After an extensive artistic career, Mrs. Ramirez returned during the 1960s to teaching and developing cultural resources within the city.
“We were all over New York City,” she told the Los Angeles Times, speaking of people of Latino and Hispanic descent, “but people thought we were dishwashers, people who washed the floors. We didn’t get any attention. I wanted to I said, ‘Hey, we have a beautiful culture.’ “
She named the company Ballet Hispánico to reflect maximum diversity, exploring performers and musical styles representing nearly two dozen Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries.
Today the school has enrolled 800 students who train in many different techniques, ranging from jazz to ballet to classical Spanish idioms.
Balet Hispánico was and is a chamber company, with 10 to 15 dancers, who perform works created especially for the troupe. The company’s repertoire includes a mix of classical ballet, modern dance, classical Spanish forms and infusions of indigenous dance vocabulary. The music and stories are almost always Hispanic in origin. The troupe’s ranks have been open, however, to non-Hispanic performers as well.
“One of the things I’m interested in is risk-taking,” Ms. Ramirez told the New York Times in 1994, explaining her decision to commission a new work from the choreographer Amanda Miller. I said, ‘Would you like to do a dark part? For Spanish music?’ “
Ms. Ramirez said she saw dance as “painting in space,” in which “emotions must come from within and be revealed by the body in motion.”
Ernestina Ramirez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on November 7, 1929. Her father was a bullfighter from Mexico and her mother was from Puerto Rico. She accompanied her father throughout Latin America for his work. She was fascinated by him, later saying that his elegance of movement and flair for the dramatic as a bullfighter fueled her interest in dance. He gave her her first dancing lessons keeping her balance on her feet.
Ms. Ramirez was 5 when her parents divorced, and she and her mother (who remarried) eventually moved into an apartment in Spanish Harlem. Her mother, who came from a family of educators, did not want her daughter to become a dancer. But Ms. Ramirez’s sister, Coco, was given dance lessons as a way to improve her failing health.
After a year, their mother withdrew and allowed Mrs. Ramirez, now 12 years old, officially began studying dance. Her main teacher was Lola Bravo, a doyenne of Spanish dance who also believed in the importance of classical ballet; Ms. Ramirez went on to study with Ballet Russes ballerina Alexandra Danilova.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Mrs. Ramirez danced on Broadway, in modern dance troupes and with a concert group directed by Federico Rey. She lived in Spain for two years and continued to study there. She and Coco teamed up for a nightclub act that toured the world with bandleader Xavier Cugat.
Ms. Ramirez returned to New York in 1963 to take over the studio of her former teacher Bravo, who was retiring. She saw firsthand what study after study has demonstrated—that arts education boosts students’ self-esteem and their performance during their standard academic curriculum as well.
This concept inspired him to start Operation High Hopes, a professional performance training program for underprivileged children from the five boroughs of New York City. The city’s Office of Economic Opportunity gave her $18,000 to start the program in the summer of 1967, before the grant money was quickly subject to budget cuts.
Some of her students from the program went on to work with her and had set their sights on professional careers. She wanted to offer them professional opportunities and Ms. Ramirez founded Ballet Hispánico with a $20,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.
“I wanted to hire Hispanic dancers,” she told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “I wanted to stop them from dancing in nightclubs. They were serious dancers and deserved the opportunity to be treated as such.”
It was an auspicious moment for black dancers. Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem was established in 1969. Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater was already over a decade old. However, then as now, providing stability was a constant challenge for even the most established troupes – let alone a pioneering start-up.
Amid a New York City real estate market that has dramatically affected the vulnerability of arts organizations, Balet Hispánico’s investment in purchasing its building was key to its longevity. When it looked like the company might lose its West 89th Street studios, the local community board stepped in to advocate for the purchase of the building as well as a house next door. Ballet Hispánico raised the $1.3 million needed to buy and renovate the two buildings “dollar for dollar,” Ms. Ramirez.
Ballet Hispánico began touring throughout the United States and internationally during its first decade of existence. The commitment of Ms. Ramirez’s passion for education radiated beyond the boundaries of her school, as she sent the company’s dancers to New York City schools and local communities on tour stops.
In 2005, Mrs. Ramirez received the National Medal of Arts, the government’s highest award for artists and patrons of the arts.
In 2009, at the age of 80, Mrs. Ramirez retired as director of the Ballet Hispánico, citing how consuming company responsibilities had drowned out her broader appreciation of the arts. “I don’t see enough dancing,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t see enough theater, I don’t go to museums. That has to change.”
Survivors include her sister, Coco Ramirez Morris.
Fundamental to the vision of Mrs. Ramirez was the continuity, the common impulse between popular culture and the disciplines of the conservatory—a recognition of the common roots of all movements in music. “I believe that all dance really comes from folk dance, even though I’m a trained dancer and I love classical ballet,” she told the New York Times in 1994. “Even ballet came from folklore. Dancers today can have a Great technique, fabulous, but it needs to come back to that.”
