JOSE LUIS REYNOSO (BELLO) (He/Him/His)
Associate Professor 

Jose Luis Reynoso Bello’s scholarly, pedagogical, and creative practices are rooted in his trajectory as a brown working-class Mexican inmigrante who works across disciplinary, geographical, social, and linguistic boundaries. After completing an ESL program, a high school for adults program, and lower division courses at a community college, Jose Luis completed a B.A. in psychology and was three (theater) classes short from completing a B.A. in dance at California State University Los Angeles where he (simultaneously) earned a M.A. in Psychology (while keeping his job as a construction worker). He completed a M.F.A. in dance and a Ph.D. in culture and performance with a specialization in dance studies at UCLA. Jose Luis was the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance studies at Northwestern University (2012-2014).

Jose Luis’ research interests also stem from experiencing the intersection of dance studies, dance practice, and life-labor in academia as a field of embodied and discursive knowledge production associated with the exercise and negotiation of different forms of power. His interests include the analysis of ideological aspects and value judgements involved in the formation and selective uses of categories and identifications such as “contemporary” and “experimental” dance”; “social,” “folkloric,” “ethnic,” and “cultural” dance; “Artist,” “dancer,” and “practitioner”; “choreography,” “dance making,” and “performance”; “authoritarian” and “democratic”; “compassionate” and “caring”; etc. He is specially interested in how the narratives dancers create to conceptualize and talk about theirs and others’ work, practices, and identities (as specific artists, dancers, and humans) relate to explicit and implicit hierarchies of value (i.e., what constitutes legitimate, “rigorous” dance/art; what criteria/power relations mediate access to resources/promotions; what determines notions of ownership; who and what defines who is, and whose practices are, “authoritarian,” “democratic,” “compassionate” and “caring,” etc.). Jose Luis’ interests assume that what dancers, dance scholars (and other people) say and claim about theirs and others’ practices and identities re/produce and challenge (hierarchical) notions of race, gender, sexuality, class and other categories of difference, including ways of knowing and being that defy normative binaries as well as those associated with different strands of posthumanism (i.e., non-human entities and processes, technology, AI, etc.). Other interests include dance practice and scholarship’s relationship to the production and accumulation of different forms of capital (i.e., financial, cultural, symbolic) inside and outside academia; transnational approaches to historicizing modernisms and theorizing contemporary dance practices and scholarship (primarily in the US, Europe, and América Latina with an emphasis on México); immigrant and Latina/o/e/x corporealities, embodied practices, strategies of survival, and modes of conviviality; racial and social formations and power relations inside and outside academia; legacies of Latin America’s colonial caste system and its logic’s relation to caste systems in other cultural and historical contexts; decolonial theories and practices, what they enable and their limitations.

His publications investigate some of his research interests in different cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. In his first book, Dancing Mestizo Modernisms: Choreographing Postcolonial and Postrevolutionary Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2023), Jose Luis analyzes the ways in which national and international concert dance artists, visual artists, critics, government officials, social dancers, and pedestrians of different ethnic, racial, and social class backgrounds have contributed to create notions of modernity and Mexicanness. The work focuses on the periods after the Mexican War of Independence against Spain (1821-1976), the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1976-1911), and the postrevolutionary period from 1919 to 1940. In this book, Jose Luis contends that people’s practices and the claims they make about theirs and others’ practices and identities reproduce and challenge racialization and socialization logics established by Mexico’s colonial sistema de castas (caste system). Thus, the monograph centers dance and other forms of embodiment to examine how racial and social formations have played a crucial role in the development of Mexico’s cultural, social, and political histories. (The book is currently a finalist for the 2024 Dance Studies Associations’ Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research award)

Jose Luis’ research interests have also formed and evolved from his creative practice. He has presented his solo and collaborative work nationally and internationally, from the concert stage and the museum to the community center and the nightclub/bar. His creative ancestral genealogy has been cultivated by embodied knowledges and interdisciplinary practices passed on for generaciones to and through the diverse working-class (undocumented) laboring bodies as well as dance artists’ bodies with whom he has learned, played, crossed borders, worked, performed, and collaborated nationally and internationally.

Jose Luis is currently at work on a second book project under the working title, “Mythologies and Other Narratives of World and Self Making” and a series of creative works under the rubric of “The Migrant’s Time.” His personal background as well as his scholarly and creative research interests also inform his teaching practice in undergraduate and graduate courses as well as his mutually beneficial mentorship relationships with undergraduate and graduate students.

¡Ánimo!

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Dancing Mestizo Modernisms: Choreographing Postcolonial and Postrevolutionary Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Articles and Essays

“Genealogical Cultural Heritages of an International Mexican Vanguard: Dance, Race, Memory, De/Coloniality, and the Making of Aesthetic Ideologies.” In Danza, Herencias y Provocaciones Decoloniales, edited by Eugenia Cadús and Hayde Lachino. Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Forthcoming in English and Spanish, 2014.

“Campobello, Nellie (1900-1986) and Campobello, Gloria (1911-1968)” (Revised). In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernist Dance, edited by Allana C. Lindgren. Forthcoming, 2014.

“Towards a Critical Globalized Humanities: Dance Research in Mexico City at the CENIDID.” In Futures of Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 2020, 523–540.

“Democracy’s Body, Neoliberalism’s Body: The Ambivalent Search for Egalitarianism within the Contemporary Post/modern Dance Tradition.” Dance Research Journal, Special Issue, “Work With(Out) Boundaries: Precarity and Dance.” Guest editors: Katharina Pewny, Annelies Van Assche, Simon Leenknegt, and Rebekah J. Kowal. 51/1 April 2019, pp. 47-65.

“La Coreografía como Metodología Teórica para el Análisis Crítico de la Corporeidad y la Subjetividad.” InterDanza, edited by Carmen Bojórquez. Coordinación Nacional de Danza del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes: Ciudad de Mexico. Año 5, Num. 45, Agosto, 2017, pp. 86-91.

“Campobello, Nellie (1900–1986) and Campobello, Gloria (1911–1968).” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, edited by. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, January 10, 2016.

“Racialized Dance Modernisms in Luso-Phone and Spanish-Speaking Latin America.” The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, Routledge P: London; New York, 2015: 392-400.

“Choreographing Modern Mexico: Anna Pavlova in Mexico City (1919).” Modernist Cultures 9.1, edited by Carrie J. Preston. Edinburgh University Press, May 2014, pp. 80-98.

CONFERENCES/PERFORMANCES (Selected)

Presenter-Discussant, (Roundtable discussion: Remapping Dance Modernisms II” organized by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht) “Embodied Mestizo Modernisms as an Analytical Concept: What Enables, Its Contradictions, and Its Limitations.” Co-discussants, Elizabeth Schwall, Ana Paula Höfling, Alexander H. Schwan, and Wojtek Klimczyk. Dance Studies Association Conference, “Cartographies of Movement.” Buenos Aires, Argentina, July, 2024.

Presenter, “Constructing Queer Subjectivity through Social Dance in the Mexican Public Sphere.” Dance Studies Association conference, “Contra: Dance and Conflict.”  University of Malta, Valletta, Malta, July, 2018.

Presenter-Discussant, (Roundtable discussion) “Transmitting Dance Studies: Latin American Concert Dance Research in Hemispheric Perspective.” Co-discussants, Victoria Fortuna, Eugenia Cadús, Ana Paula Höfling, Andrea Margarita Tortajada Quiroz. Dance Studies Association (previously CORD-SDHS) Inaugural Conference, “Transmission and Traces: Rendering Dance.” Columbus, Ohio, October, 2017.

Presenter-Performer, “La Coreografía como Metodología Teórica para el Análisis Crítico de la Corporeidad y la Subjetividad” (Two-hour version). Como parte del 20 Festival Internacional de Danza Cotemporánea Onésimo González (invited, Coordinación de Danza (director: Sandra Soto) de la Secretaría de Cultura del estado de Jalisco). Edificio Arróniz, Centro de Creación Cotemporánea “El Cuartel”. Guadalajara, Mexico, October, 2017.

Presenter, “La construcción del sujeto de género fluido al momento de bailar salsa-cumbia en el espacio público.” Moderator, Carlos Guevara Meza. Co-panelists, Luis Eduardo Bautista Peña, Ernesto de la Teja González. II Colloquio Universitario de Danza y Filosofia; Centro de Investigación Choreográfica, Organized by Colectivo Giroscopio and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico, September, 2017.

Presenter-Performer, “La Coreografía como Metodología Teórica para el Análisis Crítico de la Corporeidad y la Subjetividad” (Twenty-minute version). Segundo Coloquio Latinoamericano de Investigacion y Practicas de la Danza VISCESC. Centro Cultural del Bosque, Mexico City, Mexico, July 2017.

FELLOWSHIPS

UCR-UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Faculty Exchange Initiative Grant, 2020-2021

Regents Faculty Fellowship (Committee on Research of the Riverside Division of the Academic Senate), 2019-2021

UC MEXUS-CONACYT Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Research residency at the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de la Danza José Limón (CENIDID) in Mexico City; January-December 2017

Hellman Fellowship, UC Riverside Hellman Fellowship Program, 2016-2017