Alright, it’s not on my shelves yet! As I was researching the release date for her co-authored (with Vanessa Díaz) P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke University Press, January 2026), I discovered that one of her earlier books Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (Duke University Press 2024) had received an honorable mention for the 2025 ALLA [Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists] Book Prize. See more information on this Puerto Rican scholar in African Diaspora Studies—and recognized as a leading academic expert on reggaetón—below. [I am looking forward to reading Fitness Fiesta! soon.]
Description: As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In Fitness Fiesta! Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable “south of the border”-style vacation.
She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today.
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She specializes in Latin music and US Latinx popular cultures. Dr. Rivera-Rideau has a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in African American Studies from Harvard University. She has taught at Wellesley College since 2016, and she is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies department. Prior to this, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech until 2012. Dr. Rivera-Rideau held a postdoctoral fellowship in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond from 2010-2012.
Dr. Rivera-Rideau is author of three books, all published by Duke University Press: Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (2015); Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (2024); and P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, co-authored with Vanessa Díaz (2026). A Spanish-language version of the latter, P FKN R: Bad Bunny y la música como acto de resistencia, is also available from Planeta in 2026. Dr. Rivera-Rideau co-edited Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas with Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). In addition, she has published numerous book chapters, as well as peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Identities, Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderón’s Diasporic Interventions” (Small Axe) won the Blanca Silvestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Puerto Rico section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2019. Fitness Fiesta! also won an honorable mention for Best Book from the Association for Latina/o and Latinx Anthropology in 2025. [Source: https://www.wellesley.edu/people/petra-rivera-rideauPh.D.]
For more information, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/fitness-fiesta
Alright, it’s not on my shelves yet! As I was researching the release date for her co-authored (with Vanessa Díaz) P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke University Press, January 2026), I discovered that one of her earlier books Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (Duke
