Danzón

I miss Mexico. I know, I know, we just returned from vacation but I was missing Mexico before that and still am. It has been a good three years since we've been back (well, excluding a handful of weekend trips to border cities.) I was going through some old travel pictures and found this video of danzón in the Zócalo de Veracruz.

Side story: when I was younger (9 or 10 years old) I told my mom and grandmother that I wanted to go to Veracruz. They thought I was crazy. "We don't even have family there. What do you know about Veracruz!" But I insisted that I would go one day. I used to dance with a Mexican folklorico group and I think that the music and dance from that region really appealed to me when they taught us dances from Veracruz. Fast forward 10+ years and I finally made my childhood wish come true.

The clip above is something that I will never forget: the husband (who was my bf at the time) and I were walking around the zócalo (the main city square). There was a band playing music with lot of older people sitting around listening. They started playing a danzón and then the men got up to look for a partner. The danzón is a very old fashioned dance that is carried out in these sort of segments. All of the older people obviously knew how to dance it. It was such a treat watching them come alive on the dance floor. Most of them were dancing with total strangers (we paid attention to who and how they approached their partners), but yet they all knew how to listen to the music for cues on how to continue with the dance. It was like the music took them back to their teenage days. So sweet and inspiring.

Anyway, that's my blast from the past. Not sure what the point of this post is. Just me being nostalgic I guess.