DJ Mila Killa is throwing the fourth anniversary of her ¡Samba! party tomorrow at Hotel Haya in Ybor City, and this year's edition comes with a national tie-in: dancers from Red Bull Dance Your Style are joining the celebration ahead of the competition's USA National Finals next month. Tickets start at $20, and the lineup blends Tampa regulars with out-of-town guests for a night built around a genre-blurring dance-floor format.
According to Creative Loafing Tampa, ¡Samba! runs on what it describes as an open-ish format rooted in sounds from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, and everywhere in between. Mila Killa, a Tampa DJ, will perform back-to-back with T. Couture, and the bill also includes Toronto DJ babyvaye alongside sets billed as Ace and Supernova. Gainesville scene staple Jordie Ortiz, who also performs as oojordie, rounds out the night.
The Red Bull connection ties Friday's party directly to a bigger event on Tampa's calendar. The Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Finals lands at the Tampa Convention Center on September 19, marking the first time the 1v1 street-dance championship has been held in the city, according to GameDay. Every Day. Sixteen regional qualifiers will square off in the bracket-style format, with the winner advancing to the World Finals in Zurich, Switzerland. The tour has already made stops in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Atlanta before its Tampa stop.
A Party That's Grown Alongside Ybor's Nightlife
¡Samba! wasn't always a Hotel Haya fixture pulling in national dance talent. The series was created to introduce a Global Club sound blending Latin, African, and Caribbean rhythms to Tampa, and by its second anniversary in 2024 it had drawn a record crowd of more than 300 attendees to the same venue, according to Arkive Media Co. The party has since pushed beyond Tampa, holding satellite pop-ups in New York City and making its festival debut at the Big Culture & Arts Festival in Gainesville in April 2025; Mila Killa has also played sets at SXSW in Austin.
Mila Killa has history in Ybor City beyond Hotel Haya. She previously performed at Crowbar, the neighborhood's 300-capacity independent venue, in a January 2024 set photographed by Dave Decker for Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. Crowbar permanently closed on July 31 after 20 years in Ybor, a casualty of rising lease costs and gentrification pressures as its lease expired, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Hoodline covered how local promoters have since scrambled to find alternative rooms for alternative, queer, and indie music in a warehouse show filling that void in St. Petersburg.
Hotel Haya's Layered History
Hotel Haya, where ¡Samba! has made its home, opened in September 2020 at 1412 E. 7th Ave. as Ybor City's first luxury boutique hotel. The property came out of a $52 million adaptive-reuse project that merged two historic structures, the 1890 Las Novedades building and the Warren Building, developed by Aparium Hotel Group and designed by Tampa-based Alfonso Architects, per the Tampa Bay Times' 2020 coverage. Alfonso Architects has described the design as leaning on mid-century Cuban aesthetics, with hand-blown glass globe fixtures from the local Morean Art Center echoing Ybor's old street lamps, plus reproductions of paintings by Spanish artist Francisco Goya that were discovered behind the walls during restoration. The hotel takes its name from 19th-century cigar pioneer and local philanthropist Ignacio Haya, who helped found Ybor City alongside Vicente Martínez Ybor in the late 1880s, work that helped earn the neighborhood its title as the Cigar Capital of the World and its designation today as a National Historic Landmark District, according to Visit Tampa Bay.
Mila Killa spoke about her path to building ¡Samba! into a local fixture in an August 12 appearance on WMNF 88.5 FM's LTX with Isha, discussing her move from Lima, Peru, to Tampa Bay and the growth of the party. The community radio spot arrived just two days ahead of the anniversary celebration, giving listeners a firsthand account of the series' origins heading into the weekend.
Ybor's Nightlife Map Keeps Shifting
Ybor City's broader commercial landscape is also in flux. Gasworx, a 50-acre redevelopment connecting Ybor to Channelside, announced plans in April for a new 4,300-capacity venue operated by Live Nation, slated to open in late 2028 on what was formerly industrial land now being converted into mixed-use residential, retail, and entertainment space. That follows other ownership shifts Hoodline has tracked in the district, including the sale of The Bricks to a Gasworx-tied developer earlier this year. Against that backdrop, boutique hotel spaces like Hotel Haya have taken on added weight as hosts for independent local music series navigating a changing neighborhood.
