TAXI DANCER: A Novel, based on a sad, depressingly relevant true story

TAXI DANCER: A Novel
MARIVI SOLIVEN
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the University of Washington

Based on a true story, Taxi Dancer is a gripping historical novel by Marivi Soliven that illuminates the hidden world of Depression-era Filipino taxi dance halls, weaving a forbidden interracial romance with a high-stakes murder mystery to explore race, desire, survival, and the Filipino American experience in 1930s California.

“If we can’t marry white girls, we can at least dance with them.” In response to Depression-era California laws that criminalized interracial marriage, Filipinos established taxi dance halls where they could mingle with American women. When Filipino farmworker Eli and American taxi dancer Lucinda fall in love, they hope to move to Washington State where they can legally wed. Their plans are derailed when Eli is arrested for the shooting death of a dance hall owner. As Lucinda fights to exonerate Eli, she uncovers a murder conspiracy orchestrated by Mamie Savage, a rival dance hall owner and Sal, her Filipino bartender. The capital punishment trial brings to light abhorrent secrets concealed by the conspirators, the victim, and Lucinda herself. Inspired by true events in San Diego’s Stingaree district.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Laws about whom you are allowed to marry are always popular among the "FREEDOM FREEDOM—not for you for me" religious or otherwise intellectually impaired sort. I get that the state has a need to know with whom its citizens and residents are forming households. Beyond registering those households formed, there's no need to poke further into their business.

That's not a popular opinion in these United States in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-six. It's being shoved down our throats that some people, white men especially, deserve more of the benefits that come from freedom than other, darker and/or female people, do. This is not new, nor is it confined to the US. It's a nasty, unjustifiable piece of cruelty that's been on the run for decades and that rollback of privilege is now taking root. Therefore the demographic and actuarial reality that fewer white males are being born thus diluting their godlike, "god given" dominion over...them...is fading. The present dangerous pass in public life is down to the death throes of the established order being played out with maximal ferocity because, once gone, there will be no way to get them all back.

Exhibit A: look at every "AI" controlling person's color and genitalia.

As proof it's not a new thing, look at the reason this book exists. It's telling the story of a statutorily "inferior" man forgetting his appointed place and having sex with a white woman. Stick to your own kind, race purity is paramount so you getting a white woman pregnant is not to be tolerated! This panic, fomented by the likes of Stephen Miller among others, has deep roots in white nationlism and authoritarian corporatocracy. The Filipina author of this story based it on a tragedy that occurred in San Diego, California; I was surprised at how totally unfamiliar I, a native Californian, was with this aspect of the state's ethnic history.

It was the first of several revelations. Like everyone of my generation, I'd at least heard of (in my case seen) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? so was aware in a vague, general way that there were things called "dance halls" and the dancing was a form of socially accepted foreplay conducted for profit by unsavory people. I had not put that together with the "shocking" idea that the races (stupid term) can mix! Panic! Horripilation! In structuring her story on the bones of a real, dreadful moment in San Diego history, Author Soliven uses the time-honored epistolary method for relevant passages from official records, newspaper accounts, and suchlike demonstations of the story's authentic roots, interspersing the imagined—I'd say better described as "recaptured"—dialogues. It makes Eli and Lucinda and Amado and all the other men and women in the story come alive in sharp relief. Like a change in lighting from fluorescent ceiling fixtures in linoleumed hallways into soft lamplight on carpeted upholstered comfortable spaces.

As the story unfolds the Filipino words and phrases become more than Google fodder, the sounds and the feel of the words in my mouth become part of a truly immersive journey into a cultural state of mind. I had not expected to experience this because I am very unfamiliar with more than the broadest outlines of the milieu. In US colonial history the Philippines loom large, after all General MacArthur had roots there and he was a huge figure in my early life; but that's not the Filipino people, their lives, their needs and wants from coming here. As I spent more time with these fictionalized people and moved between chapters through the epistolary bits, I got more and more into Author Soliven's characters in their raw form. It made me appreciate more and more her careful work of fleshing the factual bones with forms so real I was gripped. I cared more what was coming next in their story after each reminder of the facts.

It all leads to tragedy. All stories do, as death is always without fail the end of The Story. In this case, Amado is shot and killed in his successful dance hall for stupid, petty reasons (at the literal beginning of the book, it's not a spoiler)...but the system's wicked, cruel restraints are, as so often, the levers used to move the structures a bit more in the direction of Justice.

We're still working on fairness. It appears to be a Sisyphean task.