By Maria Gomez
Bellevue, Wash. | Published May 11, 2024
By 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday, Daniela Ríos has already changed into her dance shoes at a bench near Bellevue Downtown Park's Inspiration Playground. Within an hour, the software engineer will be one of roughly 300 people dancing cumbia under a canopy of string lights—a weekly ritual that did not exist in this city two years ago.
"I used to drive to Seattle or Tukwila to find this," says Ríos, 34, who grew up listening to cumbia in her family's home in Cali, Colombia. "Now I walk here from my apartment."
What began as a handful of workshops at local studios has grown into one of the most visible cultural movements in Bellevue, a city better known for tech headquarters and manicured suburban landscapes than for late-night Colombian folk dancing. Yet cumbia—with its shuffling two-step, swaying skirts, and layered brass and percussion—has found an unlikely stronghold here, drawing in everyone from Colombian expats to Eastside retirees to teenagers discovering the genre for the first time.
From Studio Classes to Starlight Gatherings
The current wave traces back to early 2022, when Salsaria Dance Studio in the Crossroads neighborhood and Viva Rhythm Latin Dance in Factoria began offering cumbia workshops alongside their salsa and bachata programming. Neither studio expected much demand.
"We thought we'd get ten people, maybe fifteen," says Marco Aurelio Vásquez, a cumbia instructor at Salsaria. "Our first workshop had forty on the waitlist. Now we run three cumbia classes a week, and they're consistently full."
The studios' success revealed an appetite that existing venues were not serving. Bellevue's Latino population has grown steadily over the past decade, jumping from 7.2 percent in 2010 to roughly 11 percent in 2022, according to U.S. Census estimates. Many residents, Vásquez notes, had been traveling to Seattle's South Park or White Center for cultural events because they assumed nothing comparable existed on the Eastside.
That gap closed in June 2023, when a coalition of studio instructors and community organizers launched Cumbia Nights at Downtown Park. The free, weekly event runs every Thursday from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. from June through September. A volunteer DJ spins classic cumbia tracks on a portable sound system, and the city provides portable lighting and permits the plaza space at no cost.
"We had maybe eighty people the first night," says event co-organizer Patricia Linares, who also manages community programming at Bellevue's Latino Community Fund chapter. "By August, we were averaging three hundred. We've had to expand the taped-off dance area twice."
The crowd is deliberately mixed. Older couples in traditional dress dance alongside young professionals in sneakers and parents with toddlers on their hips. Signs at the perimeter read "Todas las edades, todos los pasos"—all ages, all skill levels.
"This isn't a performance," Linares says. "It's a public living room."
A Local Twist on a Global Sound
Cumbia itself is hardly new. Born on Colombia's Caribbean coast in the 19th century, it spread across Latin America and eventually the world, spawning dozens of regional variants—from Mexico's cumbia sonidera to Argentina's cumbia villera to the electronic-infused nu-cumbia scenes of Buenos Aires and Mexico City. What is emerging in Bellevue is less a genre invention than a distinct local chapter.
A small but growing cadre of Pacific Northwest musicians and DJs has begun reshaping the sound for Bellevue's dance floors. At La Fusión, a monthly cumbia night at the Old Fire House Teen Center in nearby Redmond, resident DJ Camilo Ortega layers cumbia's signature güiro and accordion samples over Pacific Northwest hip-hop beats and ambient synthesizers. In April, the Seattle-based chamber ensemble Cascadia Collective debuted a four-movement suite at the Bellevue Arts Museum that wove cumbia rhythms into minimalist classical arrangements.
"I wouldn't call it a new genre," Ortega says. "But it is a new conversation happening here, in this specific place, with these specific people. You can hear the rain in it sometimes."
That fusion has expanded the events' reach beyond traditional Latin music audiences. Ortega estimates that roughly 30 percent of his regulars at La Fusión discovered cumbia for the first time through the Bellevue scene.
What Comes Next
The momentum shows few signs of slowing. Salsaria Dance Studio is adding a youth cumbia ensemble this fall, and the city of Bellevue has included cumbia programming in its 2024 Spirit of Eastside
