Last summer, among the usual sea of hardcore and punk fliers slapped onto windows and telephone poles, I started spotting posters for cumbia concerts and reggaeton nights all over the city. They stood out for their warm, saturated palette. But it wasn’t until I passed a few of them that I noticed a recurring emblem: a leafy green palm stamped with “La Sonora.”
I made it to my first event in October: Yeison Landero, grandson of the legendary “King of Cumbia” Andrés Landero, and an extraordinary musician in his own right. Stepping into Le Mondo immediately brought me back to the dark, sweaty Bogotá bars where my cousins and I had recently spent so many nights dancing. Aesthetic-wise, this crowd wasn’t all that different — young, tattooed, tastefully curated band tees. But most weren’t speaking Spanish, and one woman was noticeably attempting the bouncing cumbia steps in high heels. It felt like a room of people looking to reconnect with their roots.
Still, I couldn’t believe I was seeing cumbia live so soon after returning home from Colombia. Watching Yeison work the accordion at Le Mondo — a venue where I’m more used to the occasional rave or ambient show — felt surreal, bridging two worlds of mine that rarely overlap.
“[La Sonora] just adds even more flavor to a city that already has a lot of personality and soul to it,” Benjumea said.
“[La Sonora] just adds even more flavor to a city that already has a lot of personality and soul to it,” said musician Richard Benjumea, whose cumbia punk group, Soroche, regularly travels south for gigs, making him especially grateful for the new opportunities to play.
Baltimore boasts a rich and eclectic musical lineage, and I’m lucky to call it my home scene. But growing up in the area, I had long accepted that experiencing live Latin music meant trekking down to D.C. I needed to know what brought him here.
A bit of snooping led me to Maggie Villegas. A longtime Baltimore resident, she started La Sonora in January 2025 as a much-needed space for Latino artists. Raised in Miami, Villegas grew up steeped in Latin culture. In Baltimore, where the community is much smaller yet steadily growing, that connection was harder to find.
La Sonora’s vision extends beyond the dance floor. Most recently, the collective organized “Aquí Seguimos,” a deeply moving exhibit exploring the bond between Mexican and Palestinian communities, particularly their shared resilience in the face of militarized borders and state aggression.
“I’ve found a lot of solace and a lot of safety within these communities,” Guzmán said. “These artist-activist communities where people not only are extending their homes to you, but making you feel like you belong.”
“I’ve found a lot of solace and a lot of safety within these communities,” said Alana Guzmán, who curated the “Aquí Seguimos” exhibition alongside Palestinian artist Marah Abdel Jaber. “These artist-activist communities where people not only are extending their homes to you, but making you feel like you belong.”
The show, which runs at Making Space through October 4, examines both countries’ fraught political realities through photography, poetry, painting, and sculpture. But the quieter throughlines also especially resonated, like the sacred role of grandmothers and the trials of girlhood.
Some of the most resonant pieces weren’t submitted. The curators received coloring pages on loan, drawn by children held at ICE detention centers. From a distance, they look innocuous enough — bright scribbles inside paper doll outlines. Up close, they spell out their dreams. One child wants to be a cosmetologist, another a doctor. The pages hang beside a portrait of a woman breastfeeding.
The exhibit also didn’t shy away from critiquing diasporic communities. In another interesting curatorial choice, a bench offers a place to sit and read through exhibition materials. But the bench is a piece itself: tucked just below the wooden seat is a line of barbed wire, invisible unless you crouch down to look. It’s titled “Comfort Is (Ignorance-Complicity).”
Villegas recognized that dynamic during her upbringing in Miami, a bastion of Latino conservatism where, as she told me, being in the demographic majority can breed a subtle complacency. With La Sonora, Villegas wanted to fight against those instincts.
She toyed with the concept for years, already deeply familiar with the difficulties of managing a collective. In the 2010s, she helped run Baltimore’s EMP Collective, organizing shows and connecting artists across the city. That work eventually led to a role managing public art projects within city government and later to spearheading the Baltimore Creatives Acceleration Network in partnership with MICA.
Every stage of her career taught her how to support artists, but institutional work wore on her. Villegas viewed her time with the city and MICA as “opportunity building,” yet it often felt impersonal. She began reflecting on how she didn’t own anything she created, and how detached her work often felt from personal experience.
Villegas longed for the days of DIY organizing that originally drew her to Baltimore’s creative scene. When an opera company let her go just a year into her move, that scrappy grassroots energy convinced her to stay. And even as she took pride in her work on major initiatives, she struggled with the ways hierarchical institutions co-opted the language of community and overlooked artists of color.
“I began thinking of how we can build models so ownership stays within a community and aren’t subject to shifts from an outside organization,” Villegas said.
La Sonora was her answer to that gnawing problem, and a perfect way to marry her cultural heritage with her professional background. It all started with a happy hour for local Latino artists, where she realized her sense of isolation wasn’t hers alone.
“I’ve been walking around with this little hole in my heart,” Villegas said. “And I learned other people had been walking around with that hole, too.”
“I’ve been walking around with this little hole in my heart,” Villegas said. “And I learned other people had been walking around with that hole, too.”
Villegas recognized the challenge of building an authentically representative Latino collective. The diaspora is vast, encompassing different races, nationalities, histories, and customs. It’s a flawed umbrella term that flattens a truly diverse experience. That holds true in Baltimore, too. First-generation immigrants remain largely concentrated in the Southeast, while second-geners exist across the city and are mostly leading the charge in shaping groups like La Sonora. But as the Trump administration continues to terrorize these communities, a shared label can inspire a sense of solidarity.
Honoring that breadth is no small task, but Villegas is uniquely equipped for it. Her decades in the city have connected her with artists from all walks of Latinidad. Since starting, she has helped organize over 20 events, including an Afro-Colombian heritage night, a Puerto Rican house party, and a Mexican tequila tasting. Many of the events also doubled as fundraisers to support local immigrant communities.
“Our communities are under attack,” Villegas said. “I wanted to design something as thoughtful as the complexity of this moment.”
Villegas has many collaborators, and they don’t shy away from praising her commitment to honoring their creative vision. Guzmán and Jaber felt her dedication while curating their far-reaching show.
“Maggie has been an amazing mentor for me,” Guzmán said. “She makes it seem like anything is possible.”
Many also noted how averse she is to the spotlight. At every event I’ve attended, Villegas remains content to linger on the sidelines in a simple La Sonora snapback — quiet, approachable, and there only if you need her.
Among her most steady partners is Edgar Reyes, a resident artist at Creative Alliance. Having helped organize several La Sonora events, he appreciates a new series that defies easy categorization.
“[The events] aren’t highlighting one experience of what being Latino is,” Reyes said, “they’re uplifting the different facets of it.”
With every La Sonora event I attend, the faces grow more familiar: the same couples, the same friend groups. One of those familiar faces belongs to Jenny Leon, an embroiderer and La Sonora vendor. For Leon, who left Colombia seven years ago, the gatherings carry the warmth of a good family party, always widening its circle to newcomers.
“It’s not just about Latino community,” Leon said, “but also for locals to know about the richness of our community.”