Mia Lourdes, 25, always knew she was meant to dance. From a young age, her mother introduced her to movement—ballet, folklórico, anything to keep her active. But nothing stuck until she found flamenco.
“She put me in ballet first, but I hated pink, I hated the tights. Then it was folklórico, but everyone had to smile, and that wasn’t for me,” Mia Lourdes said with a laugh. “Then she put me in flamenco, and I just loved it.”
At just ten years old, she made a decision that would shape the rest of her life.
“I remember watching Carmen La Talegona and just closing my laptop, turning to my mom, and saying, ‘I want to be a flamenco dancer.’ She said, ‘Okay, then we need to get you to Spain.’ But she wasn’t going to pay for it—I had to work for it myself,” Lourdes said.
She spent years saving, taking any job she could find—washing cars, working in restaurants, anything to fund her dream. By seventeen, she had saved enough to take her first step into the flamenco world. She moved to Granada, where she trained in the caves of Sacromonte, one of flamenco’s most iconic spaces.
Lourdes immersed herself in the art, training at Amor de Dios in Madrid, one of Spain’s most prestigious flamenco schools. There, she learned the language of flamenco—its structure, improvisation, and emotion.
“Flamenco is a language. Flamenco is a way of life,” she explained. “Once you go into this world, you can’t go back to thinking the same way.”
But making a life in Spain wasn’t easy. As a second-generation Mexican-American, she often felt caught between two worlds. On stage, her presence and style led many to mistake her for gitana (Roma).
“After one performance, the crowd shouted ‘¡Gitana!’ but I turned around and said, ‘¡Americana!’ I’m neither, and I’m both,” Lourdes said.
She knew she needed to stay in Spain to grow, but she also needed a way to make it legal. That’s when Saint Louis University-Madrid entered the picture.
“I transferred to SLU because I needed a way to get back to Spain,” she admitted. “At first, school was just a way to get my visa, but in my last year, I realized—SLU is actually really cool. I should have taken advantage of it.”
Balancing university and professional dance wasn’t easy.
“I was barely on campus that first year. I would finish class and go straight to the studio. I didn’t want a social life—I was here for flamenco,” she said.
But eventually, she learned to juggle both worlds.
“You don’t have to be obsessive about what you love,” Lourdes reflected. “I should take that advice myself.”
Now, two years after graduating from SLU, she has built a name for herself in Spain’s flamenco world. Her journey is not just about dance—it’s about belonging, about claiming space in a tradition that wasn’t hers by birth, but hers by passion and dedication.
“Looking back at videos from when I was 17, I looked like a noodle doing footwork,” she joked. “Now, my entire form has changed—I’m a completely different dancer.”
But some things remain the same: her relentless pursuit of her art and the fire that has fueled her since childhood.
She is not la gitana, nor la americana. She is simply Mia, la flamenca.
