Others have long tried to define The Bronx. Since the 1960s, most media treat our borough as a stand-in for poverty, crime, urban blight, addiction, and every other social disease that afflicts the United States. But if there’s one thing we’re not, it’s that.

That’s not to say we don’t live with the scars of public and private disinvestment, racist city policies, landlord neglect and arson, white flight, and the widespread destruction of our communities in the ’70s and ’80s. But we have never defined ourselves by our wounds. Bronx elders pass on remarkable stories of folks remaining in the community during these difficult years to fight back and rebuild. We are a borough of survivors, and our history overflows with daily acts of defiance and persistence by everyday working people. And yet, we are so much more than warriors of circumstance.

Above all, we create, we feel, we are moved. We are the Boogie Down. We define ourselves by our movement. We know how to boogie, how to get down, how to move ourselves and our communities . . . and the world in the process. During the same decades that older adults had to fight against all odds to survive, Bronx young people created not one, not two, but multiple new forms of dance—and entire musical cultures to go with them. Drawing on archival photographs, videos, flyers, posters, clothing, sound recordings, oral histories, memorabilia, and more, When The Bronx Moved: Histories of Dance, 1970–84 tells the stories of how Hustle, Rocking, Burning, Breakin’, and Boogying came to be in our borough. All of these dances built on contemporary and older Afro-Caribbean or African-American traditions of dance. But each created something fresh and unique—in promoting new combinations of human movement, to be sure, but also in encouraging the rapid development of electronic recorded music as an outlet of dance just as energizing as live music.