Every Thursday at 6 p.m., the second-floor studio above Dempsey's Public House on Broadway fills with accordion-driven vallenato and the rhythmic shuffle-step of Cumbia. Below, downtown Fargo commuters hurry past snowbanks toward their cars. Above, two dozen dancers—ages 16 to 64, in everything from ballet slippers to cowboy boots—trace circular patterns across worn maple floors, hips swaying to a beat that traveled 3,000 miles from Colombia's Caribbean coast.
This is Raíces Dance Collective, and for the past four years, it has been proving that North Dakota's dance scene extends far beyond country line dancing and ballroom.
The Origin Story: Why Cumbia? Why Fargo?
Raíces founder Elena Vásquez, 34, first stepped into a Cumbia circle at her grandmother's fiesta de quince in Medellín. She never expected to build a studio around it in a state where Latinos comprise roughly 4% of the population.
"I moved here in 2017 for a nursing job at Sanford Health," Vásquez says, adjusting the studio's string lights before class. "My first winter, I thought I'd lose my mind. No sunlight, no Spanish spoken on the street, definitely no Cumbia. I started teaching three friends in my apartment just to feel something familiar."
By 2020, those apartment sessions had grown too large for her living room. Vásquez leased the Broadway space—previously a yoga studio—and formally launched Raíces, naming it for the Spanish word for "roots."
"I didn't know if Fargo was ready," she admits. "Turns out, people here are hungry for something that isn't Scandinavian heritage or hotdish culture. They want to move differently. They want to feel part of something that started somewhere else."
Inside the Class: What Actually Happens Here
A beginner Cumbia class at Raíces follows a structure Vásquez developed through trial and error. First-timers—often arriving in work clothes, still carrying coffee cups—spend ten minutes on footwork isolation: the basic paso de cumbia, a dragging step that mimics the dance's origins in shackled colonial-era communities, transformed into celebration.
"New people always apologize for their hips," says lead instructor María Gómez, 29, who trained for eight years in Barranquilla's carnaval circuit before relocating to the Midwest in 2018. "I tell them: your hips are not the problem. Your timing is the problem. We fix that."
By week three of the six-week beginner cycle ($120, with shoes provided), students practice partner turns in rotating circles. By week five, they're learning to read the cumbia rebajada—the slowed, bass-heavy variant that Gómez introduces to bridge Colombian tradition with younger students' electronic music sensibilities.
The studio's Saturday socials ($15 drop-in, 8 p.m. to midnight) draw a different crowd: advanced students, Latino community members, and curious locals who discovered Raíces through TikTok clips of the quarterly Noche de Cumbia performances at the Fargo Theatre. Those events, launched in 2022, now sell out at 200+ attendees.
María Gómez: The Instructor in Her Own Words
Gómez, who also works as an interpreter at Essentia Health, speaks deliberately about teaching philosophy.
"In Barranquilla, Cumbia is everywhere—schools, beaches, buses. Here, I am often someone's first Colombian person. That is not pressure I asked for, but it is pressure I accept," she says. "When I teach the vueltiao step, I also teach why the hats are woven, why the skirts have lace. You cannot separate the dance from what survived."
Her students describe her as exacting but warm. "María will stop class if your shoulders are wrong," laughs Doug Erickson, 52, a Fargo attorney who started at Raíces in 2021 after his daughter's wedding. "But she also remembers I have a bad knee and redesigns the turn for me. She's not teaching steps. She's teaching how to be in a body that moves with other bodies."
The Student Perspective: Who Shows Up, and Why
Raíces's 140 active students defy easy demographic categorization. Approximately 40% identify as Latino or Hispanic—some seeking connection to heritage, others simply seeking dance. The remaining 60% includes Somali immigrants, Native Americans from nearby reservations, and white North Dakotans with no prior exposure to Latin dance.
Amina Hassan, 24, a graduate student at North Dakota State University, found Raíces after searching "things to do in Fargo that aren't drinking."
