NEW YORK — As neon lights bathe the dance floor of the nightclub, young women from Latin America sit at tables, sipping water or soda and waiting for men to approach and hand them cash.
For $2, the women will dance one song. For $10, they will dance a set. Forty dollars buys an hour of their time.
The scene plays out in immigrant neighborhoods across New York City, providing a key source of employment for immigrant women and a haven for men seeking to stave off the loneliness of being far from home. It is a perfectly legal form of entertainment — there is no stripping but plenty of hand-holding.
But some of the women say the clubs have a darker side. They complain about exploitative management, sexual advances from clients and violence. A 24-year-old dancer was recently shot and killed in Queens, and one of the city’s largest dollar-dance venues is the target of a federal lawsuit.
For many dancers, the stigma of working at the clubs is the most trying problem.
“Sometimes people or clients say we’re prostitutes, but we’re not. We dance,” said Tania Zarate, a dancer at a club in Queens.
That dancing can veer from prudish to the sensual grind. Some clubs demand that dancers wear skimpy uniforms. Elsewhere, they dress in jeans and T-shirts. Bouncers are hired to fend off unruly customers or those with straying hands.
Many of the dollar-dance places can’t rightly be called nightclubs. They are bars that happen to feature dance floors with women who get paid by the dance.
The women hail from Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. They are often single mothers who have become migrant workers to support the families they left behind.
Carla Ramirez, 26, a married mother of three, said she began dancing at a club soon after arriving from her native Ecuador. She said she keeps the job secret from her husband.
“He thinks I work in a restaurant,” she said. “He doesn’t like me drinking or dancing with another man.”
The men she dances with at a nightclub on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens are mostly laborers from Latin America. They are often construction workers, landscapers and restaurant workers. Many come to the clubs wearing boots and jeans, splattered with paint and mud.
The need for security was highlighted in December when 24-year-old Adriana Valderrama, a dancer at the nearby Tulcingo Cafe, was fatally shot and her dance partner wounded. There have been no arrests in the killing.
Messages left for the bar’s owners were not returned.
