For nearly a century, San Antonio dancers have carried flamenco between Texas, Mexico and Spain — even when the city rarely recognized the history it was building.
By Marco Aquino
San Antonio’s flamenco history survives in newspaper archives, oral histories, photographs, city records, theater programs and the memories of dancers. Read separately, these accounts can seem like isolated episodes. Together, they trace a tradition sustained by municipal dance education, Mexican American communities and local performers whose work extended from South Texas to stages across the United States and Spain.
It is not simply a story of Spanish artists bringing flamenco to Texas. San Antonio dancers participated in a wider exchange, carrying their training elsewhere and, in some cases, bringing their experience home. That movement is what makes the city’s history significant.
The city program that started it
In 1934, Berta Almaguer became the first dance instructor for the San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department. The City now describes the program she founded as the oldest of its kind in the United States; a City history of the program notes that its early focus included Mexican folklórico and flamenco.[1]
Almaguer’s own background reflected the cultural complexity of San Antonio. She was born in Parras, Coahuila, Mexico, and moved with her family to San Antonio in 1917. Her granddaughter Diana Rosa Almaguer Orellana later summed up that continuity simply: “What she learned in Mexico, she taught here.” Her teaching developed within the city’s Mexican American and South Texas environment, where Spanish dance existed alongside Mexican folklórico, ballet and other local traditions.[1]
Almaguer’s importance to the history of flamenco is less about whether she personally taught flamenco and more about what she created. She built a public system in which young people could receive dance training and move from recreational classes into serious performance.
Timo Lozano is one of the clearest examples. At seven, he was watching a Parks and Recreation dance class when Almaguer, who needed a male dancer, invited him to join. He later left San Antonio at 17 to perform with José Greco, beginning the international career that grew from that first municipal class.[2]
Flamenco on the River Walk
The dancers coming out of the City’s program did not remain in classrooms. They performed publicly, including at the Arneson River Theatre, where Spanish dance, folklórico and later flamenco became part of the cultural life of the River Walk. City records place Parks and Recreation dance performances at the Arneson, while Teresa and Willie Champion became longtime performers in Fiesta Noche del Río there.[1][3]
The importance of the River Walk is not that every visitor saw flamenco, but that local dancers were performing in one of San Antonio’s most visible public spaces, before audiences that could include residents as well as visitors from outside the city. A municipal dance program was therefore connected to a much larger public stage.
Teresa Champion brings flamenco home
Teresa Champion represents the next major turn in the story. Born and raised in San Antonio, she was sent to Mexico to study ballet folklórico and encountered flamenco there, choosing to pursue it instead. She returned to San Antonio and became one of the central figures in the city’s flamenco community alongside her husband, guitarist Willie “El Curro” Champion.[4]
In a WeFlamenco oral-history interview, Champion recalled, “In 1954, I was the first lady to bring flamenco to San Antonio.”[5]
Her story is significant because of where the art form entered her life. She did not travel directly from Spain to San Antonio. She encountered flamenco in Mexico, brought it back to Texas and developed a local tradition around it.
That makes Teresa’s story part of a much more complicated history of cultural exchange. San Antonio’s flamenco tradition was shaped not only by Spain but also by the longstanding connections between San Antonio and Mexico. Champion later described how completely the art shaped the family’s life: “We were solely show business. We bought our home with the art.”[3]
Champion also taught generations of dancers. Her daughter Chayito later recalled that teachers in Spain could sometimes identify Teresa’s students by their posture, arm work and skirt work, suggesting that her training produced a recognizable style that traveled with them.[6]
Teresa Champion in The Alamo
Champion’s career also crossed into Hollywood when she appeared as a featured dancer in John Wayne’s 1960 film The Alamo, with El Curro accompanying her on guitar. Later reporting on Champion’s career confirms the appearance and recounts the cantina dance in which she performed on a table while El Curro played.[4]
Champion’s appearance placed a Mexican American dancer from San Antonio in a major Hollywood production at a time when such opportunities were limited. It also had a direct effect on her family: she later recalled that the film helped her and El Curro buy a home.[4] Her lasting influence, however, came through the work she continued to do in San Antonio, performing and teaching dancers who would carry her training into the next generation.
José Greco and San Antonio
José Greco is an especially important figure because San Antonio dancers were not merely watching his performances; his company also drew talent from the city. Teresa Champion’s career included dancing with Greco, Willie “El Curro” Champion toured extensively with him, and Timo Lozano left San Antonio at 17 to perform with the José Greco company.[3][4][2]
That distinction changes how San Antonio’s role is understood. It was not simply a city where an internationally famous Spanish dancer came to perform; it was also a city from which that professional network drew talent, placing San Antonio within the national and international circulation of flamenco rather than outside of it.
La Presy in Granada
Priscilla “La Presy” Treviño Lozano offers perhaps the clearest example of that circulation working in the opposite direction.
La Presy came up in San Antonio’s flamenco scene in the late 1960s, with Teresa Champion becoming her first full-time flamenco teacher. After moving to Granada, she taught at Carmen de las Cuevas from 1996 to 2000 and then opened her own school in Sacromonte.[8]
For an American flamenco history, that is a remarkable development: a dancer whose education began in San Antonio became a teacher in Granada and was accepted within one of Spain’s major flamenco communities. The traditional story usually has Spain sending flamenco to America, but La Presy’s story complicates that direction of travel by showing that training developed in San Antonio could also travel back to Spain.[8]
From Loma Park to José Greco
Lozano provides another remarkable example. His entry into dance began with Berta Almaguer’s municipal program; by 17 he had left San Antonio to perform with José Greco. He later toured internationally and taught for nine years at Madrid’s Amor de Dios, becoming widely known as the “King of Bulerías.”[2][9]
What makes Lozano’s story especially important is the chain behind it. His international career can be traced back to a San Antonio municipal dance program and to a teacher who noticed him as a child, making his life one of the clearest examples of local cultural infrastructure producing an artist whose career moved onto international stages.
Ana Machado Goes Abroad
Ana Machado began dancing at San Antonio’s Palm Heights Community Center and later performed with Teresa Champion’s companies. In 1984, she auditioned in Madrid for the Spanish dance production Antología de la Zarzuela and joined a tour that took her through Asia, Eastern Europe and New Zealand. She later returned to perform at San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre and Municipal Auditorium. Her career connects a neighborhood dance program and Champion’s teaching to a professional life abroad.[7]
From the Guadalupe to Jerez
As San Antonio’s flamenco community matured, the story became less dependent on individual artists and increasingly connected to institutions. Belinda Menchaca has worked at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center since 1992 in roles that included Dance Program director, and she created the Guadalupe Dance Academy, which continues to offer Spanish flamenco alongside Mexican folklórico. That kind of institutional continuity gave the tradition a more permanent structure through classes, performance, outreach and community programs.[10]
Carlos Menchaca began his training with his aunt Belinda Menchaca at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. He later toured with flamenco companies including Yjastros, and in 2023 performed as a principal dancer in its Xicano Power at Spain’s Festival de Jerez. His route shows what the Guadalupe’s long investment in teaching made possible: an artist formed in San Antonio taking his work to one of flamenco’s major festivals.[11]
What survives in the record
There is a temptation in local history to call San Antonio the first or most important American center of flamenco. The available record cannot establish that ranking, and it does not need to. What it shows instead is an enduring network: public classes that trained future performers, stages that gave local dancers an audience, professional companies that recruited San Antonio talent and community institutions that continued to teach the next generation.
Those paths ran in more than one direction. Berta Almaguer’s student Timo Lozano went on to perform with José Greco and teach in Madrid; Teresa Champion’s student La Presy established herself as a teacher in Granada; dancers trained at the Guadalupe carried their work to international stages. Their careers make a stronger argument than a claim of primacy: San Antonio developed artists whose training mattered beyond the city.
Still moving
That history continues. San Antonio-born dancer Mia de Lourdes began flamenco as a child with Olivia Chacon and later established herself professionally in Madrid. Her 2026 return to perform in San Antonio with her former teacher is another example of a pattern repeated across generations: dancers leave to deepen their work and return with experience to share.
This is a history shaped by movement between Mexico, Texas, the United States and Spain, sustained by people who taught, performed and built places for others to learn. San Antonio did not simply receive flamenco. It cultivated it—and sent part of what it cultivated back into the world.
Continue through the San Antonio flamenco history, browse the people and companies in the Artist Index, hear first-person testimony in the Oral Histories Archive, and trace the city’s live-performance spaces in the Tablao archive.
Sources & notes
- City of San Antonio, “Berta Almaguer Dance Studio & Community Center”; City of San Antonio, 2010 Year in Review.
- Javier A. Flores, “Flamenco maestro to appear in ‘Generaciones’,” Conexión/MySA, June 24, 2010.
- Marco Aquino, “Enduring Diva: The San Antonio Dance Community Celebrates Local Flamenco Legend Teresa Champion,” San Antonio Current, 2018.
- Deborah Martin, “San Antonio flamenco icon Teresa Champion is still dancing,” San Antonio Express-News, September 28, 2018.
- Teresa Champion, oral-history interview conducted by Marco Aquino for the WeFlamenco Fest oral-history archive. The quotation about bringing flamenco to San Antonio in 1954 comes from this interview.
- Aquino, “Enduring Diva,” quoting Chayito Champion on Spanish teachers recognizing Teresa Champion’s students through posture, arm work and skirt work.
- Vincent T. Davis, “Machado danced on stages around the world,” San Antonio Express-News/MySA, March 20, 2015.
- “Rediscovering La Presy, San Antonio’s gift to flamenco,” San Antonio Current, documenting Teresa Champion as La Presy’s first full-time flamenco teacher and her later teaching career in Granada.
- Houston Spanish & Flamenco Festival artist archive: Timo Lozano, documenting his work with José Greco, international career and nine-year teaching tenure at Amor de Dios in Madrid; the “King of Bulerías” description also appears in other flamenco-program coverage.
- Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, staff biography for Belinda Menchaca and Guadalupe Dance Academy.
- Festival de Jerez, Yjastros: The American Flamenco Repertory Company, Xicano Power, program and artist credits naming Carlos Menchaca as principal dancer; Tablao Flamenco Albuquerque artist biography, documenting his early training with Belinda Menchaca at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.
