Anhelo
Salsa Club
A beginner-friendly salsa community I founded and built from scratch at UMass Boston. Weekly classes, social dances, and the kind of welcoming room I wish I'd had when I first started learning.
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I founded Anhelo because I wanted to create the kind of welcoming dance community I wish I'd had when I first started. A place where beginners feel comfortable learning, making mistakes, and connecting with each other through music and dance.
I filed the club application in September 2025, and Anhelo was approved as an official student organization that December. Then I launched and scaled it through the Spring 2026 semester. In a single semester it grew into an active campus community built around inclusivity and growth, not elitism.
Everyone starts somewhere. Anhelo is built so a complete beginner can walk in and feel welcome on day one.
Growth and belonging instead of elitism. A room where people lift each other up.
Honoring the music, history, and roots of salsa. The why behind the dance, not only the choreography.
An exec board and a succession plan so the club keeps going strong after I graduate.
One semester, from application to active club.
Wrote the proposal, defined the mission, and submitted Anhelo for recognition as an official student org.
Recognized by UMass Boston, and the real work of building a community began.
Weekly practices, collaborations, a growing membership, and a flagship event, all in the first active semester.
The programming behind the community.
Weekly Practices
Beginner-friendly lessons and social dancing every week. The heartbeat of the club and the easiest first step for newcomers.
Café con Pan
An ethnomusicology series digging into salsa's history, theory, and lore. The music and culture behind the dance, not just the steps.
Org Collaborations
Partnerships with other student organizations to bring social-dance events to campus and grow the community beyond our own room.
Choreographies
Team choreography developed with members through the semester, building confidence and working toward live performances.
Salsa by the Sunset
Anhelo's flagship event, and the one we pulled together from the ground up. It was the first live-music salsa social in UMass Boston history, bringing together ~80 attendees, multiple student organizations, outside dance orgs, and university departments. I led the coordination end to end: a live band, a student dance performance, food, vendor and purchase-order logistics, promotion, and managing the flow on the day itself.
Why a salsa club belongs on a tech résumé.
Founding Anhelo taught me how to turn an idea into a real organization. Bringing people together, planning events, communicating across very different groups, managing responsibilities, and building something that could outlast me.
Those are the exact skills any technical or customer-facing role runs on: staying calm under pressure, explaining things clearly, earning trust, and taking ownership until the job is done. Dance just happens to be where I learned them.