On a rainy Thursday night in October, nearly 300 people squeezed into the Backbeat Warehouse on Ogema's Main Street. The building has no sign out front—just a red door and a bass line that rattles the windows. Inside, dancers in cowboy boots and running shoes moved in tight circles on a concrete floor while DJ Rosa Azul, born Rosa Mendez, layered a re accordion sample over a trap beat. The crowd ranged from teenagers filming TikToks to grandmothers who remembered cumbia from Monterrey or Guatemala City, decades and borders away.
This is not where most music journalists look for a cumbia revival. Ogema, Wisconsin, population 882, sits 75 miles north of Wausau in the dense forests of Price County. Yet over the past four years, this small city has become an unlikely hub for cumbia sonidera and its electronic offshoots, drawing regional acts and producing homegrown artists now booking shows in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis.
From Backyard Parties to a Weekly Ritual
The scene's roots trace back to 2019, when Mendez and three friends started playing cassettes of Mexican cumbia sonidera at backyard barbecues for the area's growing Latino workforce, many of them employed in logging and dairy processing. By 2022, those gatherings had outgrown residential neighborhoods. Mendez, then 24, approached the owner of the Backbeat Warehouse—a former paper mill equipment storage building—about hosting a weekly night.
"People kept saying there was nothing to do here after 7 p.m.," Mendez said. "We told them to come at 9, and they'd stay until 2."
That first Thursday drew 40 people. Now, El Sonido runs every Thursday without fail, averaging 250–350 attendees and featuring rotating local DJs, occasional live acts, and a single food vendor selling tamales and elote. The event has become reliable enough that a shuttle van now makes two runs each night from nearby Phillips and Park Falls, towns with their own small but growing Latino populations.
What Ogema Cumbia Actually Sounds Like
The cumbia emerging here does not pretend to replicate Monterrey or Bogotá. Instead, local producers have developed what they call cumbia del bosque—forest cumbia—characterized by slower tempos, heavy reverb, and the deliberate incorporation of natural sounds recorded in the surrounding Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
Mendez's track "Pino Blanco," released in March 2023 and now streamed over 400,000 times on Spotify, opens with 30 seconds of recorded rain on pine needles before a synthesizer accordion melody enters at half the tempo of traditional cumbia. The percussion remains anchored in the classic caja and guacharaca patterns, but the bass frequencies are pitched for club sound systems.
Other local artists push in different directions. producer Marco Tlaxcala, 31, incorporates jazz horn arrangements—he studied music at University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point—into his live sets, often bringing a three-piece brass section toperform. The collective Nortec Ogema, a loose group of four producers, samples the mechanical rhythms of local lumber mills and layers them under cumbia beats.
"It's not about being authentic to Colombia or Mexico," Tlaxcala said. "It's about being honest to here. The forest, the mills, the cold. That becomes the sound."
The Events That Hold It Together
Beyond El Sonido, the scene organizes around three recurring anchors. The Ogema Cumbia Fest, launched in 2022 and held each August at the Price County Fairgrounds, drew an estimated 2,100 attendees in 2024—more than double the city's population. The festival features regional food vendors, a dance competition with a $500 prize, and headliners from Chicago and the Twin Cities.
On the last Friday of each month, the Cumbia de la Calle brings a mobile sound system to different neighborhood blocks, with permits negotiated through the Ogema City Clerk's office. Maria Santos, 58, a retired dairy worker who helps organize the roving events, said the location rotation is intentional.
"We don't want it to belong to one street or one group," Santos said. "It moves so everyone gets to say, 'That was ours this month.'"
A newer addition, Cumbia Para Los Niños, runs Saturday afternoons at the Ogema Public Library, teaching children ages 6 to 14 basic dance steps and the history of cumbia's Indigenous, African, and European roots. The program launched in January 2024 and currently serves about 25 children per session.
Who Shows Up—and Why It Matters
Demographic data for the
