The two Albertos had tapped into a profound realization: that the 80% of the population in the world who don’t exercise would probably do it if given the proper incentive. To be the Perez for their own friends and family.

People started calling, asking how they could become teachers themselves. Perlman and Perez got together with one telephone in a garage and started selling DVDs and VHS tapes of Perlman’s new blended dance style, which brought together everything from salsa to martial arts. Perez’s videos, given the mysteriously zany name “zumba,” sold and sold. It was already the hot age of buy-by-infomercial. In the realm of casual gym classes? Why not. In the professional dance world-where genres are as strictly divided as scientific fields of study-such thoughts would’ve been blasphemy. One day, Perez forgot his regular music and had to make do with a random assortment of salsa and merengue, and it was then that he stumbled upon a potentially novel idea: dance instruction that didn’t have to fit into any existing performance category, but rather blended elements of various cultures into one amorphous style. The thirty-somethings became fast friends. Perlman-formerly a businessman in the tech world, now CEO of Zumba Fitness LLC-first met Perez, a Colombian dancer and choreographer, in the 1990s when Perlman’s mother took an aerobics fitness classes Perez was teaching.

We have more locations that teach zumba than McDonalds, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts combined.” “You know how many studios they have?” Perez says, ready with the answer immediately: “Eighty. She tells me it was like all the hope had been drained out of her life.Īs she speaks, somewhere to our left, a waitress seats half a dozen chattering women who sport tights in the same spectacular shade of canary neon this diner operates 24 hours a day and has no windows, lit eternally by fluorescents in the ceiling, giving the odd illusion that it’s a space broken free from time. We have to strain to hear one another, across the mix of uptempo dance music thumping in from rooms a few feet away.Ĭintron tells me about her retirement from professional dance, then the car accident that halted her career as a dental hygienist, and finally the depression into which she spiraled afterward. She is calm but casual, unpoised, when we meet up at a diner in the middle of the Hyatt a few days into the convention, sitting down to talk over a mountain of napkins and half-toppled ketchup bottles. “I was going to commit suicide, you know,” Yolie Cintron, a 54-year-old Puerto Rican woman with short cropped hair and steely eyes, tells me.

Zumba dance