Quebradita is the 1990s banda craze: couples in cowboy hats and boots gallop to technobanda, then the man drops his partner into a deep back-bend almost to the floor — and whips her back up.
“Quebradita” means “little break”: it refers both to breaking in a wild horse and to the woman's dramatic back-bend, when her partner lowers her almost to the floor and snaps her back up. The dance exploded in the early 1990s, and its birthplace is disputed — Jalisco, Sinaloa and the Mexico–US border region all claim it, and researcher Sydney Hutchinson calls its early history “somewhat hazy”. What is clear is the music that drove it: technobanda. Banda sinaloense is the big brass band of Sinaloa — clarinets, trumpets, trombones, tuba and drums, made famous by groups such as Banda El Recodo; in the late 1980s and early 1990s bands in Jalisco and Nayarit added electric bass, keyboards and a lead singer and sped up cumbia-based rhythms. Banda Machos, founded in 1990 in Villa Corona, Jalisco, scored huge hits in 1992 with “Al gato y al ratón” and “La culebra”, and Banda Arkángel R-15, formed in 1992 in Las Varas, Nayarit, gave the craze an anthem with “La Quebradita” in 1993. From Guadalajara to Los Angeles — where clubs like El Lido filled with dancers in the mid-1990s — young people put on texana hats, boots, jeans and big belt buckles to dance it, and many schools and communities in Mexico and the US had quebradita teams. Alongside the dips came the trotting “caballito” and the bouncy “brinquito”, flips and lifts. Its strength and risk limited it to the bold, and by the 2000s the pasito duranguense had taken over the dance floors, but the quebradita remains a symbol of 1990s regional Mexican youth culture on both sides of the border.
