshops opened the way for other African individuals already involved
in the entertainment world after he left. For example, Eddy Vents, originally from Guinea Bissau, started to teach and produce
kizomba events in the UK. Having worked in producing African dances in Lisbon, he only started teaching when he moved to London

15
Some examples emerge in this interview with Morenasso and Anais for the Brazilian TV show Diversidade (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=pbE6djApVns) or the information displayed on the HOF website for giving context to the interview Cristina Pujol conducts with Ruddy and Vie:
http://hipsonfirevillage.com/interviews/ruddy-cap-kizomba-vie-dance-interview/.
16
From an on-line interview by Cristina Pujol that can be consulted in http://hipsonfirevillage.com/interviews/ola-warsaw-kizomba-festival/.
17
From the interview with Cristina Pujol available at: http://hipsonfirevillage.com/interviews/joao-rocha-kizomba-colonizer-interview-hips-fire/
.
18
The performance was recorded and posted on the youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-RPTbsK7Ok.

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

(Soares, 2015). Since 2014, he has been organizing the Miami Kizomba Festival, thus promoting the dance craze in the US. Another
example is the DJ To Costa d´Angola, born and raised in Angola and with some of his family members involved in Luanda´s carnival,
who also made his name in the scene.19 Moreover, he promoted the Africa Dançar Festival, encouraging his students to go to Lisbon,
boosting the centrality of this event for the global community of kizomba.
In other words, as the global kizomba infrastructure relies strongly on the pre-existing global salsa circuits, networks and culture,
connection and knowledge of this market prove to be key for accessing the field and becoming successful. From my point of view, this
may also help understand the fact that many artistic couples are composed of an African Black male and a White European female
partner. Zé Barbosa (from Cape Verde) and Marta (from Portugal), Tomas Keita (from Guinea Bissau) and Filipa Castanhas (from
Portugal) or Hélio Santos (from Cape Verde) and Lara (from Portugal) are just a few examples of a long list. Even though we can also
find couples composed of two African partners (i.e., Dasmara and Iolanda, Paulo Cruz and Lana Zamora, all of them from Angola),
they constitute rare exceptions to the common “Black and White” rule. If we go beyond this apparent “interracial coupling” aesthetics
widespread in the industry, we find out that what these female performers have in common, apart from their clear skin colour, is a
previous experience in the global salsa industry, which involves contacts and knowledge about the field and its dynamics. On the
contrary, most of these African kizomba male stars usually lack previous experience in this market. Hence, we may interpret this
“interracial artistic matching” as having a practical dimension of business networking and cultural translation. In this sense, it is
important to note that the kizomba dancing couple is imagined as a tandem built on a sharp gendered division of roles: the male
leader and the female passive follower, an idea usually stressed in dance schools, as I was able to witness during years of fieldwork. It
means that aficionados generally see the male teacher as “the artist”, the essential part that defines the couple, and the female as
merely “the assistant”, who can be substituted without risking the quality of the performance. In the same vein, most aficionados can
easily recall the names of their male teachers but may have a hard time remembering the female artists' names. This gendered politics
are so deeply assumed by female performers, that the event producer Magdalena Bialoborska reported in an informal conversation
having had problems convincing female instructors to participate in her project “Elas” (“they” in feminine, Portuguese), a series of
kizomba workshops held at B.leza club in Lisbon where they would be teaching on their own. One of the most repeated complaints
was “but the teacher is my dance partner, not myself”.
Another consequence of these gendered politics is that African women do not participate in the market to the same extent as their
male counterparts, as those who lead teaching projects are mostly African men and they usually seek for (White) salsa-experienced
partners to succeed. There are few exceptions that confirm the rule. The case of Petchú is paradigmatic in this respect. Even though he
is greatly respected and considered as one of the first ever kizomba teachers worldwide, this fact is not reflected in his degree of
success at international festivals. In an informal conversation during fieldwork, he claimed that Afrolatin Connection, who had
learned kizomba with him, were getting invited to congresses for which he did not even get a call. “I taught them the dance, I took
them to Angola, I helped them make their name, and now they are the ones recruited for international festivals” he protested. We may
speculate that, as he constitutes an exception who chose an African female partner outside the salsa world (Vanessa, from Sao Tome
and Principe), he did not establish these connections.
Networking within the global salsa industry (and within every cultural industry, see Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010) proves
essential for accessing the market, but knowledge of its culture constitutes a key to meeting with success. For example, understanding
the didactic styles that middle-class consumers appreciate the most is rather important for attracting and keeping them, a cultural
capital that African performers disconnected from the salsa industry may lack. Also, understanding aficionados´ anxieties and con-
flicts when embodying otherness proves essential, as well as finding ways to help them deal with these feelings and make them feel
comfortable. I will provide a fieldwork-based example. During a kizomba workshop with the Portuguese artistic couple Afrolatin
Connection in Madrid, they divided the group in two sections, men and women, to give some gender-specific styling tips for dancing.
Paula, from Afrolatin Connection, explained to her female students that, even though we may have the impression that African
women make wide hip movements, it was actually an optical effect due to their anatomy; according to her, very little and effortless
movements look much bigger because of their natural pronounced lordosis and the size of their hips and bottom. “You should not
force your bodies to look like sexy African women because you may hurt your lumbar muscles. Take care of your bodies. Just do it
very small and it will look beautiful anyway, don´t try to do like them because your body is different.” Afrolatin Connection were
among the most appreciated and successful teachers in the festivals where the ethnography was carried out. This kind of cultural
translation relates to the experience of teaching salsa to White middle-class consumers and having passed through the same kind of
body conflicts and frustrations related to the efforts of embodying otherness. In other words, cultural closeness to students derives
into an insider´s knowledge capitalized when competing with African colleagues who lack these resources. Summing up, the main
argument of this section is that ethnicity and gender play an important role in structuring this cultural industry. In overall terms,
(White) performers with experience in the global salsa industry are better positioned to achieve success in the kizomba industry, while
(African) women are in a position of double disadvantage. I can therefore conclude that the congress and school habitus proves to be
more important than the dancing habitus per se in this business.

4. The global economy: how capital is reoriented from the peripheries to global cities

Discourses, images and videos circulate in multiple directions through the internet, giving the impression that kizomba “flows”
freely throughout the world. However, this contrasts with the way capital circulates, reorienting the benefits of the global kizomba

19
See for example this interview with Cristina Pujol: http://hipsonfirevillage.com/interviews/costa-kizomba-music-dj-interview/.

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

industry to specific cities in Europe, at least in its initial phase. Even though there have been several attempts to attract capital,
investments and visitors to Angola, taking advantage of the global kizomba craze, structural inequalities still condition the circulation
of these benefits towards European cities. In this section, we will briefly explore the cases of Lisbon, Madrid and Paris. The global
dance business materializes in four sectors of the entertainment industry: dance schools, the night leisure sector, the organization of
yearly festivals or “congresses” that have a positive impact on the local tourist industry of the cities where they are organized and the
associated merchandising (i.e., special clothes and shoes for dancing, CDs or teach-yourself DVDs).
Regarding the dance school industry, one of the European cities where it has developed greatly is Lisbon. As I could verify when
exploring the dance school sector of the city during fieldwork, kizomba was present in almost every academy, having more class
groups and diversity of timetables than salsa or any other genre offered. As for the night leisure sector, finding a stable “home” where
aficionados can practice what they have learned in workshops at night proves essential for the development of the dance school
business, so that teachers have often become active promoters of kizomba events. In Lisbon, even though a vibrant African nightlife
where immigrants danced to kizomba hits already existed, postcolonial unsolved tensions prevented dance students from visiting
them. Instead, teachers and promoters developed parallel circuits of discos, venues and parties for this new community (Jiménez,
2019b). When kizomba became global, aficionados from all over the world started travelling to Lisbon to enjoy dance nights. When
they asked for information about the best places to go, the commodified circuit was suggested. Correspondingly, African club owners
based in Lisbon did not receive any benefits from the commodified dance industry, at this early stage of development.
A good example of how kizomba nightlife developed in other European cities is the case of Madrid, where Albir Rojas20 promoted
the emerging business. In the beginning, he organized some informal weekend dance trips to Lisbon with his first group of students,
so that the development of the industry in Spain started to have a positive impact on the night entertainment and tourist industries of
the Portuguese capital. Nevertheless, this sporadic travel did not fulfill the needs of the emerging dancing community. Even though
the proximity of these neighbouring countries allowed for easy frequent travel, it also proved exhausting and expensive at the long-
term. During an interview, Albir explained how he turned into a kizomba party organizer in the following way:
“(R)egular kizomba students (…) told me: “ok, we are learning how to dance kizomba but we don´t dance”. They felt discouraged
because they learnt the dance but they had no clubs to go dancing in. And some of us went to Lisbon to dance (…) (later) some of
my students went on their own (to Lisbon) to dance because they loved it (…) but they wanted to dance here in Madrid.21 ”
(Interview with Albir Rojas, 1 st May 2013)
In this context, Albir got involved in the organization of parties in Madrid. This initiative developed successfully to the point that,
in 2012, the year of my fieldwork in Madrid, there was already a full weekly circuit that kizomberos followed with a different venue
and club every night.
However, structural inequalities also shaped the map of favourite dancing destinations for the transnational community of ki-
zomba aficionados. Paris, a city much better positioned in the global economy than Lisbon (Parilla et al., 2016), came to substitute the
Portuguese capital in this respect. During fieldwork in 2012–2013, I was able to observe through regular informal conversations this
shift in the preferences of Spanish kizomberos. According to most of them, aficionados living in Paris invested much more time and
money in improving their dancing skills and the night offer had evolved in such a way that the French capital looked now more
attractive than Lisbon. In international festivals, I could check that this had become a widespread idea in the transnational com-
munity of dancers. There was an informal consensus on the nature of Paris as the new “kizomba paradise”. In this way, the benefits
started to be reoriented from the Portuguese tourist and night leisure sector to the French ones.
In spite of this, Lisbon continues to hold the status as the source of legitimacy for most European aficionados, both because it still
remains the home of most “old guard” members and because it hosts the oldest and most emblematic kizomba festival: Africa Dançar.
Organized since 2007 by the Angolan Paulo Magalhães and the Portuguese Inês Pinto, this successfully centralizes the international
gathering of aficionados every year. Indeed, they decided to change the event´s name to “Kizomba Nation” in 2014 in order to stress
the centrality of Lisbon (Soares, 2015) as the capital of global congress style kizomba.22 Since the beginning, this has involved an
international competition in which each of the winners of the previous national rounds participates. They are evaluated by a board of
“old guard” members, who correspondingly keep their authority over a constantly growing and changing transnational field of
practices. The results of this contest generate a great impact on the prestige, legitimacy and visibility of new teachers and performers
(Soares, 2015). For example, Albir Rojas and his dance partner Sara López gained recognition in the field of global kizomba after
obtaining second place in the 2009 championship. Dasmara Dos Santos and Iolanda Rangel also became popular and gained nu-
merous students after winning the first place in the 2013 competition.
So far, we have seen some examples of capital from the global kizomba industry circulating towards European cities. In the
meanwhile, the PALOPs apparently remained apart from the business and their populations did not seem to show much of an interest
in the phenomenon, at least in the beginning. This apparent lack of interest led Paulo Isidoro, an Angolan man who lived in Paris and
witnessed the kizomba craze, to develop his project “Kizomba Na Rua” (“Kizomba on the street”) in Luanda. In this way, he wanted to
bestow public visibility on a dance that was associated to domestic gatherings, which Soares terms a process of “domestic re-
appropriation” (Soares, 2015).
At the government level, there have been attempts to capitalize on the global popularity of kizomba in order to promote the

20
As pointed out in previous sections, he is an artist and teacher from Panama based in Spain.
21
Translated from Spanish by the author.
22
By using this category, I follow the term “congress style salsa” proposed by McMains (2016: 490).

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

Angolan national touristic sector. For example, the project “Kizomba Nation” received support for organizing an event in Luanda that
involved inviting some of the most emblematic kizomba teachers in Europe to attend talks on the origins and history of kizomba that
linked it with Angola and other aspects of its culture. In the same vein, TPA (the Angolan state television company) launched the
program “Kizomba Nation” in order to show how the commodified dance is developing in a series of countries. Moreover, Angola
participates in the world championship Africa Dançar (now renamed “Kizomba Nation”, Soares, 2015) held in Lisbon every year and
broadcasts this national contest on TPA. The Angolan embassy in Spain, among others, has also introduced kizomba in some events,
such as the independence anniversary commemorations. In this respect, the music and the dance have gained official recognition as
respectable representations of the national expressive culture beyond its borders. However, the impact on the Angolan tourist sector
is far from evident. In general terms, the democratizing power of kizomba global success remains an empty discourse for most flesh-
and-blood people living in Angola or other PALOPs.

5. Conclusions: kizomba does not “flow” throughout the world

Throughout this paper I have tried to demonstrate how kizomba globalization reproduces the structural inequalities that shape
global markets instead of democratizing them. Even though certain actors labelled African have made their way from the margins to
better positions in the dance industry capitalizing on their embodied knowledge and the authenticity aficionados associate to their
skin colour and origins, they have succeeded by accepting the rules of the game, which involves a process of self-exoticization, instead
of trying to change them. As a whole, the structurally unequal system remains untouched and, thus, the kizomba globalization case
clearly challenges the main principles of the neoliberal global democratization utopia. In other words, as I will argue in this last
section, kizomba does not "flow" throughout the world.
Several scholars have stressed how certain widely used terms that involved denouncing structural inequalities have been sub-
stituted by more neutral or even positive ones in the current scientific globalization literature. For example, the image of economic
“penetration” transformed into “circulation” (Tsing, 2000: 336). In the same vein, Pratt (2006) has claimed that the idea of “flow”
drives our imagination to the neutral movement of liquids, turning into a means to render invisible structural inequalities that
become manifest in a local migration drama in which many people die every day invisible. Arjun Appadurai is one of the key authors
who have popularized this concept for accounting for contemporary transnational social dynamics. In his “model of global cultural
flow” (1990: 301), commodities, technology, labour, finance, ideas, money and even refugees (1990: 208) “flow”. Another reference
in the dissemination and sanctification of the concept is Manuel Castells who, in his seminal work The Information Age, claims that
“our society is constructed around flows” of capital, technology, interactions, images, sounds and symbols (Castells, 2000: 442).
However, according to Pratt (2006: 13), the term “flow” exemplifies “the official legitimising language of globalisation”, involving a
positive connotation of movements, disconnecting them from any ethical or political dimension. In this line of thought, she claims
that the “flow” metaphor, imported from natural sciences, drives our theoretical imagination to politically neutral liquids moving in
diverse directions and tending to a homeostatic balance. Correspondingly, it places movements of a rather different kind (i.e., sex
tourism and labour migration) under the same aseptic umbrella and neutralizing their structurally conditioned direction. Moreover,
as “to flow” is an intransitive verb, it leads us to overlook the ways human intervention shape global movements (Pratt, 2006: 12).
In spite of this critical line of thought, the pervasive “flow” metaphor has turned into common sense for globalization studies, so
that even authors committed to denouncing structural inequalities base their analysis on this concept. An interesting example of this
kind of contradiction is Thussu. In his analysis of media “flows” through the global scene (Thussu, 2007), he coined the term “contra-
flows” to talk about the flows generated in the peripheries of international media industries, contrasting them with “dominant flows”
from hegemonic centres of production such as the USA and the UK. Regarding directionality, even though this concept of “subaltern
flows” or “contra-flows” is interesting for challenging the idea of global media traffic as just one-way (“from the West to the rest of the
world”), it relies on a simplistic dichotomy (flow vs. contra-flow) based on another simplistic dichotomy (West-non West). Regarding
the democratizing power of “contra-flows”, interestingly, he builds a critical argument against the supposed balancing power of
“contra-flows”, accounting for how deep inequalities structure the global media market (Thussu, 2007: 25) Nevertheless, he labels
what he describes as neatly different processes with the same neutralizing metaphor of (however “dominant” or “contra”) “flows”.
In the empirical case analysed here, people, culture and capital definitely do not “flow” in the kizomba industry. Regarding people,
global forces have blocked certain movements of citizens while allowing or even fostering others. Unlike recorded music, cinema or
TV show formats, the global dance industry relies on embodied knowledge transmitted through direct physical presence with the
teacher (McMains, 2016), so that the movement of the dancers´ bodies through national boundaries is essential for the business.
Correspondingly, only those who already had passports allowing them to cross state boundaries could join, move through and expand
the transnational kizomba circuits. Moreover, even for those who succeeded in their migratory projects, their kinetic capital does not
guarantee access and success in the industry, as it depends heavily on connections with the salsa circuits. As for culture, it has
changed dramatically throughout this process. As described in Section 2, in the context of Europe, teachers have transformed certain
dance movements into conflict-free exotic products in order to make them marketable. African-ness is not just accepted and admired
but reworked and reshaped for purchase, leaving the conflictual aspects of postcolonial interethnic relations unchallenged. For all
these reasons, the kizomba case constitutes a clear empirical example of how current globalization processes actually work in rather
different ways than those to be expected from a neoliberal utopia perspective.
However, it is important to stress the limitations of this research, which focused empirically on the South European region and its
connections with the PALOP area. Even though the area became central during the commodification and initial globalization period,
the kizomba phenomenon has evolved in the last decade in multiple directions. And so we need to move beyond this perspective to
avoid, among others, a Euro-centric bias. Future research lines might explore the dissemination of commodified kizomba dance

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L. Jiménez Sedano Poetics 75 (2019) 101360

through the African continent, challenging simplistic ideas on global circulation, “whitening” and transnational appropriation of
culture, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial relations.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all the dance lovers and professionals who generously helped me during this research. This postdoctoral project
was funded by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Government of Portugal), Grant SFRH/BPD/876553/2012.

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Livia Jiménez Sedano She works as a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at UNED (Spain). From 2013 until 2018, she worked on her postdoctoral
project “Dancing ethnicities in a transnational social world” as Postdoctoral Fellow and integrated researcher at INET-md. In the context of this project, she has done
fieldwork in dancing contexts in Madrid and Lisbon including African discos, dance schools, dancing associations and public celebrations. During 2013 and 2014, she
also took part of a research project on Islamophoby and gender relations in the Muslim Diaspora in Spain. She gained her PhD by UNED in 2011 and obtained the
Extraordinary Award of Doctorate. She holds an M.A. in Migrations, an M.A. in Berber studies, and an M.A. in Professional Expertise in Islamic religion and culture.
Between 2002 and 2007, she did fieldwork in two different multi-ethnic settings in Spain. She has worked on several research projects in Spain about issues related to
ethnicity, children, gender, immigration and social exclusion, including the coordination of an Observatory of exclusion processes in urban areas of South Spain.

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