My name is Antonio Padron. I’m from San Antonio, Texas.

And when I was 16, I was in my living room watching TV. I was watching MTV and there was a dance show on there. It’s called America’s Best Dance Crew, and I came across a dance crew called Vogue Evolution. It showed me a new, like, type of expression within myself that was more… I would say masculine and feminine, but a lot more feminine. It really opened my world up to something that I suppressed within myself in terms of expression. 

There was no scene here. Vogue Evolution is from the ballroom scene. It was a lot more underground and they were based out of New York City. And I did find two of my friends who actually taught me how to vogue. In 2015, we actually flew out to New York. We went to a club, it was called Escuelita’s. We went to the vogue nights out there, and vogue night’s is a weekly event that they do in New York City. It was amazing, and it just activated something in me where I was like, “We gotta have this back home.” 

2015 is the same year that we formed a house. It’s the first Kiki house in Texas. It’s the House of Kenzo. We threw the first ball in 2015 in San Antonio, and we… it was called the Rainbow Ex- Extravaganza. We threw it in a dance studio and it was packed. It was huge. 

It was San Antonio’s very first ball, but it got raided by the cops and got shut down and people got arrested. While the cops were, like, arresting people and, you know, killing the vibes and stuff, we were across the street just voguing in protest. And it probably pissed them off, but we didn’t care at that point.

It was San Antonio's very first ball, but it got raided by the cops.

The scene in Texas in general, the ballroom scene started growing. 2019 was the first year that I joined a ballroom house, an official mainstream ballroom house, and that was the house of Mizrahi. So fast-forward, like, probably a year later, I get a call from, from Nemo, my father in Mizrahi, and he’s like, “Do you want to be on Legendary?”, which is a show on HBO Max. So Kind of the format of Legendary is the houses going up against each other. 

I was like, “Hell yeah, I want to be in, in Legendary.” I remember the first performance, um, it was nerve-wracking, you know, practicing all the way up until the moment that you’re on stage in front of the judges. One of the judges, she kind of tried to cr- she… she critiqued my performance. Well, the next judge was Megan Thee Stallion, and she was like, “No, I actually think he, he was badass and he, he did really well.” I was gagged at that, that… that was… that was really good to hear. 

We ended up getting eliminated on episode three. But it was dope. It activated like this, like, this like redemption, like, energy in me. I started developing more of a more into my artistry for music and dance. 

On this… on this journey of… of creating the ballroom space in Texas, I was able to create this culture alongside Natalie Lepore. So we started vogue nights here in 2023, alongside the Kind Clinic. It has activated so many people in both Austin, San Antonio, also Dallas and Houston. You’re seeing people come out and express themselves through dance, through music, through fashion, and through other, like, forms of expression.

You know, seeing the trajectory of where I started where there was no scene, fast-forward to where we’re at the forefront of a community that’s growing year after year. It’s a blessing in itself. I’m grateful for it. I love to see people express themselves and become like a badass.  That’s… it reminds me of my younger self, but to see that translate into, like, other, other kids, other people is just like It’s beautiful to say the… to say the least.