After moving to Canada from Mexico, bioinformatics PhD student Erick Navarro realized he missed dancing salsa at parties and family gatherings.
“In Mexico, salsa and cumbia are things that are culturally danced in family reunions and parties with friends. I feel like that's maybe a little bit different to here, because here, from what I've seen, you dance salsa at classes,” said Navarro.
He noted the few spaces in the city where he could dance the salsa and cumbia he grew up with were dominated by cis-het people, which made his Queer friends less inclined to go.
“When I first started going to these spaces, and I danced with another guy, we would get these looks,” said Navarro. “So it was interesting to see how these spaces were still not … entirely welcom[ing].”
With this desire to create a safe and accessible space for Queer people to experience the joys and freedom of dancing socially, Navarro created Salseo, a Queer Latinx collective that provides free salsa and cumbia lessons around the city.
Navarro was inspired by the free classes he took at Van Vogue Jam (VVJ) when he first got involved in the local ballroom community over a year ago.
Ball culture is a Queer subculture founded by Queer and trans Black and Latinx people that evolved out of Harlem in the 1960s. During balls, people compete in different categories “designed to simultaneously epitomize and satirize gender constructs, occupations, and social classes,” according to VVJ’s website.
He credited Ralph Escamillan — the founder of VVJ and his “ballroom mother” from the House of Gvasalia — for helping set up Salseo.
The community response for Salseo has been enthusiastic from the start, with signups filling up for events the day they are announced.
“One of my fears [was] like, ‘Okay, what if I do it and then no one shows up?’ …. But when I did it for the first time, I got so much response, and then every time that I've been doing it everything fills up on the same day, every time,” said Navarro.
He also highlighted the positive response from the Latinx community in Vancouver.
“I've had comments from people from Latin America [and] the diaspora of Latinx people being like, ‘It's really nice to see so many Latinx cultures here to feel a little bit like home.’ So I think that's really, really nice.”
Keeping the classes as low barrier as possible has been an important consideration for Navarro. This includes making each event free or pay-what-you-can. In doing this, he has been able to keep Salseo as accessible as possible for fellow students and community members and make the events feel “like home.”
In terms of what’s next for Salseo, Navarro hopes to find a permanent location to have more regular events as well as collaborate with different groups to expand the types of social dances the collective teaches, like bachata.
When Navarro is not teaching, he’s learning and putting the skills he’s gained from dance and performance to use in his studies.
“Confidence that I developed, for example, in ballroom, helped me a lot during my presentations, in my day to day life, and also with my interactions with our professors,” he said.
Much like how dance involves an element of creativity and building on basic rules, Navarro's other side lies in biology and coding. During one of his undergraduate internships, he learned how to code for the first time and fell in love with it.
“I just thought it was really cool,” he said. “Something that I also like about coding is it's really creative in the way of, you have a set of rules that are basic, but you build the blocks the way you think are gonna work the best.”
Navarro's PhD project is in the field of epigenetics, the study of how genes are regulated without changes to the DNA sequence and how environment impacts gene expression.
“We don't currently have a very good understanding on globally … how much the environment affects DNA methylation,” said Navarro, noting the majority of studies tend to focus on the impacts of only one environmental aspect, such as smoking, on DNA methylation.
Navarro's PhD project will integrate data about environmental exposures and epigenetics to see how they shape fetal methylation profiles, as prenatal development is a particularly sensitive time for environmental exposures.
Interdisciplinary collaboration has been key for Navarro throughout his PhD, as he has to work with environmental exposure data across several fields, like nutrition and psychology.
“One of the challenges [is] I'm working with very heterogeneous data … data that I need to understand — and to understand, I need to get out of my zone of comfort and talk to other people,” he said.
By working with other experts in their respective fields, Navarro is not only able to extract the best information and encode data more meaningfully but also contribute to greater conversations between fields.
“It was really nice to just talk with other people, exchange ideas and see how this can help to answer so many other questions that are relevant in our fields,” said Navarro about a conference he had attended in Columbia in November.
But he isn’t just talking to other researchers. After taking several courses in his undergrad about science communication and outreach, Navarro became passionate about bringing that knowledge to everyone.
“I feel like scientists a lot of times [are] just kept in a very small community," said Navarro. "We don't touch ground with the reality of what are the actual needs of people and how can we bring our expertise to people.”
Navarro has worked with children both during his undergrad and at UBC with Let’s Talk Science to lead workshops for children.
“Also something that I love is how [kids] can get amazed at things. I think that's something we lose as we grow up,” he said.
Through teaching classes at Salseo, Navarro brings that same sense of wonderment and discovery to adults.
“[There’s] a community that’s super happy to have a space like that, to have a space where, in addition to being able to learn something new and move without judgment … you can meet new people and meet new Queer friends.”
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