RISE San Antonio, 6504 Bandera Rd, Suite 2 San Antonio, TX 78238, San Antonio, TX (2026)

10/09/2026

No one:
Peiwei: what do you call a two-legged cow? 🤠
James: ...what do you call a two-legged cow?
Peiwei: lean beef 🐄

At RED & BLACK, Peiwei and James Cobo might teach you salsa. They might teach you pachanga. After this video, we’re not ruling out stand-up comedy either. 🎤

Either way, they’re coming to San Antonio for Semeneya Dance Studio’s 27th anniversary | Red & Black, and it’s Peiwei’s first time in Texas. Yeehaw, y’all.

Workshops, a show, a heated rooftop pool party, and social dancing until 3 AM. Use code PJ20 for 20% off the full RED & BLACK pass (it’s called the Weekender at checkout). That’s $80 before the price goes up, and we’ll know you came for them. 🎟️ Link in RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education bio.

Staying over? Room payment plans end tonight, and room prices go up tomorrow.

📅: Saturday, November 14
📍: The St. Anthony, downtown SATX
💃: Peiwei Cobo
🕺: CoboBrothers Dance Co.
👑: Lee Rios
🎉: 𝙎𝙀𝙈𝙀𝙉𝙀𝙔𝘼 𝘿𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙀 𝙎𝙏𝙐𝘿𝙄𝙊
🎧: DJPlaziuz | Latin DJ & Event Producer

10/05/2026

A song about a man locked in a cell, counting the years, sure he will never get his life back.

Latinos: fifty years of dancing to it.

“El Preso” turns 50 this year. Fruko y sus Tesos recorded it in Medellín, Colombia, in 1975. It became the first Colombian song to be a hit around the world.

It started with a friend. Álvaro Velásquez was a musician on tour in Canada. In Toronto he found out that his friend Gustavo Gómez was in prison, serving thirty years. He went to see him. They talked through a thick window, and Gómez told him what life inside was like: alone, afraid, every day the same. Álvaro wrote the song on the six-hour flight home.

His own record label said no. So he took the song to Discos Fuentes. The engineer there, Mario “Pachanga” Rincón, heard it one time and knew. “I liked it. I knew it was good.”

The arranger, Luis Carlos Montoya, turned it into hard salsa. The song was written for Joe Arroyo, but he was not available. It went to Wilson “Saoko” Manyoma, a young singer who used to play soccer for a living. He made up the first line right there in the studio. He speaks to you from inside the prison.

Listen to the piano. Luis Fernando “Tomate” Mesa carries the whole song.

“El Preso” broke sales records in Colombia and in other countries. When Manyoma died in February 2025, the news stories called it the song of his life.

Swipe for the full story. Desliza para leer la historia completa.

Written by Alex La Rotta, “’El Preso’: A Salsa Liberation Anthem at 50,” published November 18, 2025 in Intervenxions, the digital publication of The Latinx Project at New York University. Photographs courtesy of Alex La Rotta. Carousel by Geremy Landin.

RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education

10/02/2026

April 2022: she started practicing emergency medicine and she started training seriously at Empire. Same month. Elana Pascoguin has carried both ever since.

She started salsa at 26, which she will happily tell you, because she thinks more people should know the door stays open longer than they have been led to believe. Latin Fever. Latin Soul Dancers. Mambo Loco. Training now at Love for Movement under Angel and Steph. A partnership with Brayian that has taken them to stages together. And a career as a physician assistant running right alongside all of it.

Here is the part she loves: the two feed each other. Medicine taught her how nerves become second nature. Dance taught her how to be present under pressure. Her dancing makes her better at her job. Her job makes her better at dancing.

The Practice is a new RISE series on people who carry a demanding profession and a serious dance practice at the same time. Physician assistants, lawyers, nurses, engineers, teachers, business owners. Not a trade off. Both, at the same time.

Elana is No. 01. There is more coming.

🎵 “Linda Mujer” by El Timba y Fabio Gianni

By Geremy Landin, Founding Executive Director RISE, Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education

The Practice, No. 01. Swipe for the full profile, in English and Spanish. All photographs provided by Elana Pascoguin.

RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education · ritmoinstitute.org

10/01/2026

Weekly free salsa class at Algo Nuevo provided in partnership with RISE, Semeneya Dance Studios, and The BIG Salsa Fest.

💃: Blanca Lic. TX Realtor
🕺: Lee Rios
🎧: DJPlaziuz | Latin DJ & Event Producer

09/17/2026

Any clue who these talented salsera sisters are? This was supposed to be tricky but they would be hard to mistake. We’re as excited as you to see them on stage and teaching workshops for sure!

09/14/2026

Some cities got a scene. Norfolk got orders.

Naval Station Norfolk is the largest naval installation on earth, and the tracts that wrap it run past twenty percent Hispanic. Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban service families have rotated through Hampton Roads for a century. Many stayed and raised kids here. That is the condition this chapter is about: a city where the Caribbean keeps arriving in uniform, and where a good share of the population ships out again before anything has time to root.

Almost none of it was photographed. There is no archive of Latin social dance in mid-century Norfolk. The parties happened in living rooms, on bases, in rooms nobody sent a photographer to. The absence is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence of who gets recorded.

The chapter runs through Brianna Y. of Sip & Salsa because she is where the question lands. Two years into dancing, she noticed her city had two Latin dance scenes that did not touch, classes and linear salsa on one side, live bands and street dancing on the other, and set out to get them in the same room. She came home from a congress having felt what an on2 community is, found Hampton Roads did not have one, and started asking instructors to help bring the style home. Her teacher, world champion Peiwei Cobo, puts it better than we could: difficulties, challenges and all, she simply found a way.
She is not the only one. Hampton Roads has other teachers, other organizers, and the families who were dancing here first. RISE is working with Bri on a project, and that is how this chapter found Norfolk. We love the organic work of getting people in a room together.

Chapter three of Latin Dance Cities, a series from RISE on the cities the official story skipped.

Follow RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education

Plates: Library of Congress, Boston Public Library, U.S. Navy. If a photo here is yours, reach out and we will credit you or remove it.

Samuel Marichal Peiwei Cobo CoboBrothers Dance Co.
LatinDance AfroCaribbean

09/13/2026

She was bargaining with butchers before she bargained with anyone else. A farming town near Chongqing, no supermarket until she was ten, her family trading chickens for rice.

Ten years of rhythmic gymnastics. Fourteen at the piano, national podiums. She will not call it discipline. She calls it the absence of a choice. “In China there are a thousand other people just as good, or better, and they made sure you knew it since you were children.”

China to France to the United States, alone and young, looking for a crowd to belong to. She found breaking and hip hop first. Salsa arrived at a Halloween party in a castle, Cuban music on three floors, rueda in the courtyard, a few basics somebody had shown her. She danced all night with strangers and her makeup melted off her face.

People credit her technique to the classical training. She stops them. The only reason she can dance and feel the way she does, she says, is ten years of Afro-Cuban study with the master Marisol Blanco. She studies with her still. What that decade gave her is not steps but a way of hearing. The Cuban way does not treat dance, music, and history as separate subjects. The drum call changes what you dance.

So the pianist became a dancer who listens first. Ask her what a student cannot skip and she says timing.

Ask her what she built for women that did not exist before and she declines the question. “I don’t think I created anything new. There were many amazing women before me. I believe sometimes improvements are better than innovations.”

“To hear music, for me, is the best medicine. So when I dance, I first listen and enjoy the music, before I enjoy the movement.”

🎵 “Después de Todo” by The Pedrito Martinez Group

By Geremy Landin, Founding Executive Director RISE, Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education

Artist Profile, No. 08. Swipe for the full profile, in English and Spanish.

RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education · ritmoinstitute.org Peiwei Cobo CoboBrothers Dance Co.

09/09/2026

HELP US CONGRATULATE THEM. The first Ritmo Honors class, and these are the names.

Four categories. Five honorees. Salsa, bachata, and the cultural arts of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

CULTURAL ENTERPRISE
Jorge Canavati, recognized posthumously

CULTURAL STEWARDSHIP
Belinda Menchaca and Jeannette Chavez, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center

TEACHING LEGACY
Lee Rios, founder of Semeneya Dance Studio, twenty seven years on the floor

EMERGING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP
Kimberly Guanziroli, flying in from Cantù, Italy to accept it in person

Friday November 13 at The St. Anthony. Breakfast, the Honors, a performance by Bri, then Blanca Flores opens the floor for a beginner class and it turns into a social. Anybody can walk into that room.

Now the stuff you keep asking us.

The codes are not assignments. PJ20 and HABRIBI take 20% off up to two tickets and that is ALL they do. They do not put you in anyone’s class. They do not keep you out of anyone’s class. They do not tie you to one artist. Every single class is open to every single pass holder.

Performing? You get a code. Go ask your director TODAY, because a code comes off the price of the day. It will not save you from September 14.

September 14 the prices go up. Everybody. Every pass. Codes included. And they never come back down.

The rooftop pool party is not for sale and it never will be. There is no pool ticket. You get the roof because you came for the whole weekend. Friday morning works the same way. You do not buy your way into that room. You get it because you showed up.

So look at what $80 actually holds. Five classes, salsa and bachata, all levels. Heated rooftop from three to six. Performances at 10:30. One room, open until 3 AM. Add Friday and the breakfast and it is $125. Separately those are $165.

Two accounts, one weekend. RISE is the nonprofit that produces The BIG Salsa Fest, and RED & BLACK. Either bio, same link, everything is on one page.

Come be in the room when we say these names out loud.

Link in bio

09/02/2026

Her mother signed her up for everything. Tennis. Swimming. Margarita tried all of it, the way a kid does before she finds the thing.

Then she found it.

She grew up in Ioannina, in the mountains of northern Greece, in a house that ran on Greek music, entekhno most of all. Her mother danced salsa and bachata, and there was a party every Sunday afternoon. Margarita was eight. She did not know how to dance yet. She stood there and listened.

“Dancing was the only thing that stayed in my life. My mom is the person who dragged me into this, and I don’t tell her enough how important she was.”

Contemporary, Latin ballroom, belly dance, breaking, Greek dance, hip hop. All of it comes back into her salsa now, fused her own way. At fifteen she was riding to Athens once a month to train at La Secta Dance Company, one of the best schools in Europe. Then the lockdowns, then her first year living in Athens, when the work turned serious without anyone deciding it would. Social work degree, barista shifts, jewelry under the Acropolis.

She teaches body movement, and she is exact about what she means. Not copying the movement, but feeling it and making it your own. “It is the consciousness of the body, being able to feel which parts we are using and to be present in our movement.” That awareness is what makes the dancing free.

She and Nando Lasso decided on Milan last May and moved at the end of October, to train. “We didn’t force it. It kind of flew by itself.” They built a six-hour bootcamp around a song they loved and staged it in Transylvania. Twenty-some strangers went on stage. “The most touching thing was not that they performed well. It was the bond that had started between them.”

The Art of Salsa began online and now has a room in Athens.

Ask her what she would tell the girl who wanted everything the same day and she has one word. “Balance.”

🎵 “El Amor” by Sonora Ponceña

By Geremy Landin, Founding Executive Director RISE, Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education

International Artist Profile, No. 12.

RISE — Ritmo Institute for Salsa Education · ritmoinstitute.org Margarita Skarlea | Professional Salsa Dancer Nando & Margarita | International Salsa Artists Fernando Lasso | Salsa Artist The Art of Salsa | Dance Academy

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