MEXICO CITY (AP) – The Los Angeles show has been packed every weekend since 1937 with couples dancing with mambo, cha-cha-cha, salsa and danzón. presuming room, “Anyone who hasn’t been to the Los Angeles Show doesn’t know Mexico. “
But Mexico City’s ballroom, like other bars and clubs, has been closed in whole or in part for more than five months due to the coronavirus pandemic and its owners say they are in debt and may have to close and demolish it.
Guests, some of whom wear zoot costumes from the 1940s, say the loss of the city’s social and cultural life would be irreparable. Last weekend, the dance runner declined to organize cake sales and a craft fair and ask sponsors to save the position where Cuban musicians such as Pérez Prado and Beny Moré helped popularize the mambo. Their owners say they perceive the need for social estating but feel they have gained little help from officials.
“We are the last precedent, in terms of strategic ventures,” he is helping the government, said Miguel Nieto, the 3rd generation of his family circle to run the corporate started through his grandfather. “But I have to draw attention to the fact that we are a precedent in terms of intellectual health. “The dance runner is a way, he says, to lessen the stress, isolation and domestic violence that has engendered confinement.
Mexico City’s other ballrooms face similar inastrous cases amid a pandemic that has hit Mexico very hard, with the fourth highest number of COVID-19 confirmed deaths in the world. his task until the end of March — is a nostalgic movement to return. The owner of another ballroom, Salon La Altena, died of pandemic.
Nieto says it would be a double tragedy if the Los Angeles Show succumbed to this top antisocial pandemic, which has largely disrupted nightlife in the Mexican capital.
“This kind of activity, dance, is vital, and it is vital to replace this end with isolation and not to talk to others. We’re going to have to end social isolation,” Nieto said.
The accountant Ricardo Zamorano, 58, would agree. She appeared over the weekend dressed in the kind of outfit she’s been dressed in at the Los Angeles Show for 20 years: a full-length red patchoque suit and a matched wide-brimmed hat. Her date, Paola Tiburcio, dressed as a “rumbera” dancer from the 1940s.
Zamorano called the exhibition “an icon, anything very important, a tradition”, and said it transforms their lives.
“Since you came in, no more, since you left your space to come here, you’re another one,” Zamorano said. “When that goes away, you feel something missing, that something is over. They’re very worried they’re talking about the end of the ballroom.
There are some regulations in the ballroom: no drugs, no fights, no harassing women to dance and when the orchestra plays a mambo, everyone has to get up to dance. But with 25 workers to pay, in addition to the countless musicians who have been fired, Nieto says he can do it for a few more months.
“Every month it’s more complicated to make (debt) payments,” he said.
Its gigantic wooden dance floor is surrounded by neon mirrors and luminaires installed in the 1940s. Located in one of Mexico City’s toughest neighborhoods, the Guerrero Colony, the Los Angeles Salon projects the kind of symbol of danger, excitement and devrun glamour that invaded the dance. rooms of the videos of the 40s and 50s, the “golden age” of Mexican cinema, when gangsters or boxers fell in love with a dancer.
But the room has also been replaced over time: Nieto sells a young band that combines the tropical tool known as marimba with electric guitars and drums, does not need the room to freeze over time.
“We don’t want to be declared a cultural heritage monument because we already are,” Nieto said. “It’s to copy the Los Angeles Show because it’s to revive all the other people who came here. “
David Romero, 71, for example, leaves his global worldly as a bus dispatcher and transforms into a costume of zoot, chains, rings and wide-brimmed hats – he has a dozen – when he leaves his humble apartment to move into the Los Angeles Salon. . Bring two costumes in case someone else comes up with the same color, so you can replace it with being different.
“I liked to stand out from the crowd,” Romero said. If this Los Angeles Show culture were to disappear, it would be very serious, wouldn’t it?That would be very unhappy for me.
Romero went to other ballrooms, but said he doesn’t like any other than Los Angeles: “It’s like a time of home for me. The people who come here to dance, we’re like a family. “
Mario Morales showed up dressed in his best galas – a giant white hat with white blouse and black jacket – to soak up the atmosphere, even if there is no music. He’s been lacking the position he’s held for years.
“It is unique; there are no two places on the global like this, there is so much magic, so much charisma, it has what the dancers want to make us dance,” he says.
“You feel nostalgic when you look around and there’s no life,” Morales said, examining the dance floor to see the ghosts of those who have danced here for 83 years.