La Peña Cultural Center
LA PEÑA CULTURAL CENTER
Berkeley, CA
Project: ¡Baila! Community Dance Party
La Peña is building upon an innovative monthly Latinx dance party that celebrates the connection between social dancing and Latinx culture with an emphasis on fighting negative stereotypes, consent, and safety. Each ¡Baila! event begins with salsa and bachata dance classes and are followed by a live salsa band on the venue's main stage.
Venue Info
Since 1975, La Peña Cultural Center has been a central site for Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities of the Bay Area to preserve and celebrate cultural traditions, present new interdisciplinary creative works, and to nurture grassroots social justice movements with artists, activists, and allies. Their founding as a “peña”—or place offering music, food, and political support to cultures of resistance in South America in the 1960s-70s—has guided their program of challenging dominant narratives and centering marginalized musical and cultural traditions for nearly fifty years, and they proudly stand as the last such “peña” still in existence today.
