The Latin Rhythm Club brings people of different backgrounds together to teach Latin dances and spread the culture.
The Latin Rhythm Club is aimed to celebrate Hispanic culture through dance and community.
Since its creation in 2001, the club has seen students lining up outside of the Key West Ballroom every Tuesday and Wednesday night to learn Latin dances.
Mathew Ruiz, sophomore aerospace engineering major and one of the club’s head instructors, explained that their main focus is to expose people to Latin dance and culture.
“There’s a lot of people that come up to us and they’re like ‘hey we’ve heard this kind of music our whole life,'” Ruiz said. “‘As we grow up, we start to connect with it more and we see all these people having fun dancing. How can we learn that?'”
Ruiz mentioned that it’s the club’s responsibility to help people get in touch with a part of their culture they may have grown distant from.
Professor Evelin Pegoraro, an associate instructor of Portuguese and Spanish in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department, said that dance is an important part of Latin culture.
“It connects people,” Pegoraro said. “It’s a way to connect to the music as well.”
This mixture of dance and music can act as a gateway, connecting people back to the culture it originated from.
“It can definitely link to the past, to history. It can relate to that place’s culture and where it’s coming from,” Pegoraro said. “It could provide a sense of identity, and it’s a way to keep the history alive.”
Pegoraro said she believes that despite dance’s deep ties to its culture of origin, anybody can still connect with the themes, emotions, and history being expressed. Even if the dancers don’t fully understand the language.
A group of beginner dancers in the Latin Rhythm Club practice the first steps of bachata outside the Pegasus Ballroom.
“We have found that a lot of people that don’t even speak Spanish still end up understanding the songs in a way just from dancing it,” Ruiz said.
It is this expression between dance and music that Ruiz said she believes can bring people from different cultures to love and want to learn Latin dances.
With sixteen years of formal dancing under her belt, Pegoraro insisted that dance’s importance comes not from the movement but the ability to express oneself freely.
“It’s just so important to move our bodies, to have that other way to express ourselves,” Pegoraro said. “I believe that art is so important, and dance is a type of art.”
Ruiz said he has hope that the international spread of Latin dances continues to bring curiosity to people outside the culture.
“At this point we have so many people from European countries, from Asian countries and all over the world that dance the dance style even though they don’t speak the language,” Ruiz said, “So I think that speaks volumes. It is impressive that it comes from our culture but ends up being everyone’s culture.”
