When Omar Martinez started teaching salsa in the Bronx in 2003, he had 40 students and used the space in what used to be Jimmy's Bronx Café one night a week. Today, five years later, he has his own studio and around 125 students in nine classes a week.
Starting his own business without any prior experience wasn't easy, but with the help of friends and a little persistence, Martinez now owns Mambo 101, a basement studio off of Fordham Road. The entrance of the studio is unassuming: a silver-painted metal door with a red awning reading "Mambo 101" crunched between the signs and buildings around it. Inside, there are two mirrored rooms where salsa music is blasting as students learn Susy Q's and hook flicks.
After moving to the current 214 East 188th Street location almost five years ago, Martinez was struggling to run his own business while working a day job as a pre-print manager for a printing company. Carlos Vasquez, owner of La Salsa de Hoy in Brooklyn, where Martinez first started teaching lessons in 1997, gave him advice, telling him to worry first about getting students and then about other aspects. By handing out fliers and through word of mouth, "slowly but surely it started to grow," he said. After three months, he could afford wall-to-wall mirrors, and a few months later, he painted the studio.
"I don't make that much doing this," he said. "It's a sacrifice I make with my life. But it's paying my son's way through college."
"I have fun with this," he added. "There are days I'm sick and I'm manic because I want to come in."
Martinez runs his studio a little differently than others. While many schools teach on a per-class basis where anyone can drop in and learn a few steps, students pay for monthly lessons at Mambo 101 and follow a curriculum. A list of 80 "shines," or individual dance moves, hangs above the floor-length mirrors, and in each week, the instructors progress one or two moves down the list.
"It feels like you're learning from the core," Yvette Rivera, 51, a student in the beginner class, said.
Mambo 101 fosters building upon skills taught, and when an instructor starts a beginner class, they continue with the same students until too many of them drop out. To date, the longest class with the same group of people has been progressing for one year and two months. According to Martinez, this way the students get to know each other and become friends. Some meet to practice during the week and form friendships that last beyond the class.
There is a trend of long-lasting connections at Mambo 101 that extends beyond students. Angelique Hernandez, Fordham alumna, CBA '06, would wait in the studio as her mom took lessons about four years ago. Martinez saw her dancing and gave her things to do while she waited, showing her how to break down the moves to be able to teach them. Martinez decided to bring Hernandez to his lessons with Eddie Torres, innovator of the "Mambo on 2" step popular in New York and what Mambo 101 teaches.
"I think Omar had an idea of what he wanted with me before he told me," Hernandez said. In fact, that was true.
"I can tell somebody's potential just by looking at them," said Martinez. "I took Angelique to Eddie Torrez to test her. By the following week, she was fine." Now, Hernandez teaches her own class.
Martinez has a long-standing relationship with his office manager, Damiana Garcia, who describes herself as "Omar's right hand." The two met in 1999 in an AOL chat room. She started taking lessons at Jimmy's Bronx Café, followed the studio in a location change, and now works as an office manager and has started teaching her own class.
The classes themselves are two hours long, one night a week. If you work at it, Martinez said, within three months you understand the counts and mechanics of the dance, and within six months a student can be a "decent dancer." But it's not about "breeding professionals, but teaching regular people to dance." Martinez recalled a story from his earlier salsa days when he went to a club and saw a girl he wanted to ask to dance. He got up the courage to ask her and she turned him down.
"I took lessons, and when I went back, she saw me," he said. "She came up to me and asked me to dance, and I turned her down."
But it's not all about competition.
"It's such a fun dance to learn," said Martinez. "It's not just dancing, but a way of life."
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