Dancing club

Victor Flores López was born in Hidalgo on July 28, 1956 in a poor family where all the members of the family had to be jacks-of-all-trades. He had always been the black sheep of the family, but that didn't stop him from being a good person.

In 1964 his family left the state of Hidalgo to settle in Ecatepec in the State of Mexico. Don Herón, the head of the family, always hard-working and charismatic, despite his violent nature, was an important figure in the Santa Clara neighbourhood. My uncles and grandfather built many things: schools, houses, roads, to the extent that Santa Clara belonged to them, so much as they belonged to Santa Clara, despite them coming from a different state.

Irma López Ramírez was born in the state of Mexico on November 10, 1959. Also from a poor family where all the members had to be jacks-of-all-trades. She was the eldest sister and from a very young age she had to mature prematurely and become the unofficial pillar of her family.

Don Rogelio made sure that the girls' childhood was complex, on the one hand he gave them love in the form of emotional attachment, but at the same time he denied them a fatherly figure, by being absent for long periods of time. People nicknamed Don Rogelio El dango, god knows why, and his daughters were consequently las dangas.

Despite belonging to a relatively conservative family, Irma could slip away from her father, and Doña Julia would cover up for it, not before telling her to play with fire, but not to get burnt.

Victor could always sneak out of his house, despite he knew that the day after, his father would beat him up for sure.

Irma and Victor met in 1975 at a quinceanera¹ party. Dancing was always part of their history and for a long time they were just that: dance floor friends.

In all that time, Ecatepec was very different from what it is today (2023). You could walk quietly at night, violence did not prevail in the streets and you could go out dancing without worrying about what was going to happen, other than what your parents would tell you upon your return.

After 2 years of being boyfriend-girlfriend, Irma and Victor got married on April 23, 1983. By then, Irma had a job at the thermostat factory and Victor a job at the paper factory. Being a young lower-class couple in the eighties, despite their shortcomings, they still had a long way to go.

When they began to have children in 1984, Irma left her job and Victor became the main provider, but hyperactive as they always were, neither one of them stopped looking for better things, and for that they needed to work very very hard.

For a long time in the eighties and nineties they sold everything, from shoes, clothes, appliances and even corn-based street food, despite the fact that Victor had a good job at the Hoechst factory.

In 2001, Victor was fired from the factory, just a couple of weeks after he himself resigned from a union-leading position. Although the Flores López family did not easily give up, that was an important moment in their lives. On the one hand, the main source of income was temporarily shut, on the other hand they could take a break after working so hard for so many years, but time was not forgiving, Victor, being more than 45 years old, without a formal education with a piece of paper that said useless technician, and in the midst of a fragile economy... it was going to be impossible to get a job that could adequately support the whole family.

Irma and Victor decided that opening a convenience store was the right course of action, and with the store, a new chapter in their lives also opened.

The first months brought enormous changes: the were more than joyful the first day that they sold over 700 pesos of merchandise.

Seven hundred pesos!!!²

Each of them were shouting, while counting the profits and making mental maths of their potential monthly income, assuming that they continued selling like this. If at that moment someone told them that there would be Christmas eves in which they would sell well over 10,000 pesos of merchandise, they would surely think that it was a joke or at least they would have found it hard to believe.

Working in a convenience store was not an easy task, much less when the 4 people who were working there, had such different and sometimes even incompatible personalities.

Irma was always the pillar of the family, and on more than one occasion her tough character was what kept the family together but at bay. This behaviour was not for free: due to her childhood, her way of relating to people and, the bad example of Victor frequently getting drunk in the nineties with friends, Irma did not really believe in friendship. She found it very difficult to believe that her sons had significant friendly relationships and, she herself said that she did not have nor did she want to have friends.

The evolution of Ecatepec did not help in the development of Irma's character, the neighbourhood of Santa Clara gradually became a violent entity besieged by crime. Progress and over population emphasized the imminent changes to which the town was subjected.

The relationship that Victor and Irma have with the neighbourhood of Santa Clara goes beyond emotional attachment, or love and hate; there were stories, tears, hard work, happiness, sadness, and hopes anchored to a house that serves as a fortress in the jungle of Santa Clara.

In the summer of 2018, Victor won a lawsuit against the Mexican Social Security Institute, and was finally granted a pension that would allow the family to stop working at the store. Soon after, Irma also obtained her pension and for the family, that meant taking a well-deserved rest.

A convenience store is a some kind of little monster that although it protects you from all harm and provides quite well, it is also that type of entity that requires all the attention in the world. In all this time there weren't many opportunities to party or to take vacations, much less to go dancing.

Not having to work at the store any more, and given that they had virtually no more obligations, Irma and Victor could start over, although they didn't quite know where.

Almost by accident they found a danzón group to which they quickly signed up and integrated to even more quickly.

The danzón group was not just a dancing club, it was a group of people sharing time and space, opening up to a couple of strangers they had just met.

In the lives of Irma and Victor, this new episode was perhaps the most satisfying. They found shelter in the danzón group, from their daily lives, the news about the pandemic, vaccines, crimes, the economy... all of that disappeared when they got to the dance floor to practise. They found something that was stimulating, challenging, fun and, above all, that they thoroughly enjoyed.

Irma finally understood the meaning of friendship and she understood what her sons had experienced for so long: emotional connections with people they could trust, tolerate, appreciate, and even love.

Their new family was not only an excuse to continue dancing, as they had done for more than 40 years, and will continue to do as long as they had the will... no, their new family represented a grain of hope to return to live their lives peacefully in a neighbourhood that was once their dance floor.

1The latino equivalent of Sweet Sixteen

2Around £32