My Spot: Salsa Dancing in San Francisco's Mission District

For 66-year-old Irma Iñiguez, dancing salsa is like a drug. “It’s very addictive,” she says. You can find her every second and fourth Sunday of the month at a San Francisco club called El Rio for “Salsa Sunday.”

The Mission District bar opened in 1978 and its website describes itself as a “Leather Brazilian Gay Bar.” As for Salsa Sundays, a live band plays salsa music as the patio swells with dancers, young and old.

Iñiguez, an El Rio regular for the last 30 years, has witnessed firsthand the transformation of the club and the neighborhood. Nowadays, she says, salsa music isn’t geared mainly toward Latinos. She says it crosses over to mix with different genres -- like reggae and rumba -- to attract different folks.

“People of all ages come here,” Iñiguez explains. “Transplants come here. People that are trying to figure out if they want to live here come here.”

She says she has adapted to these changes with the help of life-long friends.

“There’s a group of us that I call the ‘Q-Tip heads,’ ” she says. “Of course, there’s those that dye their hair. But I know underneath that, they’re the Q-tip heads. And we all come here together. We dance together.”

She even reconnected with high school friends at the bar and became Facebook friends.

Iñiguez, a Mexico City native, moved to the Mission with her family when she was 5 years old. As a child, she learned to dance from her father, who was also a dancer.

As a young adult, Iñiguez started going to dance clubs. She says the dancing was different from what she was used to.

“You know, everybody counted,” she recalls, “and they would ask me, ‘Do you dance on the eighth or the fourth?' and I was like, ‘I don’t know.’”

When she was in her 30s, she discovered El Rio and its “free spirit” atmosphere. She says you don’t have to worry about how you dance, “and everybody improvises and nobody cares if you stumble and fall.”

Around the time she discovered El Rio, Iñiguez became a salsa performer and was even the group’s personal makeup artist. Today she’s no longer performing in a salsa group, but you can still find her every “Salsa Sunday” on the El Rio dance floor sliding and swinging in the arms of other salsa dancers.

“And who cares if you’re a Q-tip head or a brown head or, you know, a black head or a red head, you know, nobody cares,” she says. “You know, it’s just everybody enjoying the rhythm of El Rio, the music, the people, the environment. I love it.”