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The story of how a particular beat went from moving the hips of African slaves<\/strong> newly arrived on Colombian soil courting the local indigenous ladies, to the collective hips of a continent is a fascinating, if fairly contested, one. Cumbia, the two-step dance said to have originated in chained legs on the Colombian Caribbean coast<\/strong>, has slowly spread its infectious beat all over the Americas, taking on a myriad of radically different forms in places as different as Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Texas<\/strong>. Anywhere you go in Latin America, you’ll find steamy dance floors reverberating to the same basic beat in a rich profusion of interpretations. And it all began in Colombia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n http:\/\/youtu.be\/Mi8iDSEyJ9w<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Way back in the day, before Cumbia started conquering the world<\/strong>, that distinctive 2\/4 beat was just one kind of music the bands up around Cartagena <\/a>way would set their audiences into day-long dancing frenzies with. Other beats would include\u00a0porro<\/em>,\u00a0merengue<\/em>, and\u00a0mapal\u00e9<\/em>; all recognised today as very different styles. Cumbia first started to be seen as its own genre when elements from jazz big bands from abroad started to make themselves felt, resulting in the cumbia big bands of the 1950s<\/strong> – something that would appeal to the fancy folks in bigger cities like Medellin and Bogota:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n