The St. Mary's City Origins
In 2014, Maria Santos, a Peruvian-American percussionist working as a fisheries biologist in St. Mary's City, Maryland, posted a flyer at a local Latin grocery store. She was looking for anyone interested in learning cumbia—the accordion-driven, hip-swaying dance tradition she grew up with in Lima. Jake Olsen, a hip-hop dancer from Anchorage who had landed in southern Maryland for a Coast Guard assignment, was the first to show up.
"I just missed home," Olsen recalls. "And I missed moving. Maria played 'La Pollera Colorá' on her phone, and I thought, this is it."
What started as weekly sessions in Santos's rented garage—usually six to eight people, a portable speaker, and a single tambor drum—would eventually evolve into one of the most unexpected stories in Latin dance. Within two years, the loose collective they called the St. Mary's Cumbia Circle had outgrown two community centers and drawn dancers from as far as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
The Alaska Connection
The group's identity shifted in 2016, when Olsen's Coast Guard transfer ended and he returned to Anchorage. Santos, recently divorced and restless, decided to follow. "Jake kept saying Anchorage had nothing like this," she says. "I thought, let me see if that's a problem I can solve."
The "Alaska's Cumbia Dance Ambassadors" name began as a joke on a Facebook event page for a 2017 summer showcase at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. Olsen and Santos had recruited 14 dancers—mostly Latinx community members, military spouses, and self-taught hobbyists—who blended traditional cumbia footwork with hip-hop isolations and house-music theatrics. A local blogger picked up the event, the nickname stuck, and the group formalized under it.
The geographic jump from Maryland to Alaska became central to their mythology: a dance form born on Colombia's Caribbean coast, rehearsed in a Chesapeake Bay garage, now finding its footing 3,600 miles northwest.
From Local Showcase to Measurable Momentum
By 2019, the Ambassadors were performing monthly at venues like the Bear Tooth Theatrepub in Anchorage and the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. Their breakthrough came in 2021, when a TikTok clip of their cumbia-meets-breakdance routine at the Anchorage Museum's winter solstice gala accumulated 4.2 million views in ten days.
"We went to bed with 300 followers and woke up to interview requests from Colombia," says Elena Vásquez, the group's current artistic director, who joined in 2018 after moving from Phoenix. "Suddenly we were 'Alaska's cumbia ambassadors' to people who had never seen snow."
The viral moment translated into tangible opportunities. In 2022, the group performed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., and the Festival Internacional de Cumbia in Montería, Colombia. Last year, they sold out a three-night run at Harlem's historic Apollo Theater's Amateur Night alumni showcase. Their 2023 collaboration with Colombian accordionist José Hernández—recorded partly in Anchorage and partly in Medellín—has streamed over 8 million times on Spotify.
What They're Actually Doing Onstage
The Ambassadors' choreography is less about purity than conversation. Traditional cumbia vueltas—the spinning, skirt-flicking partner work—share space with popping, waacking, and Alaskan Native-inspired gesture work from collaborators like Yup'ik dancer Michael Tunuchuk.
"We're not claiming to be traditionalists," Tunuchuk says. "We're claiming that cumbia is elastic enough to hold all of us. When I do a cumbia step and finish with a wing [a breakdance move], I'm not betraying the form. I'm proving it travels."
That elasticity has drawn both praise and critique. Colombian dance critic Ana María Rueda, writing in El Espectador in 2023, called the group "a fascinating case of cumbia's diasporic reinvention," while noting that some purists find the hip-hop elements "diluted." The Ambassadors have responded by inviting traditional cumbia masters from Colombia to lead annual intensives in Anchorage.
Anchorage's Small but Persistent Scene
Has Alaska become a "hub" for cumbia? Not in the sense of Medellín or Mexico City. But the evidence of growth is concrete. The Ambassadors' nonprofit arm, launched in 2020, runs free beginner classes at the Mountain View Community Center in Anchorage, where enrollment has grown from 22 students in 2021 to
