The mirrors at the Parkway City Recreation Center fog up by 10:30 on Saturday mornings. In Studio B, 34 students—ages 8 to 64—shuffle in sneakers and leather-soled practice shoes across linoleum worn soft at center floor. A portable speaker pumps Canícula de Bandas at a volume that draws complaints from the yoga class next door. At the front, Maria Gomez counts off in Spanish: "Uno, dos, tres—no, don't lift the heel on three, arrastra—drag it."
Four years ago, this room sat empty on weekend mornings. Now it's the busiest hub of what locals are calling the Parkway City Cumbia revival—a grassroots surge led not by an institution but by a loose collective of young instructors who teach between day jobs, gig economies, and, in one case, a thriving TikTok side hustle.
From Dorm Room Parties to Community Center Classrooms
Cumbia's presence in Parkway City is not new. The city, which sits on a former manufacturing corridor about 40 miles north of the state capital, saw waves of Colombian and Mexican migration beginning in the 1980s. For decades, Cumbia existed mainly in private spaces: quinceañeras, backyard barbecues, late-night radio. What changed around 2021, according to instructors and students interviewed for this story, was a generational handoff combined with pandemic restlessness.
"Everyone was stuck inside, scrolling," says Lena Martinez, 27, whose TikTok account @lenaenmovimiento now has 412,000 followers. "I'd post these videos of my mom teaching me the paseo in our kitchen. The comments were all, 'Where do I learn this?' And I was like—well, nowhere, really. Not here. Not officially."
Martinez, who works full-time as a pharmacy technician, started hosting free outdoor sessions in Riverside Park in the summer of 2021. Thirty people came to the first one. By August, she was turning away dozens. That's when she recruited Gomez, a former dancer with the Ballet Folklórico de Colombia who had settled in Parkway City after a knee injury ended her touring career, and Carlos Ramirez, a community theater actor with no formal dance background but a childhood spent watching his aunts dance at family parties in Nuevo León.
The three never filed paperwork or chose a leader. They simply started splitting classes. Students began calling them the Parkway City Cumbia Collective—a name that stuck, even if the structure remains deliberately informal.
Three Instructors, Three Versions of the Same Dance
Gomez, 34, teaches the Saturday morning fundamentals class that now maintains a 20-person waitlist. Her choreography builds from the Colombian cumbia de orquesta tradition: precise footwork, upright posture, the courting narrative embedded in each turn. But she has adapted her methodology for a student body that is roughly 60 percent non-Latinx and largely adult beginners.
"I used to teach in conservatories where the body was expected to look a certain way," Gomez says. "Here I have a 55-year-old white guy who works in IT, a teenage girl whose grandmother danced in Barranquilla, and a mom recovering from a C-section. The question is never 'Can you look like a professional?' It's 'Can you feel the clave in your chest?'"
Ramirez, 31, handles the collective's performance arm and its monthly "Cumbia Theatre" workshops, which blend social dance with narrative staging. In March, he directed a piece at the Parkway City International Festival in which a dozen students enacted a migration story through dance—complete with folding chairs meant to evoke a bus terminal, and a costume change mid-song that drew audible gasps from the lawn crowd.
"Lena brings the people. Maria brings the technique. I bring the lie," Ramirez jokes. "The theater lie, I mean. The moment where someone forgets they're dancing and realizes they're telling something."
Martinez's influence may be the hardest to measure and the easiest to spot. Her most-viewed video—a 46-second breakdown of the vueltia, set to a trending Grupo Frontera track—has 3.2 million views and has directly recruited students, she estimates, from as far as two hours away. She also uses her platform to document the collective's internal tensions: a recent video candidly discussed whether charging $15 per class was betraying the mission of accessibility. The comments section became a referendum on sustainable arts education.
"People want the fairy tale," Martinez says. "But I think they're more invested when they see the math."
By the Numbers: What "Surge" Actually Looks Like
The collective's growth is quantifiable. In 2022, Gomez, Ramirez, and Martinez taught a
