Selling Dreams

Abstract

Chapter 4, “Selling Dreams,” focuses on the financial model for Zumba Fitness. The company promises to provide instructors with all of the tools they need to be financially successful, including a website and choreography. Zumba Fitness thoroughly embraces and promotes the American dream—the idea that the United States is a meritocracy where anyone can succeed if they work hard enough. The brand frequently centers founder Beto Pùrez’s journey from impoverished Colombian immigrant to fitness celebrity and multimillionaire alongside other successful Zumba Fitness instructors. These biographies represent certain Latino men as ideal immigrants who are financially independent and assimilable. However, the reality for Zumba Fitness instructors is more tenuous. Many instructors barely break even and many admonish the company for promising unrealistic dreams of financial success. This chapter examines this contradiction, and the ways that selling dreams reproduces hegemonic ideologies of neoliberalism and the American dream.