1. Nadie Te Lo Quita (Lo Que Es Pa Ti) [No One Can Take What’s Yours], Laritza Bacallao
Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and Saturday morning, I step into one of the most extraordinary phenomena I’ve ever known: a Zumba class. Now, I know what you’re thinking—you’re likely picturing a bunch of old ladies in pink spandex and leg warmers, barely moving, hips undulating like belly dancers—but let me explain.
2. Todo El Mundo [The Whole World] (feat. Nando Boom & HISATOMI), DJ Ricky Luna
Fractal: A pattern in which similar patterns repeat at progressively smaller scales—thereby causing the smaller parts of a thing to look like the whole. Trees branch in fractals because when you zoom in, each branch resembles a miniature tree.
3. Rompe La Bocina [Crank the Volume], Dj Yus, El Micha & Chacal
In my little Southern California town, we have one of the top Zumba instructors in the country and the largest attended Zumba class in the world. The music is room-shakingly loud, so loud that many people wear earplugs, and I worry about losing my hearing. Attendees have been known to bring toddlers wearing noise-canceling headsets.
4. Booty Shake, Matt Houston
Our moves are what I’d call cardio-dance fitness, and the rotating playlist runs through sixty minutes of multi-genre Latin music, including Reggaeton, Hip-Hop, and Global Fusion. Fifty to one hundred of us throw our hands into the air and spring off the historic ballroom floor. Many of us, like me, have been coming for more than eight years. Some, like Mauricio and Rosie, have been coming for fourteen. We move fast, hearts pumping, and are generally dripping, heaving, and smiling by the third song. But what’s made this class special is not just the instructor, but the community she’s built and her story.
5. Higher Love, Kygo & Whitney Houston
I was raised on the East Coast, and I remember the first time, after moving to New Orleans for two years in my mid-twenties, walking up St. Charles Street to the Rite Aid when a passerby looked me in the eye and said, “Hi,” only because we were physically crossing through the same space. I was stunned. Then, a second shock as the security guard minding the front door of the Rite Aid said, “Good morning, Miss.” I’d grown up internalizing the big-city maxim that strangers didn’t interact for no reason, unless mental illness was involved. You kept your eyes down and your pace brisk; life was a serious business. But that day, I glimpsed an alternate possibility: an openness, an ok-ness to connect with others, if only because we existed on this orbiting rock at an exact cosmic moment that would never repeat in quite the same way, and this fact meant we had something deeply in common.
6. Looking at Me, Sabrina Carpenter
Wavefunction Collapse: The moment a wave stops being a cloud of possibilities and collapses into one specific reality (a particle)—only because someone observing it felt that reality was possible.
7. Believe in You, Raja Kumari
Josette, our instructor, is Julliard trained, but stopped dancing when she was told that she didn’t have the body of a ballerina—too curvy, too short—which is hard to believe because when she moves, it’s mesmerizing. In 2011, she was diagnosed with advanced rheumatoid arthritis. Her left arm suddenly fused at the elbow, and she could barely move her once-supple body. Doctors said her condition was chronic, incurable, and degenerative—she would soon be in a wheelchair. Determined to live for her toddler, she turned down medication and searched for a way to return to herself, to her heart. She studied, she prayed, she started our class, moving through the pain, allowing for the possibility that bodies are sacred, that movement and community heal. Despite her physical state, slowly, people came. At one point, there could be one-hundred-and-fifty of us dancing on a given Saturday. Today, not a trace of disease remains in her body.
8. Otra Vez [Again], (feat. J Balvin), Zion & Lennox
I’m fascinated by the repeating patterns of the universe; macrocosms and microcosms, fractals hidden in plain sight. Cells organize to form tissues, organs, systems—the way humans organize to form communities, cities, countries. What if each of us is a cell in the body of our planet? What if stars are neurons in the dark matter of a cosmic mind?
9. Mi Gente [My People], J Balvin & Willy William
During class, it’s not unusual for “oooo-ah ooo-ah!” to be hooted out by one or many of us at once. In response, one or many will reply with, “ooo-ah ooo-ah!” It’s our way of keeping the energy high, of checking in with each other, of saying, “You’re amazing!” and “I can’t breathe!” and “I see you!” There are no mirrors in the ballroom, so no one knows how they look. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been coming or if you can dance. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing the steps we’re doing or doing something that looks more like an Irish Jig (thinking of you, Fred). It doesn’t matter if you’re seventy-eight years old like Carol, or seven years old like Quincy, or how fat or thin you are, or if you work in construction like Mauricio, clean houses like Antonia, or went to medical school like Dr. Kathy. What matters is that you’re here, with us, feeling it.
10. Par Atras [To The Back/Behind], MAX MUH, Kid G, & Lakambra
As a little girl my favorite thing to do was invite friends over and make up dances. I’d spend hours in my childhood den, maneuvering between the Sony TV and the white velvet sofa, choreographing moves to Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood”, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”, or any song off the Grease or Bee Gees soundtracks. One year, in first grade, Natalie, Audra and I felt compelled to put on a show. Natalie’s mother hosted, and I remember the honor and the glee I felt when she’d actually baked a cake for the attending parents. We were seen! I don’t remember when the dancing stopped, but I do remember that when moving my body to the music, I felt most like myself.
11. Que Viva La Vida [Here’s to Life], Wisin
Mr. Shrack, a ninety-eight-year-old World War II vet, attends every class. He dances in the far back corner and knows all the moves. Though he can’t move his body with the speed and agility that many of us can, he goes right when we go right and goes left when we go left. He moves with the whole, as part of the whole, and says this class is what gets him out of bed in the mornings. Lately he’s been having trouble with both eyes— macular degeneration—and so has had to miss several classes. When he isn’t in the room, we notice, we worry. There’s a vacancy in his space, a vacuum within our whole.
12. Limbo, Daddy Yankee
In Quantum Field Theory, there’s no such thing as empty space. Even when an electron is missing, its field remains.
13. Trabajar [Work], (feat. Claydee), Young Ash & KG Man
A body is a universe unto itself—teeming with players of all kinds to sustain it. Sometimes, when I see Mr. Shrack, I picture older cells moving slowly, working hard to keep up with the whole. Does each player know the purpose of the whole, or does it just do its job by showing up and being fully itself?
14. Sigueme y Te Sigo [Follow Me and I’ll Follow You], Daddy Yankee
Coherence comes from the Latin verb “cohaerere,” meaning “to stick together” or “to be connected,” and refers to the degree to which waves (like light) maintain a consistent phase relationship—or are in sync.
15. Sweet Sensation, Orezi & Sheebah
In class we all move together: grapevine left, grapevine right, four steps forward, four steps back, counting without counting, kick-ball-change, repeat. We’re single cells moving coherently, working for the sake of the whole. Even when it’s messy, we’re creating something beautiful. There’s one particular song where we all step sideways, twice, while raising both arms from down near our hearts to up above our heads, then we sweep both arms open and around—as if to scatter love, like confetti, onto the ballroom floor. When we do this in synchrony, it feels like we are the metronomes of the universe.
16. Without You, (feat. Usher), David Guetta
When traveling, I’ve tried the recorded classes online, but it just isn’t the same. Alone, an energy is absent; a sacredness that emanates from our commingled presence, our synchrony, our joyful, collective abandon. It’s a force that saturates the room and percolates throughout our bodies. It’s transformative. Healing. During Covid, we didn’t stop dancing. Instead, we moved to Chase Palm Park, across the street from the beach, dancing barefoot on the cold grass in the shadows of palms.
17. Mucho Flow [Lots of Flow], Ilegales
To be graceful in this class is to be in the moment; to stop thinking about whatever’s happened, needs to happen, should or shouldn’t have happened. To let yourself inhabit the music so fully that you become the joy, the energy. The moment you begin to think, you inevitably mess up. When you trust that your body knows the song and the movement that goes with it, you flow. The trick is to empty your mind and feel with your heart.
18. Shake Señora, (feat. T-Pain & Sesan Paul), Pitbull
In class, smiling becomes contagious. Booties of all sizes shake, thrust, and pump. When a classmate is invited to lead a dance, vigorous cheering ensues. When the energy feels low, Josette will often stop to remind us that nothing serious is going on, and we’ll applaud and holler as she calls up Ross to dramatically play her spurned boyfriend and the Zumba-fied track of “At first I was afraid, I was petrified…” begins. Inevitably, Mauricio will take it upon himself to circulate and dance in step with anyone and everyone, so no one feels left out. I’ve arrived with a headache that has vanished halfway through. And if I’m having a hard time finding joy, I just look over at Essie, who mouths made-up English words to the Spanish songs, because she can’t help but sing along.
19. Conexión [Connection], Foreign Teck, Justin Quiles & Jhayco (with Bryant Myers, Eladio Carrion & Tory Lanez)
Quantum Entanglement: When particles become entangled, they are linked in such a way that the state of one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they are.
20. Me Entiendes [You Understand Me], DrefQuila
Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and Saturdays from 11:30am-12:30pm, for one short hour we come together from disparate corners of town. We strip off our sweatshirts, our worries, and our smaller selves to become bodies in motion—both particle and wave. Like galaxies, like cells, we are the same and different: stardust and dirt expressed in rhythm and form. We come to be together, to lift each other up, and on many occasions, to be lifted up. In that particular ballroom, in my ordinary town, we are more than just a dance class. We are a fleeting constellation, a glimmer of the perfect whole.
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