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There are exactly three things you need to know about Maria Gonzalez's Thursday evening cumbia class at William Paterson University: the bass kicks in before you're ready, someone is always laughing, and by the end of the hour, even the students who signed up "just for the credit" are swaying without thinking about it.
Gonzalez has been teaching cumbia here for over a decade, and if you watch her in the studio—watch the way she catches a student's hip rotation mid-step and adjusts it with a single word—you understand that this isn't a hobby. It's a practice. A serious one.
"When students come in, most of them have no idea what cumbia actually is," she tells me after class, wiping sweat from her forehead. "They think it's just a rhythm. A beat for a party. But cumbia is a story. It's Colombia, and Africa, and Indigenous history all moving together through one person's body."
She's not exaggerating. Cumbia's roots run through the Colombian Caribbean coast—Indigenous Kogi traditions, enslaved African rhythms, and Spanish colonial influence colliding over centuries into something that feels both ancient and immediate. At William Paterson, a public university in Wayne, New Jersey, Gonzalez has built a program that teaches students to move and understand what they're moving to.
The entry-level class covers what you'd expect: the basic step, the relationship between footwork and percussion, how to listen for the gaita flute that threads through so many traditional recordings. But Gonzalez approaches even the fundamentals differently than a standard dance class might. Students learn the history behind the parce positioning, the meaning of the circle formation, why cumbia historically was a courtship dance. By the time they're drilling footwork patterns, they already understand why the movement matters.
What surprises most newcomers is how much the program leans on live music. Gonzalez collaborates with musicians from New York City's Colombian community, bringing in accordion players, drummers, and gaita flute performers for workshop sessions. There's a noticeable shift in the room when a live percussionist takes over—students stop thinking about their feet and start listening, and from that listening comes something more organic than choreography could ever produce.
"Studio learning is one thing," says Marco Reyes, a junior communications major who grew up hearing cumbia at family gatherings but never learned to dance it properly. "But when the drums are right there and the baile is happening around you, it clicks in a different way. I called my grandmother after the first workshop and she almost cried."
Reyes isn't alone in that kind of reaction. The program draws a genuinely diverse cross-section of students—some with deep Colombian or Latin American roots, others with no connection to the culture whatsoever. Gonzalez treats both groups the same: she expects effort and she expects curiosity. The students who thrive are the ones willing to look a little foolish in the early weeks, willing to let the rhythm carry them somewhere unfamiliar.
Advanced students spend more time on regional variation—Cumbia Nortena from northern Mexico, Peruvian cumbia with its psychedelic edge, the Colombian coastal style with its sharper hip movement. Guest workshops bring in touring artists, and the program has hosted performers from Barranquilla and Cartagena, dancers who grew up in traditions Gonzalez herself wasn't raised in. She sees no conflict in this. "Cumbia belongs to cumbia," she says simply. "If you're approaching it with respect and genuine interest, it opens up to you."
The semester-end showcase is where everything comes together. Held in the university gym converted for the occasion, it's loud and crowded and unmistakably alive. Families fill the bleachers. Students who've spent fourteen weeks rehearsing perform in groups, in pairs, some solo. The energy in the room is something I haven't quite felt anywhere else on campus—raw pride, unguarded joy, the particular electricity that happens when people are doing something that actually matters to them.
One student, a nursing major named Destiny Okafor who came to the first class because her roommate dragged her, performed a solo at last fall's showcase that stopped the room. She'd chosen a track with a slow, deliberate gaita intro and built into something faster and more complex. Her movement was confident, rhythmic, and entirely her own. Afterward, Gonzalez hugged her for a long time without saying anything.
That image—two women from completely different backgrounds, connected by a dance that traveled from the Colombian coast to a New Jersey gymnasium—captures something about what this program actually does. It doesn't just teach cumbia. It uses cumbia to build a bridge between students and a world most of them never knew existed, and in the process, it teaches them something harder than any footwork pattern: how to show up somewhere unfamiliar and belong there anyway.
Cumbia is having a moment in American popular culture, showing up in pop collaborations and festival lineups, often stripped of its origins and reduced to a rhythm. Gonzalez knows this. She's not naive about what gets lost in translation. But she also believes that when students leave her program, they carry more than steps—they carry context. And context, she says, is what transforms a trend into a tradition, and a dance into a language you can speak anywhere in the world.
