In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy García describes how local salseras/os gain social status by performing an exoticized L.A.–style salsa that distances them from club practices associated with Mexicanness. Many Latinos in Los Angeles try to avoid "dancing like a Mexican," attempting to rid their dancing of techniques that might suggest that they are migrants, poor, working-class, Mexican, or undocumented. In L.A. salsa clubs, social belonging and mobility depend on subtleties of technique and movement. With a well-timed dance-floor exit or the lift of a properly tweezed eyebrow, a dancer signals affiliation not only with a distinctive salsa style but also with a particular conceptualization of latinidad.

"“Readers concerned with Latina/o studies, salsa dance, ethnography, cultural and national identity will be interested in this book. Through her wonderfully descriptive ethnographic storytelling, Garcia offers a cogent study of the power systems emerging from a particular culture’s struggle to deal with contradictions and inequalities brought on by globalization, migration, and transnational labor practices.”" - Dance Chronicle

"“In her introduction and title, García promises a bold new approach to analyzing salsa dance…. García is at her best when she is thick in everynight action and thick in description. This approach yields brilliant moments, such as when she meditates on the meaning of the preference for arm styling over hip movement in studio salsa, or eavesdrops on the conversations among girlfriends in a nightclub restroom.”" - Dance Research Journal

"“[Garcia’s] vibrant study extends well beyond a mere examination of an evolving art form...García’s potent, lively text goes a long way to fill a void and to bring an art form dependent on movement into full flight in the reader’s imagination. For those interested in dance, Latino or otherwise, and complex issues of race, gender, and social hierarchies, this is an indispensible study on the richness of an evolving dance form… Highly recommended.”" - Choice

"“Through her experience as a dance ethnographer in a heated urban performance space, Cindy García is able to show – in a highly detailed and refined fashion – how the salsa environment is a prism of immigration and integration problems, globalization and its standardizations and codifications, and contested enactments of ‘Latinidad’ in the US today.”" - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"[A] valuable contribution to literature in dance and ethnic studies. Whether she is painting a vignette in one of the many loosely disguised L.A. clubs that figures prominently in the text or delving into theories of ethnic identity, Garcia’s prose is captivating and easily accessible to the nonspecialist. Her focus on how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class on the dance floor continues to expand the work of scholars who are illuminating how dancing bodies construct and disrupt hierarchies of power." - American Anthropologist

"“Another of the book’s strengths is its readability. Rare is the scholarly monograph that genuinely speaks to the “educated general reader” while retaining the scholarly rigor necessary to make a significant contribution to academic debates…. In summary, Salsa Crossings is an important look at a topic that until now has been neglected in scholarly investigations of dance and that also adds much to the broader field of Latina/o and Chicana/o cultural studies. It is a useful source for scholars researching questions of Latina/o embodiment that will also prove quite teachable.”" - Aztlán

"In Salsa Crossings, Cindy García expertly weaves description and analysis in her first-person narrative, taking the reader along as she navigates the Los Angeles salsa scene, both on and off the dance floor." - Latin American Research Review