USPS "Let's Dance/Bailemos

USPS on 17 September 2005 issued four First Day Cover stamps dedicated to Latin Dances: Mambo, Cha Cha, Salsa and Merengue. The series was called "Let's Dance/Bailemos". The stamps were initially issued  in Miami, Florida, and New York. Ethel Kessler of Bethesda, Maryland designed the stamps. 

 

Four Latino artists present their personal interpretations of the dances.  

 

For the Merengue stamp, Rafael Lopez used a warm palette of colours, from red and orange to yellow and lime green, all suggesting the tropical sunlight and vegetation of the Caribbean islands  

 

Capturing motion in the billowing skirts of a salsa dancer, José Ortega used palm leaves to refer to salsa's tropical roots in the Caribbean, and a cityscape to suggest its New York City birthplace. 

 

In creating his design for the Cha Cha stamp, Edel Rodriguez juxtaposed the warmth of the dancers' suntanned skin and the sinuous line formed by their bodies with the coolness suggested by their white clothing and waving palm fronds.

 

Sergio Baradat evoked elegance in his design for the Mambo stamp. The red of a woman's dress offsets the nighttime purple and gold hues of the ambient light, while a drum-shaped moon seems to join the orchestra's saxophone and timbales. 

 

Designer Ethel Kessler borrowed the dance-school convention of step patterns for the margins of the stamps. All descriptive texts and headers are in English and Spanish. Sennett Security Products printed 70 million stamps in panes of twenty in the gravure process..  

 

Latin-American dances developed from a mixture of native American, European and African cultures. The mambo, for instance, came from the French contre danse and the Spanish contradanza (country dance), brought to French and Spanish Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century. In addition, African slaves on the islands contributed their rhythms to these  dances.

 

 After World War II, the mambo became the rage in New York, coming north with Cuban musicians and tourists who had frequented Havana night spots. Dominican immigrants brought their national dance, the fast-paced merengue. People from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti brought their music and dances as well.dances.

 

The cha cha, a version of mambo, became a favorite in night clubs during the 1950s. A faster and more dramatic style of Latin dancing, called salsa, started in the 1960s in Latin night clubs. The disc jockeys would call out, “Salsa, salsa!” (“Spice it up!”).

 

 

 Source: Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Mystic Stamps