The stage lights turn off, only showing the silhouettes of the dancers. When the dancers start striking their shoes on the floor, the rhythm fills the room with each step as the audience cheers them on.

“Ghostly Labor” is a dance piece performed by La Mezcla, showcasing different dances from Latin America, with its main subject matter being the labor of immigrants in field and domestic work. The evening began with four of the dancers performing son jarocho, a traditional dance from Veracruz, Mexico in which the shoes punctuate the floor by striking the floor.

Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

La Mezcla is a San Francisco-based dance company that utilizes rhythms from Mexico to Cuba to Brazil, particularly emphasizing the contributions of Latin America’s Black and Indigenous population. Making its Los Angeles debut, the dance company’s main mission revolves around highlighting the stories that are not often told in American history books.

“I spend a lot of time volunteering with farm workers, volunteering with domestic workers and just meeting with historians and doing historical research into the stories that we’re telling,” said Vanessa Sanchez, the founder, executive artistic director and choreographer for La Mezcla.

The performances were beyond a simple imitation of land or domestic workers, but they were a tribute to those that are often forgotten. Props like wooden buckets and brooms added to the reality that many lower class workers face, which often happens to be extensive hours of labor with minimum pay.

“My grandfather was a janitor for 30-plus years after coming to the United States,” Sanchez said. “I come from a very long line of domestic workers.”

The interludes in the show are what really grounds it to humanity. The projector turns on, playing videos of real-life immigrants giving their testimonies working in the field and doing house work. These are everyday people that perform the “ghostly labor” of the country.

“My folks are coming from the car wash,” said Sandy Vazquez, the artistic and associate rehearsal director. “[In] a lot of what we see in the film, our folks are not protected. They don’t have the same labor rights and protection as what a lot of people have today in this country.”

In Latin America, contributions to the culture made by the Black diaspora often go unnoticed. However, La Mezcla understands the impact that African culture has had on son jarocho, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music. There was extensive research done on the dance styles to create an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere.

“Tap dance, like [Sanchez] mentioned, originated in the United States, and it is a Black American art form,” Vazquez said. “Zapateado is rooted in Afro-Indigenous traditions from Veracruz, which is a gulf port city in Mexico … I’ve been trained in tap dance for a very long time, and I think one of the things that’s really, really important is to stay true to the traditions.”

Oftentimes, words cannot translate feelings correctly, so La Mezcla uses music and dance to verbalize those emotions across audiences.

“Percussion is the universal language. And so we’re coming from that, just like a heartbeat,” said Pedro Gomez, the lead percussionist of La Mezcla. “But there’s always a vocabulary in any language that you learn. It’s the same in music and the same in the dance, so we try to stay authentic to how we’re speaking through the instruments and through our movement.”

In one of the sequences, Gomez begins reading a newspaper about Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old domestic worker, who refused to take a toxic disinfectant bath which was mandated to every Mexican immigrant working in the U.S., causing the bath riots. These untold stories are brought to life by Gomez’s powerful yet beautiful narration, bringing awareness to an issue that has happened for centuries.

“That was my starting point within historical narratives,” Sanchez said. “It was really important to not just talk about peers and an act that has affected hundreds of people, but also [bring] actual people onto the stage throughout history, from 1917, through the domestic workers and farm workers that you saw on stage today.”

By telling these stories, La Mezcla connects with audiences across the country, spreading awareness about issues that often are swept under the rug but are important to our society.

“I love the mixing of the cultures, the different music styles, the different dance styles and instruments,” said Jasmine Rojas, who attended Thursday’s show. “It was all put together so cohesively, so nicely, and it’s a wonderful story.”

“Ghostly Labor”’s reach goes beyond an artistic level. It connects audiences to the struggles that many immigrants face by giving them a voice through the arts.

“We have to connect with the communities that the stories are based in,” Sanchez said. “We have to spend a lot of time just looking throughout history to really see how we can respectfully represent a time period that we weren’t there for, especially looking at farm worker communities and domestic labor communities.”