Posted on May 11, 2024
By Elena Morales | Texas Dance Quarterly
An Unlikely Dance Hub
Falls City, Texas, sits at the intersection of ranch roads and cotton fields in Karnes County, a town of roughly 600 where German and Czech settlers built the first farms in the late 1800s. Cattle auctions still draw bigger crowds than most local events. Yet on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the parking lots at three small dance studios fill with cars bearing license plates from San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and beyond.
The draw is salsa—but not the salsa taught in Miami clubs or New York ballrooms. Instructors here have developed something they call the "Texas Twist": a hybrid style that layers Cuban casino footwork with the theatrical lifts, spins, and showmanship of competitive country-western dance. The result is flashy, technically demanding, and distinctly Texan.
Where It Started
Salsa arrived in Falls City in 2008, when Roy and Linda Treviño—both former competitive dancers from San Antonio—retired to Linda's family land outside town. Roy, a Cuban-American sonero who had trained in Miami, began teaching small classes in the Falls City Community Center to stay busy. By 2012, demand had outgrown the space.
"We'd have forty people crammed into a room built for twenty," Roy Treviño recalled. "Ranchers' daughters, oil field workers, kids from Karnes City High School. Nobody cared about the floor space. They cared about the music."
That same year, the Treviños opened Rumba Road Academy, the first dedicated salsa studio in Karnes County. Fiesta Dance Studio followed in 2015. Sole to Soul Dance Center opened its Falls City location in 2019 after outgrowing a smaller space in Poth, twelve miles north.
Today, the three academies enroll a combined 340 students across weekly group classes, private lessons, and youth competition teams.
Three Studios, Three Philosophies
Rumba Road Academy: The Purist Foundation
The Treviños still run Rumba Road from a renovated 1940s cotton warehouse on Highway 181. Classes begin with clave rhythm exercises and history lectures. Students learn the difference between son montuno and salsa dura before they step into a partnered turn pattern.
"Our kids can tell you who Arsenio Rodríguez was before they can do a double spin," Linda Treviño said. "Technique without context is just gymnastics."
Rumba Road fields the most competitively successful youth team in the region. Its junior squad won first place in the Teen Division at the 2023 San Antonio Salsa Festival and took silver at the 2024 Texas Latin Dance Championships in Austin in March.
Fiesta Dance Studio: The Competition Machine
Five miles east, Fiesta Dance Studio operates from a climate-controlled barn with a sprung floor and full-length mirrors. Founder and head instructor Diego Vásquez, a former So You Think You Can Dance contestant, structures every class like an athletic training session.
Vásquez, 34, pioneered the Texas Twist format after noticing that his students—many of whom also competed in country-western dance—kept borrowing lifts and dips from their two-step routines.
"I told them, if you're going to do it, do it cleanly," Vásquez said. "Now we teach aerials and shadow rolls as part of our advanced salsa syllabus. Judges in Dallas and Houston know our name."
Fiesta's senior team placed third in the Open Professional Division at the 2023 Houston Salsa Congress and first at the 2024 Lone Star Dance Invitational in San Antonio this past February.
Sole to Soul Dance Center: The Entry Point
Sole to Soul, located in a refurbished church fellowship hall, takes the opposite approach. Co-founders Amy and Marcus Chen offer beginner-heavy schedules, sliding-scale pricing, and "social dance nights" on the first Saturday of each month.
"We're where people come when they're scared to dance," Amy Chen said. "About sixty percent of our students have never taken a formal class before."
The Chens estimate that roughly half of their advanced students eventually transfer to Fiesta or Rumba Road for competitive training—a pipeline all three studios actively encourage.
The Texas Twist, Defined
So what exactly is the Texas Twist? In practice, it varies by studio, but several elements appear consistently:
- Expanded frame and posture: Dancers maintain a more open, upright stance than in traditional Cuban or Colombian styles, borrowing from country-western partnering.
- Theatrical lifts and drops: Advanced routines regularly incorporate aerials—once rare in social salsa—
