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2	SALSA FOR THE WORLD Competitive salsa dancing goes global at the Third Annual World Salsa Championship. read more...
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4	AMERICAN ME Introducing San Antonio’s Alameda Smithsonian, the first Hispanic-themed affiliate of the nation’s top museum. read more...
5	LEADING HEALTHCARE Meet Jose R. Sanchez, the man at the helm of Northern Manhattan Health Center, New York City’s largest multi-hospital network. read more...
6	ROLE PLAYER With so many parts to play, there’s nothing desperate about Housewives’ actor Ricardo Antonio Chavira. read more...
7	SONGS FROM THE HEART Oscar-winning music artist Jorge Drexler wrestles with restlessness, uncertainty and doubt on his latest release, 12 segundos de oscuridad. read more...

DANCING FOR GOLD

As the popularity of Salsa dancing
spreads throughout the world, competitions such as the World Salsa Championship have scored throngs of new PARTICIPANTS, as well as a TV contract.

Rob Beiner, a veteran boxing and Olympics television producer, stood at the edge of a cavernous room on the perimeter of a mid-sized arena in Las Vegas. He watched a Bulgarian couple, Kikis Kakoullis and Elina Kostova, as they sat and watched Swing Latino, 18 salsa dancers from Cali, Colombia, rehearse a fast-footed routine.
It was a few hours before the start of the Second Annual World Salsa Championships last December. Beiner, a member of the “Salsa Seven”—named for the number of people involved in staging the championships—was key to getting the event broadcast this month on ESPN International for an audience of 23 million throughout Latin America and elsewhere.
As he leaned against a wall and looked out across that roomful of dancers, he had an epiphany of sorts. Seeing the Bulgarian contestants watch the Colombians, he realized how far salsa had traveled in the event’s sophomore version.
It had expanded from a field of contestants representing 12 countries in its first year, also in Las Vegas, to 33 countries in its second—and the boom came about mostly through word of mouth, Beiner says.
As the couple from Bulgaria sat and watched nine Colombian couples, Beiner thought, “What I’m seeing is ... whether they can speak the same language or not, they’re picking up something.”
Hundreds of thousands around the globe are apparently also picking up salsa, in part fueled by this event, now gearing up for year three.
And as four one-hour shows from the December finals air throughout March in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean, those numbers can only grow. Earlier this year, negotiations were still underway to broadcast the show to a U.S. audience.
The itinerary of Albert Torres, head of Albert Torres Productions and another member of the Salsa Seven, serves to demonstrate the global spread of salsa through dance.
His recent calls came from Hong Kong and New Zealand, where he was laying groundwork for qualifying events for the third global showdown of salsómanos.
Like Beiner, he has seen legions of converts to the cause. He recalled a 74-year-old woman from Manchester, England, who he had run across in his 48-weeks-of-the-year junkets. She hadn’t danced since she was 21. “But her husband passed away, and now she’s dancing all over the world,” he beams.
Torres was born in Brooklyn 50 years ago. His mother danced on the hallowed floor of the Palladium, in the days of “the big three”—Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Machito.
“There was always music in the house,” he recalls.
At 10, he moved to Puerto Rico. Soon after, he fell in step with a new sound: the clave, conga and brass combination that got tagged, salsa. He spent the next 17 years dancing nearly every weekend, hitch-hiking from Vega Baja to San Juan, living in the fast lane. In 1990, he moved to Los Angeles and through a chance meeting got picked to appear in the movie Mambo Kings. Then came the movie, Dance with Me. By 1999, Torres was staging the first salsa congress in Los Angeles, an event that combined live concerts, conferences and dancing. Competition soon got added to the mix.
Torres acknowledges that others have thought along similar lines—including Eli Irizarry and Laura and Isaac Altman, who have founded events in Puerto Rico and Miami, respectively, during the last decade. In fact, the Altmans’ World Salsa Federation also holds an annual event at Florida’s Miccosukee resort bearing the name, World Salsa Championships, now in its sixth year.
One of the main differences, then, has been the Salsa Seven’s ability to score an international television contract. The Las Vegas event has also drawn a larger paying audience to the finals than the others.
ESPN International’s participation, says Torres, was “the answer to a question.”
Now he hopes to keep reaching larger domestic and international television audiences—already primed to watch dance in their living rooms after the runaway success of such shows as So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars.
His goal is to educate the competitors, and those who wind up taking dance classes in the home countries of many of those competitors, about the music’s Latin roots.
“I watch people ... and they have no idea what the words are saying or what’s behind it, but they want to dance.”

cali: Salsa’S unofficial Mecca

If a Bulgarian couple sat and took mental notes as they watched 18 dancers from Cali, Colombia’s Swing Latino rehearse for the World Salsa Championships in Las Vegas last December, it’s because the two were smart students.
Indeed, though salsa’s roots are squarely located in New York via Puerto Rico, and if you dig far enough back, Cuba, it has been dancers from Cali that have dropped jaws in the first two years of the global competition, airing on ESPN International this month.
Versions one and two, with four categories each year, have seen two first-place finishes by caleños, and two others in the top three.
Though the rest of the world barely noticed, Cali—a city of 2 million-plus on the other side of some steep mountains from the Pacific Ocean—granted itself the nickname of “The Salsa Capital of the World” some four decades ago.
And although there was a period, mostly fueled by drug cartel money, where the city’s love affair with clave blossomed into a selection of up to 100 homegrown orquestas, the fact is, Cali has been spending the last 40 years nurturing a particularly frenetic, footwork-heavy style of salsa dancing all its own.
That’s why event producer Albert Torres calls Cali’s steps “the future” of salsa dancing.
Last year, the qualifying event held in Cali to choose who would dance in Las Vegas drew 15,000 spectators and more than 1,000 contestants—and no one budged when a tropical downpour let loose. This year, Torres only half-joked, they may have to move the event to the city’s soccer stadium.
To quote the title of a locally famous novel based on the 1969 arrival in Cali of the salsa saints, Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz: ¡Que viva la música!