Salsa dance and music has become popular worldwide and Salsa communities outside of Latin America offer a fertile environment for studying gender and heteronormativity in cultural contact zones. Often, the desire to reconstruct ‘traditional’ heteronormative gender roles in these contexts is striking. Interestingly, informants of the qualitative, ethnographic study presented here display high degrees of reflexive consciousness regarding the constructed nature of their gendered performance. This article also discusses and analyses non-heteronormative performances that do not adhere to ‘traditional’ gender roles, which may be understood as queer performances. These are found frequently; however, an analysis of discursive data that relates to these performances makes their subversive potential debatable.