Esther Gutierrez-Sloan began her professional life learning everything she could about computers and data processing, a domain in which the word “excitement” might be hard to find in the database.
Now, however, the 40-year-old Colombian native is building a name in an opposite world as the mother of SALSArobics, a brand of hot Latin music blended with aerobic workouts that has won converts everywhere she has appeared, not only in the Midwest but also in Florida and California.
The influence of the program has reached even farther. The name SALSArobics is copyrighted in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, France and Japan, and the 7,000 SALSArobics videotapes she has sold have gone to 16 countries.
She plans to follow that 1989 video, which sold for $24.95, with another tape this year that gets down to the basic steps of SALSArobics. She continues to spread her word through the numerous teaching engagements she has made since hitting on the formula in 1988.
The inspiration came 10 years after she and husband Walter Sloan had moved to Lake Bluff from the Rogers Park area of Chicago. Since her teen years she had worked out at health clubs, and one day while exercising at the Chicago Health Club in Vernon Hills, doing weightlifting and then some aerobic dancing, it occurred to her that her Latino background could combine with aerobics to make a new style of exercise that wouldn’t be so hard on the body but would be lots of fun.
“I wanted to teach dancers to exercise and exercisers to dance. So I used some friends as guinea pigs from the Lake Forest Montessori, where I was board president,” she said. She ran her SALSArobics out of the Gymnastics Factory in Lake Forest, then from her house. Gradually, her classes grew so large that she started teaching at several North Shore locations.
An exciting departure from the thumping drone of traditional aerobic classes, SALSArobics combines what Gutierrez-Sloan says are the safest, most effective technical aspects of aerobic exercise with the sensual, intriguing blend of Latin dance rhythms. While traditional aerobics classes rely on a memorized sequence of steps, SALSArobics concentrates on working on specific body parts, proper allignment of the body and body awareness.
“I’m not a big supporter of aerobics, but I took a couple of her classes, and I loved her style,” said Lisa Gold Daddono, director of Highwood’s North Shore School of Dance, where Gutierrez-Sloan teaches three times a week. “She’s so well trained it’s amazing. And she keeps on training. It’s a big dance party. Everyone has so much fun!”
Certified to teach aerobics by the American Council on Exercise in San Diego and the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America in Sherman Oaks, Calif., Gutierrez-Sloan does SALSArobics exhibitions at health clubs, universities, high schools, conventions and ethnic festivals in Illinois, Wisconsin, California and Florida.
Though she teaches regular classes at upscale North Shore establishments in Deerfield, Bannockburn, Lake Forest and Evanston, among her favorite regular classes are the twice-weekly sessions at the Women’s Residential Center in Libertyville, Lake County’s addictions-recovery facility for women and their children.
Peggy Siebert of Lake Bluff had been taking Gutierrez-Sloan’s class in Highwood for 2 1/2 years when it occurred to her that SALSArobics would be a perfect match for her volunteer organization’s newest endeavor.
“Junior League was eager to fund an exercise part of recovery for the Women’s Residential Center. Esther did a class in January, and the women loved her,” Siebert said. “She’s dynamic, caring . . . and the most selfless . . . person I’ve ever met.”
The Junior League allocated funds for Gutierrez-Sloan, and she started her twice-weekly classes last spring.
The attraction for Gutierrez-Sloan is that she knows those clients are looking for more than exercise and a good time; they need to exercise inner strength.
Of all her endeavors, this one seems to intrigue her the most. It’s there that Gutierrez-Sloan plugs her energy into a group of women who are recovering from years of drug and alcohol addiction and, in most cases, sexual abuse. She stirs up their emotions and ultimately, triumphantly, rekindles their self-esteem.
“These women have disconnected emotionally from their physical selves. They look at their bodies with shame and hatred,” Gutierrez-Sloan explained. “Exercising puts them back in touch with feeling proud of their bodies, being proud of what they can do.”
Linda Millon, co-director of the Center for Mental Health at Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, noted that success at exercise, regardless of what type, translates into higher self-esteem and self-worth. “Your sense of self is enhanced by exercise. If you lose weight, you feel better about yourself. And you want to look better, so you go get clothes to look nicer,” she observed.
For most of the women at the Women’s Residential Center, who go there voluntarily, this represents their last chance to beat the addictions that tore apart their lives.
“My job is to provide a place for the body to release tension and stress,” said Gutierrez-Sloan, whose personal presence far exceeds her 4-foot-11, 100-pound frame.
For one session at the center, Gutierrez-Sloan dressed in neon blue nylon shorts, gray tights, workout shoes, black socks and a multi-colored bra top. Wearing an omnipresent smile and with her sparkling eyes framed by short, cropped black hair, she was ready to begin. A few of the women had wandered in.
“Okay, let’s go! You’re looking great today! Are you ready to sweat?” asked Gutierrez-Sloan, swaying her hips as she stood on tiptoe, placing a tape into the recorder. Several more women shuffled in as the small room filled with a pulsating Latin beat.
“Step, step, like you’re jumping rope!” Gutierrez-Sloan shouted. “Now move like someone’s pinching your butt. Follow me.” They all clapped, stepped and turned their heads in unison. “Aren’t they great?” she said, beaming.
The exercise group was definitely not like other classes, where toned women casually saunter in, twist and sway within a mirrored gym and flit out on their way to the grocery store.
SALSArobics is a lifeline for this group. Some of the women entered the room eagerly, while others slipped in hesitantly. But within minutes of joining the group, a transformation could be seen within everyone.
The veil of reluctance seemed to lift as they lost themselves to the relentless beat of the music. The message of SALSArobics is simple, says Gutierre-Sloan: Love your body and its movements. Act silly, lose your reservations and stop being uptight.
“Women need this physical release for their sensuality to come out in a healthy way,” Gutierrez-Sloan explained. “It makes them start to care about their health and body in a positive way for the first time.”
After the class, as the women cooled off, she sat down crosslegged and had a heart-to-heart talk with them.
“This is my favorite class. I’ve learned from all of you. You feed me with your energy,” she exclaimed, as they sprawled out on the couches and floor. “You’re emotionally open. It’s okay to be sensual and sexual as a woman. It’s a gift to yourselves. I’m honored to be here.”
Positive comments flowed from the normally reserved group. “When I know you’re coming, I go, `Uhhh,’ but then when I do it, I feel great,” one woman said.
“In the lifestyle I came from, being a jock wasn’t cool,” another said. “But I came in here the other night, and I’ve never laughed that hard in my life.”
“You see,” Gutierrez-Sloan said, “you can’t just work on their heads. They need a place to sweat out all their problems.”
Women’s Residential Center director Margo Preston recognizes that the women love Gutierrez-Sloan’s compassionate personality and contagious energy. “Esther has been a blessing to us,” she said. “We’ve known for a long time that exercise is important for their recovery, but with a limited staff and budget, we couldn’t incorporate it into our day until now.
“Esther is truly amazing. One day she came in at noon, and most of the women were doing their chores, like vacuuming. So she yells, `Hey, you guys! Get in here and I’ll show you how to exercise while you’re vacuuming!”‘
Chris Ruitge of Munster, Ind., read about the group in a national magazine and called Gutierrez-Sloan in hopes of soon starting her own local SALSArobics. “I felt like I had discovered gold when I talked to Esther. She’s like a live wire. She was so thrilled to talk to me!” exclaimed the legal secretary.
“My point of view is that as an incest survivor,” Ruitge said, “we disconnect from our bodies. We rent space in our bodies. We don’t know who we are. Exercise helped me get back in touch with my body, to reclaim it, to feel it again.”
Invited to take a class with the women at Women’s Residential Center, Ruitge was deeply affected. “They were wonderful. They were hugging me. I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep.”
People often ask if there’s a difference between her classes at the Women’s Residential Center and those at health clubs and high schools. “It’s the same music, same moves, but I get a totally different response,” Gutierrez-Sloan noted. “People at Multiplex, Bannockburn (Health & Tennis Club) or high schools don’t tend to give themselves this emotional release. They’re there for the aerobics, not the release. I try to work on that all the time with (the women at the Residential Center).
“The Latino culture is very loud and expressive, where the Anglos are much more reserved. I want the emotions to work out, too, not just the body,” she explained, waving her arms. “We’re so culturally ingrained not to let go. I say, `Hey, you guys have to scream for me!’ “
In a sense, this niche has taken her back to her Colombian roots.
She remembers dancing with her mother back in Cali, Colombia, which she left at age 12 with parents Hernan and Alicia, older brother Hernan and maternal grandmother Encarnacion in the hope that the children would get a better education in the United States.
They moved into Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Though Gutierrez-Sloan could speak no English initially, she soon learned and later graduated from St. Casimir High School on the South Side. She went to work with her mother at Western Electric in Chicago as a lab technician, working with integrated circuits. But her real desire was to use her multilingual background as an interpreter, so she started saving money to go to college in Switzerland for a degree in business and translation.
Then she met Walter Sloan, an engineer at Western Electric. For love, she decided to stay. In June they will celebrate their 22nd wedding anniversary.
While she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and gradually piled up experience in data processing, computer systems analysis, information science and data-systems consulting, Gutierrez-Sloan was always interested in exercise.
As a teenager, she had often accompanied her mother to the fledgling Chicago Health Club in Marina City. But her business career came first. She got a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and eventually went on her own as a consultant.
With the birth of her second child in 1985, she quit work to be a full-time mother. “I started doing a lot of volunteer work in community projects and school projects and ended up working harder than when I had a job,” she said.
All the while she was working out and beginning to think more about her “spiritual journey” in life, she struck upon her SALSArobics formula and began building her reputation.
She knows she could exploit her idea further by training other instructors and spreading her program, but the thought is difficult for her. “It’s selling your baby,” she said. “There’s only one of me, and when people hire me, it’s not just the exercise they’re getting, it’s also personality.”
One aspect of SALSArobics that extends into every aspect of life is “being comfortable with ourselves, with our bodies, allowing us to pass to our daughters this awareness of how special we are,” Gutierrez-Sloan asserted. “Nowadays we’re so busy being a professional, a wife, a mother, that we forget to be a woman with our daughters. So they get their images on how to act and how to dress from magazines.”
But her daughters, Andrea Michelle, or Michi, 12, and Daniela Joelle, 9, get a steady dose of healthy images from their mother. And the girls display an unusually open affection for their mother.
“She’s the craziest mom I’ve met. She takes work and turns it around and makes it fun,” Daniela said. “She makes me feel very special. She doesn’t ever say anyone is doing something wrong. She never yells. She’s always nice.”
Michi agreed. “She’s my best friend. Everyone loves her. She’s such a hip person.”
And the secret to her success? “I’m a very popular mom because I give myself permission to be everything I am. I’m a grown-up and a child,” Gutierrez-Sloan said. “The biggest compliment is that my daughters want to look like me. I teach them that sensuality is not dirty. There’s nothing more beautiful. They learn from Mom that it’s very healthy.”
“She’s very spontaneous, youthful, highly energetic. That’s the way she is at home, too,” said husband Walter, a sales and marketing representative with IBM. “When we want to relax, we put on music and dance together.”
In fact, the couple teach private dancing lessons, much like in the movie “Dirty Dancing,” for clubs and at homes.
“Her little girl inside brings out my little boy inside. She keeps me feeling so very young,” 46-year-old Walter said.
From the reactions she gets in her classes, especially at the Libertyville center, apparently Walter isn’t alone.
“I thank God for being exposed to these women,” Gutierrez-Sloan said, “that I’m able to make a difference in their lives. They’re taking ownership of their bodies, of their lives for the first time. They’re trying to be responsible. It’s a wake-up call for not taking life for granted. What keeps me going is knowing that this is what I’m here to do in life.”
———-
For more information, phone 800-467-2572.
