JOSE LUIS REYNOSO BELLO (he/él)
Associate Professor & Undergraduate Advisor

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 also earned an M.A. in Psychology (all the while keeping his job as a construction worker). He completed an 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 stem from experiencing the intersection of dance studies, dance-performance practice, and life-labor as a permanent state of creative practice (a form of creative ontology). In different versions, he has been developing ideas to formulate the concept of “mythology” as a technology of story-telling and narrativity, explicitly and implicitly, invested in the exercise of different forms of power and production of different forms of capital. Under the title, Mythologies and Other Contemporary Narratives of Self and World Making, Jose Luis continues to analyze the stories, narratives, and discourses dancers and dance scholars tell themselves and others about who (they think) they are, what (they think) their work and practices do in the world, and what (they think) the value of their work and practices is. He’s developing the related concept of “The spectacularization of the self” as a mechanism of self-making-and-representation. The idea motivates analyses on how dancers and dance scholars create narratives to highlight their perceived (and real) exceptionalism within a hierarchical system of valuation that determines rewards, reprieves, penalties, and punishments according to the (estimated) value of who they are ‘in the field’ and what the worth of their work and practices is (e.g., grants in artistic circuits; merit and promotion reviews in academia; bios like the one you are reading right now). Jose Luis is also interested in the ideological aspects and hierarchical value judgements (the mythology) implied in constructs such as “artist,” “dancer,” and “practitioner”; “choreography,” “dance making,” and “performance”; “authoritarian” and “democratic”; “compassionate” and “caring” (among others) as they relate to the exercise of different forms of power and accumulation of capital (i.e., financial, cultural, symbolic, relational). Other interests include forms of engagement with and resistance to binary thinking; the everyday-life material conditions of ordinary humans and theoretical proposition of different strands of post-humanism; transnational approaches to historicizing modernisms in the twentieth century and theorizing contemporary dance practices and scholarship in the twentieth-first century (primarily in the US, Europe, and América Latina with an emphasis on México); inmigrante and Latina/o/e/x corporealities, embodied practices, strategies of survival, and modes of conviviality; racial and social formations (class, gender, sexuality, etc.) 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.

Jose Luis has investigated some of his research interests in the context of the twentieth century in his first book, Dancing Mestizo Modernisms: Choreographing Postcolonial and Postrevolutionary Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the Dance Studies Association’s Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, 2024. The book 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, Mexicanness, and nation. It 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. The work contends that people’s practices and the claims they make about theirs and others’ practices and identities reproduce and challenge hierarchical logics of racialization and socialization established by Mexico’s colonial sistema de castas (caste system). In so doing, 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. See other publications below for analyses within the twentieth-first century context.

Jose Luis’ research interests have also formed and evolved from his creative practices in “artistic” spaces and in daily, quotidian life trough improvisation, photography, conceptual sculpture, different forms of writing, and problem solving. He has presented his solo and collaborative dance-performance 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 dancers’ bodies with whom he has learned, played, crossed borders, worked, performed, and collaborated nationally and internationally.

Jose Luis is working on written and performance projects around ideas related to “Mythologies and Other Narratives of World and Self Making” and “The Migrant’s Time.” His personal background as well as his scholarly and creative research interests also inform his teaching practice as well as his mutually beneficial mentoring relationships with undergraduate and graduate students. 

Jose Luis currently serves as co-chair for the DSA’s international conference in Mexico City, June 22-25, 2027. 

¡Ánimo!

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Dancing Mestizo Modernisms: Choreographing Postcolonial and Postrevolutionary Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023, winner of the Dance Studies Association’s Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, 2024.

Articles and Essays

“Genealogical Cultural Heritages of an International Mexican Vanguard: Dance, Race, Memory, De/Coloniality, and the Making of Aesthetic Ideologies.” In Dance, Heritages, and Decolonial Provocations, edited by Eugenia Cadús and Hayde Lachino. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 2024, pp. 116-149.

“Herencias Culturales Genealogicas de una Vanguardia Mexicana Internacional: Danza, Raza, Memoria, De/Colonialidad y la Creacion de Ideologias Esteticas.” En Danza, Herencias y Provocaciones Decoloniales, editado por Eugenia Cadús and Hayde Lachino. Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 2024, pp. 80-115.

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

“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.

“El género fluido: salsa y cumbia en el espacio público.” Fractal, Número 94, Mexico City, mayo-agosto, 2021. 

“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.

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