Dancing boots are back on

 Something that has always been a huge part of who I am is music. I have expressed this in a few ways over my life, which has been through playing trombone and dancing Mexican Folklore. To me, I feel more of a connection with dancing because it is a direct link to my Mexican heritage. Unfortunately, I haven't danced in a long time. The last time I danced was in October of 2020 at the Mount for Hispanic Heritage Month. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to dance again...until recently. 

A friend of mine, Lupita, goes to the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Maryland. I have known her for close to 10 years; her and I have been dancing together for all of that time. She wanted to get some of the members in the dance group back together and perform for international night at her campus. Keep in mind that we all haven't danced as group in close to three years, so it had been some time. Nevertheless, six of us got together and we rehearsed a couple times before the performance that took place this past Tuesday, March 15th. 

The dances we did were from the state of Jalisco. I think that this is one of the more well known states because of the costumes worn from there. 

As you can see here, the three guys, Martin, Israel and I, are wearing Charro suits. These are costumes that you typically see Mexican Mariachis wear. This costume typically has charro pants (which we replaced with regular black pants), a white button up, a sash around the waist, charro jacket, a bowtie and sombrero. Oh, I also can't forget the black boots! I love these costumes but let me tell you, they are not fun to wear in the summer because they are all wool...

The three dances we performed were Guadalajara, Tranchete, and Son de la Negra (which we were dancing to in the photo above. These are all songs that we have danced together many times. That's why we were all able to put this performance together in a relatively quick time frame. The only difference was changing up some choreography, but that was about it. 

The image on the left are the girls dancing the very well known song, Guadalajara. This is a song that only the women dance, and is an opportunity for them to show off their beautiful dresses. All of these girls, minus Etsube (green dress), have been in the group for years. Etsube only danced for us this performance and is a friend of Lupita's. Lupita is in the yellow dress, Gabi (my sister) is in the pink dress and Sandra is in the red dress. 

All in all, it was great to dance again. The performance went really well and all those in the audience enjoyed it. We all had fun dancing again and even talked about getting back into it. It's just been hard with the pandemic of course, but we are all getting older and have our own things going on. Almost all of us are in college, so our futures may be taking us all in different directions. Even if that is the case, we all love to dance; we are a family.