On the last Saturday of September, the parking lot of the Waskom Civic Center transforms. By 6 a.m., trailers from Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mexico have claimed every space. Inside, hundreds of dancers warm up for the annual Waskom Folk Dance Festival—a spectacle that draws more people to this 2,000-person East Texas town than live there year-round.
Welcome to Waskom, Texas: a railroad-crossing community just west of the Louisiana border that has, against considerable odds, become a genuine hub for American folk dance.
From Railroad Town to Dance Floor
Waskom's folk dance story begins not with a government grant or a tourism board, but with a single instructor and a borrowed church basement. In the early 1990s, Marie Delacroix, a retired schoolteacher and lifelong clogger from Shreveport, moved to Waskom to be closer to family. She started teaching weekly flatfooting classes to a handful of seniors. Word spread. By 2003, her students were performing at county fairs across East Texas.
The past two decades have built on that foundation. Today, Waskom's scene draws from three distinct regional wells: Appalachian flatfooting and clogging, Cajun and zydeco two-step, and Mexican folklórico—reflecting the area's cross-border cultural traffic along Interstate 20. The result is not a polished, professionalized dance district but something rarer: a working-class town where folk dance functions as social infrastructure.
Three Studios Keeping Tradition Alive
Waskom Folk Dance Academy
The most formal operation sits in a converted 1940s cotton warehouse on Spur 156. The Waskom Folk Dance Academy, founded in 2008 by Delacroix's former student Tomás Herrera, offers structured training across five studios with sprung maple floors—an unusual investment for a town this size.
Herrera, 52, grew up in Waskom learning folklórico from his mother and clogging from Delacroix. His academy now enrolls roughly 120 students, ages six to seventy, in tiered programs. Beginners start with East Texas clogging fundamentals. Advanced students cross-train in Cajun jigging and Tejano conjunto styles. The faculty includes four full-time instructors, among them Herrera's daughter, Ana, who holds a BFA in dance from the University of Houston and runs the academy's folklórico company.
"We're not trying to make everyone a professional," Herrera told the Marshall News Messenger in 2022. "We're trying to make sure no one around here forgets how to do this."
The Community Dance Center
Three miles north, in a former Baptist fellowship hall, the Community Dance Center operates on an entirely different philosophy. No enrollment fees. No recitals. Just $5 drop-ins on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, plus a monthly Saturday afternoon family dance.
The center emerged organically in 2014, when a group of academy parents wanted a lower-pressure option for working adults. Volunteer instructors rotate monthly. One week might feature Louisiana Cajun two-step; the next, old-time square dancing with a live string band. The wooden floor is scuffed, the sound system is held together with duct tape, and the coffee pot never shuts off.
It is, by design, the entry point. Many of the academy's advanced students got their start here, nervously shuffling through a Tuesday night beginner session.
Waskom Cultural Center
The third pillar is the most institutionally grounded. The Waskom Cultural Center, housed in a 1961 brick building that once served as the town library, receives partial funding from the Harrison County Historical Commission. Its dance programming is explicitly educational.
Exhibits in the lobby trace the migration patterns that shaped regional dance: Scottish-Irish settlers bringing percussive step dance into the Appalachians, Acadian refugees seeding Louisiana dance halls, Tejano musicians crossing into East Texas after World War II. The center offers six-week seminar courses—"Dance as History"—that pair movement instruction with archival research. Students have access to a small oral history collection, including recorded interviews with Delacroix before her death in 2019.
The Festival and Beyond
The Waskom Folk Dance Festival remains the scene's gravitational center. Organized by a volunteer committee and held annually since 2004, the event spans three days and features competitive clogging, Cajun dance showcases, and folklórico exhibitions. Attendance typically ranges from 800 to 1,200, with participants traveling from as far as North Carolina and Monterrey.
The festival's economic impact is modest but real. Local motels sell out. The barbecue stand run by Waskom High School's booster club clears enough to fund athletic equipment for the year. More importantly, it validates the town's investment in a cultural identity that has nothing to do
