Farzana Lozano, 25, said they had gotten a shock when a woman he had known since he was about 7 years old — one of their classmates — decided to visit them on a date. “If she just wanted to meet us for fun, we gave her a room,” Lozano said, “and that’s it. She kept asking, and we started to get really suspicious. The whole trip was really kind of weird for us since we’ve been in contact with her a lot.” For weeks, Lozano and his friends heard nothing from their friend. Finally, they got an email saying that the woman had “recently” moved. When the girls finally confronted her, Lozano and his friends weren’t told what she had done with their friend or that she had taken their apartment. It was at that point that Lozano remembered a local story about an event in Mexico called the Zumba Fiesta. It was on that day Lozano realized: “This is what was happening to the girls in our neighborhood right now.”
The Zumba Fiesta is a dance-oriented, free Latin American festival that takes place on the weekend around December. It’s the largest celebration, attracting hundreds of thousands of people. It’s also where Zumba (Zumba Afi) comes from. The festival’s origins lie in the 1980s, when it developed into a mass migration and cultural exchange event that took place every year in Zumba-land.
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Since then, Zumba has evolved into a huge free-for-all for mostly Latino, mostly female dancers who enjoy getting wild on the beach. They generally play to crowds of up to 10,000 people.
“We call it a ‘fiesta,’ a ‘fiesta parade’ or a ‘fiesta dance party,’ but they’re all the same,” Lozano explained.
“From the outside, it looks like they should take care of their house. It’s like a jungle that you can really slip into.”
And from the outside, it looks like they should take care of their house. It’s like a jungle that you can really slip into.
With more than 3 million people annually in the United States attending what is one of the largest cultural festival on earth, it’s unclear how many people actually turn up. The organizers of this event (the World Zumb