Now as I am tripping over my red sneaks, trying to keep up with the high-heeled, purple-clad, hip-wiggling instructor (and failing, mostly), I have to wonder what chaos curious passerbys are witnessing.
The music is the cha-cha-cha.
The rest? Bedlam.
However, if you zoom out on the scene, perhaps more order will appear.
So let's switch tracks for a bit: consider the movements of a single, nearly brainless, ant.
Trace his path, and he seems to have no prevailing sense of direction.
(In parallel, I seem to have no prevailing sense of salsa, cueca, or cha-cha-cha.)
Yet if you trace the overlapping paths of an entire ant colony, overall they are finding food, performing feats of construction, inviting themselves to picnics, and surviving marvellously, among their other ant-ly activities.
The collective sense of the colony outweighs the senselessness of the singular ant.
Thus, I propose that our colony of gringos knows more than the singular gringo when it comes to dancing.
While one gringo is stepping on another's toe, the next gringo is executing a turn (most likely out of sheer luck or repetition). My inability to cha-cha-cha is counter-acted by someone else's knowledge. In turn, my merengue, however immaculately concepted, saves our colony a misstep or two. By the end of class, we have hopefully arrived at status quo.
We ain't too good, but we ain't too bad, neither.
Collectively, that is.
My contribution to the survival of the dancing-gringo colony?
Apparently Latin America has its own version of the Electric Slide.
And I have taken to it like a duck to water, an ant to honey, a Chilean to mayo, or a Southerner to a modernized version of the hoe-down.
So let's boogie, gringos! For the good of the colony!
Yeehaw! 
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