Newsletter

Sin Negro no Hay Guaguancó: LV’s Salsa Night

By Eva Jo McIlraith

October 8, 2025

Dance scholar Hilda M. Jordan and choreographer Jair Andres Chara joined forces on Tuesday, September 30th In the annex to bring the world of salsa to Hamilton’s campus. Faculty, staff, and students gathered to learn from the instruction of these talented dancers, listening intently and moving in rhythmic unison. 

Chara, an international master choreographer, dancer, and anti-violence educator built off of his over ten years of experience to teach students the foundations of salsa. He spoke of his personal history with the dance, as he grew up in the salsa capital of the world Cali, Colombia. Chara remembers the Petronio Alvarez Pacific Music Festival, where live salsa dance teams would parade down the streets in multi-hour long dance arrangements. 

Chara collaborated with Jordan, a bilingual social equity consultant and Rocefeller fellow who studied folkloric dance and salsa in Panama as a site of pluralistic national identity building, providing a bilingual teaching experience. Jordan contextualized the dance form, describing the emergence of salsa in the 1970s in the Bronx among Cuban, Puertorican, and other latin immigrants following the Afro-Cuban movement and Mambo stylings of the 1940’s. Jordan described the Salsa dance form like the sauce: a melting pot of different cultures, movement styles, and rhythms - with global influence. The Cuban rhythms of Son Cubano and Guaguancó formed an era of migrant movement, which she paralleled to the inception of hip hop. 

Attendees first mastered the skill of rhythmic marching and footwork, before moving to partner work. Despite varying levels of talent and experience, attendees beamed and giggled from around the room, each one learning something new about salsa, about themselves, and about each other. The event not only taught the dance form and its community building potential, but credited the creators of this transcendent identity tool. Jordan and Chara left attendees with the sentiment, “Sin Negro no Hay Guaguancó,” or without black people, there would be no Guaguancó.