Off and on, between 1985 and 1999, I lived with my parents in Kendall. If you don’t know Miami, that’s a suburb you don’t need to know about. (Sorry, K-Town.) Anyway, I spent some months and years out there in my 20s and early 30s, and while I did, what I most looked forward to was Wednesdays, when the local weekly would hit the metal boxes in our neighborhood. As a young mom and an erstwhile academic, I could not get enough of reading the Miami New Times’ amazing crew of journalists, as much for their prose style as for the stories they broke.

When I took a hiatus from academia, I noticed that New Times was hiring a “Latin music maven.” A maven! Of Latin music! I’d never so much as written a letter to the editor or an article for a school newspaper; all I did was listen and dance to Latin music. I was a maven! I wrote up three articles in what I deemed the New Times style, drawing on interviews from the Cuban musicians, dancers, and DJs I was hanging out with back then. Two lunches and a dinner with editors later, and I was a journalist! I had a column named, Shake, as in shake your booty, mover la colita, you get the idea. A dream I never even knew I had came true: I spent the next 5 years meeting and writing about the music makers of the early 2000s Latin boom.