JENNIFER AVILES SADITES

“Life is a dance, you waltz or you Rumba, ChaCha or Salsa, But whatever you do, make sure you know the steps even if you have to make up your own.” 

Michelle Geany

THE JOURNEY
New York City is the birthplace of the term “salsa dance”. The name gained appeal in the mid 1970s to refer to a variety of different music rhythms from several countries of Hispanic influence. New York City is also the birthplace of Jennifer Sadites. Jennifer gained appeal in the mid 1970s with her proud Hispanic parents as a dazzling brown-eyed newborn.

Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, is located on the western bank of the Guayas River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean. During the 1950s Guayaquil experienced substantial population growth in response to the rise in banana cultivation on the coast.

According to Dennis Hanratty (Ecuador: A Country Study, 1989), the tremendous influx of migrants increased to the point that they defeated the ability of the Guayaquil government to provide basic services and employment. With the city becoming overwhelmed by incoming inhabitants, Jennifer’s parents, Juan and Elsa, decided it was time to “venture out”. With the ink still wet on Elsa’s high school diploma, Juan and Elsa contacted a distant cousin in New York City. In 1961, with the assistance of their relative, Juan and Elsa arrived in the “Big Apple”.

A decade and a half later, when Jennifer was four years of age, her family moved to Miami where her father secured employment. Moving to the “Latin music capital of America” helped to en- sure that Jennifer’s affiliation with Latin music would extend beyond coincidental beginnings: “We’d have big family gatherings with big dinners and later we would play salsa and merengue music and everyone would dance. The more of these gatherings we had, the better.”

Jennifer later incorporated her salsa-bred agility into her careers as a physical education teacher and massage therapist. In the early 2000s, she was drawn to an alternate musical influence in the form of a vacationing guitarist from Timmins, Ontario, named Jason. It wasn’t long before Jason ‘struck a chord’ with Jennifer’s heart and in October 2005, they were married. 

THE ARRIVAL
According to the ‘American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms’ the expression “put on the map” dates from the early 1900s. For over a century small towns have used various measures, ranging from giant statues to annual festivals, to attract attention and fame. On occasion an international news story or a local celebrity serves to endow a small town with notoriety. Long before meeting Jason, Jennifer recalls watching a Shania Twain special: “Shania was talking about her hometown (Timmins) while they were showing a place with lots of snow. I remember saying ‘wow what a place’.” In January 2009, six years removed from Shania’s last hit, Jennifer arrived at the “place with lots of snow.” She recalls the silence of the night as one of the first, and perhaps starkest, realizations that she was far from the “big city”: “I was listening for some sound and there was no sound . . . I had never experienced that.” 

THE SETTLEMENT
More than sixty percent of Miami’s population speaks predominantly Spanish. With Spanish being her first language, Jennifer, who is fluently bilingual, was part of the sixty percent: “I didn’t learn English until I started school.” Although the opportunity to speak Spanish in Timmins rarely presents itself, Jennifer is committed to imparting the benefits of being raised as a bilingual child onto her own son who, at four years of age, is well on his way to conversing interchangeably in English and Spanish.

One of the most pervasive values in the Hispanic community is the concept of family, including the extended family. The “big family gatherings” of her childhood provided Jennifer with a venue to refine her dance steps, but more compelling, they served to instill in her the immeasurable worth of family. Jennifer credits “being with” her family as the single most dominant factor in helping her adjust to her move north and she ranks the birth of her son as “the best thing that has happened” to her since her arrival.

Jennifer admits that the “best thing that has happened” ironically has also uncovered the bittersweet reality of starting a new family far away from her family in Miami: “Its a shame that I couldn’t share the birth of my baby and raising of my son over the past four years with my family.”

Unless you are a bird, who is wired to migrate north in the spring and is discerningly motivated to escape the cold and return south in the fall, moving seven climate zones from south Florida to just south of the 49th Parallel is bound to stir an occasional longing for tropical weather: “I miss just being able to walk outside with my flip flops and tank top. I was an elementary phys-ed teacher and my classroom was outside all day long - I miss that.”

“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are” observed Bernice Johnson Reagon. In hindsight, Jennifer has been emboldened by her emigration experience and by how she has been able to conquer the challenges strewn along the way: “I’ve learned that I’ve been able to adjust to things better than I could - moving away from what I was used to and living in a very different area – I wasn’t sure I could do that”.

Dance Dojo’s “Ultimate Guide to Salsa Dancing for Beginners” describes the “basic count” sal- sa timing as “1-2-3, 5-6-7”. There is no step on 4 or 8 because the rhythm of the movement is “quick, quick, slow; quick, quick, slow”. The “quick, quick, slow” salsa rhythm epitomizes Jennifer’s transition from the “quick, quick” fast paced urban environment to the “slow” small town pace: “I was a very fast paced person - I packed in as much as I could but being here has forced me to relax a little bit”.

The guide further explains that counts 4 and 8 are used “to draw out movement and make it longer, allowing the slow part of the rhythm to be fully expressed”. Jennifer’s move to a smaller community has similarly allowed her more time to “draw out” her movement and to “fully express” herself: “It has helped me to spend more time with my family and enjoy the important things in life like watching my son grow. I really enjoy being a mother, a wife, and taking care of my family”.

Jennifer knows how to “step it up” on the salsa dance floor, but a glimpse of Jennifer so patiently and lovingly attending to her son is all that is needed to realize she also has a firm grasp of the dance of life.