Salon Los Angeles: Inside Mexico’s City’s Oldest Dance Hall

Just look for the Art Deco neon signage on the stuccoed facade and then follow the intoxicating sounds of the guitars, mambo drums and maracas inside. Welcome to Salon Los Angeles – the 85-year-old musical institution in working class Colonia Guerrero where zoot suited men and women in long flowing dresses and heels – and other kaleidoscopic throwback threads – still arrive for timeless dance genres. 

You can partially thank the 1930s for the influx of dance halls around Mexico City. In fact, Salon Los Angeles was one of the inaugural spots to host popular danzon bands (a unique mashup of Cuban, African, and Haitaian beats). Back in the day, a slew of well-known visitors swung through the fabled ballroom doors – in the 1930s, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo visited with exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky – and later,  Cuban revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara stopped to hear music while Colombian writer Gabriel Gacia Marquez was known to frequent the bar.  That’s not al. Musical legends like Ruben Blades and Celia Cruz mounted the stage alongside iconic 80s big band Latin crooners like Maldita Vecindad, and today, you might catch marquee fusion acts like Son Rompe Pera.

Open two nights a week, the club rotates various throwback styles on Tuesdays, and on Sunday evenings you’ll find a dedicated salsa night. Should you need a reminder of where you are, just look up. Nodding to the influx of Mexicans who left home to work in the U.S. in the late 1970s, the salon adopted it’s now famous motto – set in red-neon-lit signage outside the venue saying Quien no conoce Los Ángeles, no conoce Mexico which translates to: “If you don’t know Los Angeles, you don’t know Mexico.” 

Find it 

Salon Los Ángeles, Lerdo 206, Mexico City, Quintana Roo  06300, Mexico, Tuesday 5-10pm, Sunday 5-11pm