Strictly salsa.

• Author: Pratt, Timothy
• Position: !Ojo!

A LANKY WHITMAN ANGULO borrowed a cell phone and dialed thirteen numbers linking the towering neon of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the tumbledown cinderblocks of his barrio on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia. "Mami, we're the world champions," said Angulo, almost shyly, as if he didn't believe it.

The 24-year-old, together with seventeen of his teammates, also from Cali, had just won in the team category at the Second World Salsa Championships. Riding the world's deepening love affair with dance competitions, the event's final night a year ago December was filmed by ESPN International's camera-on-a-crane, for later broadcast around the globe.

But the fact that Angulo was standing in Las Vegas, telling his mother about "the incredible hotel that had everything--even a pool," was not just a sign of the revival of a 40-year-old dance forth that once swept Latin America's tough urban neighborhoods. It also marked an important milestone for his hometown.

The very internationalization of salsa in the years leading up to this event--which drew competitors from 28 countries, including Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, even Bulgaria and Korea--had produced an unexpected result. Like some exotic flower kept in a hothouse during those four decades, Cali flourished with first-, second-, and third-place finishes both years of the event. It had shown the world a frenetic style of dancing that Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and the millions influenced by their twirls and spins could only imagine. Salsa came into its own in New York but its rhythms and steps had never strayed far from their Caribbean heritage, after all. Now a new kid was on the block.

The piston-footed, acrobatic style seen in Cali, a city of two million in southwest Colombia, is an example of global culture's free-flowing currents. Its roots go back to US sailors who showed the Charleston and other steps to black port dwellers on Colombia's Pacific Coast six decades ago. The portenos adapted those hops, leaps, and flips to the Cuban-style dancing they were already doing. Their children later migrated over the Andes to Cali and added other steps to the mix, such as boogaloo. When salsa came...