The Folk Feminist Struggle Behind the Chola Fashion Trend
(Edited) Barbara Calderon-Douglass
Growing up in the 90s on the south side of Houston, I
watched my older sister Lynda set the chola beauty
standard. She lined her lips with berry-colored lipliner,
plucked her eyebrows thin, and teased her permed hair with
Aquanet hairspray, creating a stiff asymmetrical bang wave
with a height capable of competing with all the homegirls in
the neighborhood. She wore baggy polo shirts, gold jewelry,
and had a gangbanger boyfriend named Angel with a bald
fade and a lowrider car. She was a beautiful, highly
accessorized chola who was respected in her world—most
of all by me.
When I turned 13, Lynda began initiating me into the chola
scene. By then, the look had evolved a bit—bang waves
were no longer the style—but the core elements of the
culture remained. Lynda and I drank Smirnoffs together,
danced to Tejano music at the bar, and, at the end of the
night, watched the boys fight in the parking lot. At 15, she
bought me my first golden nameplate and I started dating
one of Angel's friends. She taught me the moral codes of
what would become a sometimes violent teenage lifestyle—
codes she had learned growing up in our rough
neighborhood.
I got into fights at school with other girls who challenged or
disrespected me and tried to hold my own in a community
that did not look kindly on weakness. I eventually pushed
myself toward academics, hiding away from the scene, and
ended up going to college—an opportunity not afforded to
many of my peers. However, I maintained my chola vibe
throughout my time in high school as a way to survive in my
environment. So today, when I see chola culture being
sampled and recontextualized by fashion designers, pop
singers, or celebrity starlets, I can't help rolling my eyes.
I get it. Celebs reference the style to conjure a subversive
and feminine fierceness. Aesthetically, cholas are really cool.
However, there is a dysfunctional idea at the heart of these
instances of chola appropriation—that an elaborate outfit is
all you need to enter into a culture. Anne Hathaway's
character in the movie Havoc is a great example. In the film,
she plays a rich white girl from the suburbs of LA who tries to
woo a gangster from the Eastside by rocking big gold hoop
earrings and brand name urbanwear. In one of the movie's
more mortifying scenes, she sings and rolls on her wannabe
thug boyfriend to a Tupac song. Then there are those celebs
who take it to another level of offense with straight-up
mockery, like when George Lopez gave Sandra Bullock a
chola makeover by drawing her eyebrows on with a Sharpie.
As with most instances of cultural appropriation, when the
chola look is worn by pop starlets, it gets stripped of context
and becomes little more than a costume. Cholas are more
than Latina sidekicks for Lana Del Rey or concepts for
Fergie's music video. The chola aesthetic was first forged by
the marginalized Mexican American youths of Southern
California. It embodies the remarkable strength and creative
independence it takes to survive in a society where your
social mobility has been thwarted by racism. The chola
identity was conceived by a culture that dealt with gang
warfare, violence, and poverty on top of conservative gender
roles. The clothes these women wore were more than a
fashion statement—they were signifiers of their struggle and
hard-won identity.
To understand the significance of the chola subculture, you
have to look back at the history of systematic oppression
and discrimination that plagued Latino communities in the
US. From 1929 to 1944, in a shameful incident known as
Mexican Repatriation, the US government forcibly removed
around 2 million people of Mexican heritage from the
country—more than 1.2 million of them United States
citizens. These people were snatched from their homes and
workplaces and illegally deported. The government's
campaign against Mexican Americans continued throughout
the century, as 300-plus acres of land known as the Chavez
Ravine owned by generations of Mexican Americans were
slowly stolen from 1951 to 1961 by the Los Angeles City
Housing Authority. The residents were forced to sell their
land and their houses were burned as practice sites for the
LA fire department. (The land was later used to construct
today's Dodgers Stadium.)
It was during the time of Mexican Repatriation and WWII that
pachucas, the forebears to the cholas, started to appear on
the streets of Los Angeles. Pachucas were the female
counterparts to pachucos, the Mexican American teenagers
who wore zoot suits with high-waisted pegged pants and
long suit coats. Pachucas also had their own nonconformist
style of dress. They were known for teasing their hair into
bouffant beehives and wearing heavy makeup, tight
sweaters, and slacks or knee-length skirts that were
immodestly short for the time. They were a rebel subculture
that rejected assimilation into the white, hyper-patriotic spirit
of WWII. Their rejection of mainstream beauty ideals and
association with a non-white underclass challenged the idea
of a unified nation, which the US was desperately trying to
portray during wartime. The pachuco and pachuca style
became a signifier for a racialized other and was therefore
considered un-American.
In 1943, in the midst of World War II,
citywide brawls known as the Zoot Suit
Riots took place across Los Angeles and
Southern California as white military
servicemen began attacking pachucos, who
were deemed unpatriotic due to the extra
fabric needed to make their clothing, and
deviant because of their racial difference.
That year, the press called "cholitas" the
"auxiliaries of the zoot suit gangs." As
depicted in Luis Valdez's 1991 film Zoot
Suit and Edward James Olmos's 1992 film
American Me, pachucas were also victims
of physical and sexual violence during
these clashes. Instead of repressing the
pachuco culture, these attacks only
strengthened the pachucos' desire to resist
assimilation into a jingoistic white America
that treated brown minorities like secondclass citizens. In addition to claiming a nonwhite womanhood, pachucas also defied
gender norms by wearing slacks and
sometimes even zoot suits.
"I thought pachucas were so cool. I saw
these women with tight sweaters and pants
hanging out. They took over the street and
taught me that it wasn't only a male space,"
says Chicano studies scholar Dr. RosaLinda Fregoso, author of the 1995 article "
Pachucas, Cholas, and Homegirls in
Cinema," an analysis of how American
Latina women are portrayed in film. To
Fregoso, pachucas embody the rebellion
against domesticity and challenge the idea
of "appropriate female behavior." She says
that being a pachuca back in the day was a
type of "feminismo popular" or folk feminism
that didn't come from an academic
consciousness, but from a critique of
patriarchal culture embedded within the
Chicano community. Fregoso was also
experiencing the culture in South Texas. By
the 60s, pachuco style had spread all along
the Southwestern United States.
"Pachucas [were] very radical women," says Roseli
Martinez, an art event organizer in LA, cofounder of Xicanas
de Corazon book club, and poster girl for a modern day
pachuca movement in California. "When you think about it,
it's the 1940s and you're putting on pants, rolling with the
guys. You're wearing short skirts, going to parties, getting in
fights, holding your man down. And you still don't give up the
responsibilities that fall on you for the simple fact of being a
woman."
The transition of a predominant pachuca
style to a more gang-inspired chola look
happened in the 60s and 70s. The chola,
the female counterpart of the cholo, was a
"working-class, young Mexican American
female from the barrios of the southwest
with a very distinct aesthetic, style, and
attitude," according to Hellabreezy, an
Oakland-based model and modern-day
chola, who spent a part of her youth in the
projects of LA. "But to me, a chola is the
epitome of beauty, style, and pride. She is
a strong and proud woman who holds it
down for her family and hood."
The term cholo (the masculine form of
chola) first entered the popular lexicon in
the 60s and 70s in Southern California,
although it has been documented in casta
paintings as early as the 16th century.
According to Latin American dictionaries, it
simply means "mestizo," or a person of
mixed Amerindian or Andean indigenous
and European lineages. However, on the
streets in the 60s and 70s, the word
became slang for the Mexican American or
Chicano gang-affiliated men in Southern
California who wore a combination of khaki
pants, Pendleton plaid shirts over a white
tee, and Locs sunglasses. At this time,
gangs were prevalent in barrio life. They
offered a sense of family, pride, identity,
self-esteem, and belonging—things
Chicanos did not receive from the dominant
society. (Gang members were not all men;
LA has had Latina girl gangs since at least
the 1930s.)
The interests of the chola/cholo subculture
were documented in the pages of lowrider
publications like Teen Angels and Mi Vida
Loca, which highlighted cholo art, fashion,
tattoos, and moral codes. The chola code
included things like loyalty to your
homegirls, never fighting over boys, and, in
some circles, not dating outside of your
neighborhood.
The chola aesthetic is the result of impoverished women
making a lot out of the little things their families could afford.
Many of the early cholos and cholas were the sons and
daughters of farmworkers, a group of people exploited at
high rates because of their lack of education and their
vulnerability as undocumented people. In 1965, the United
Farm Workers organization was fighting for a mere $1.25
hourly wage, so expensive brands were not a part of this
style. Instead the girls wore cheap stuff like wife-beaters
over baggy pants by brands like Dickies, a workwear label
sold for cheap at local supermarkets. The style also evolved
from sharing clothes with brothers and feminizing the cholo
gangster look. Cholas wore their eyebrows thin, their
eyeliner thick and black, and their hair teased or feathered,
sometimes with tall bangs made stiff with hairspray. They
also accessorized with gold jewelry: door-knocker earrings
and nameplates or chain necklaces.
One of the most popular depictions of the
subculture is a photo taken by Mexican
photographer Graciela Iturbide in East LA
in 1986. The iconic picture features a crew
of cholas posted up in front of graffiti
renditions of the historical Mexican
revolutionary figures Benito Juarez,
Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa. One
woman holds a baby while the other three
throw up gang signs with their heads tilted
back and their chins up. Another iconic
portrayal of teenage cholas is in the movie
Mi Vida Loca—a film that focuses on
relationships between Central LA high
school girls named Sad Girl, Mousie,
Whisper, and La Blue Eyes. (The movie got
flack from real cholas for depicting a nearfatal riff between Sad Girl and Mousie that
started over a boy—something cholas
would never do.)
Though the subculture is sometimes
spoken of in past tense, plenty of people
still identify as cholas or have maintained
chola elements in their style, which
continue to signify the same sort of
defiance the original pachucas did.
Hellabreezy, whose real name is Mayra
Ramirez, has worked with streetwear
brands like Mama Clothing who she feels
do the subculture justice. "I loved working
with homegirls and creating images of
subcultures that have been around for so
long," she says. "But I'm careful about the
people I collaborate with. I don't want to
represent our culture in a wrong way. I only
work with people who know the culture and
genuinely appreciate it." Although Mama
Clothing was a pioneer, embracing the
chola look as far back as the late 90s, there
are now several female clothing lines
owned by Latinas using the chola aesthetic.
Brands like BellaDoña and Bandida
Clothing all take inspiration from a pachuca
and/or chola look. But unlike Givenchy,
they're not exoticizing the subculture in a
way that disconnects it from it's antiestablishment origins and makes it more
palpable to bourgeois white folks, they're
articulating a pride in their own culture.
Events such as Style as Resistance actively honor the
Chicano history of pachucos and pachucas in light of
gentrification and the loss of Chicano cultural hubs in cities
like Los Angeles and the Mission District of San Francisco.
This is especially important because Chicano history is in
danger of being pushed to the margins of the mainstream—
we've recently seen the banning of Mexican American and
general ethnic studies in Arizona and the attempted erasure
of Cesar Chavez from textbooks. This whitewashing of
Mexican American history makes the disassociation of the
chola aesthetic from its political roots seem particularly
malignant. Being a chola is more than perfect eyeliner, gold
accessories, or Dickies. It's an identity forged out of struggle
to assert culture and history, a struggle that continues—just
look at the racist "show me your papers" laws popping up in
states all over the country, from Arizona to Indiana, and
racist Mexican-themed fraternity parties in which frat boys
dress not only in ponchos and sombreros but as construction
workers and border patrol agents.
I don't want to fight over who gets to use gelled baby hairs
because nothing will stop high fashion from harvesting
trends from hood kids—everyone knows they are the true
creative class. But that doesn't mean I won't stop rolling my
eyes whenever I see white Forever 21 models wearing
"Compton" sweatshirts and beanies.
"Back in the day, we were mocked for looking different. Now,
so many young girls want to emulate the look and have no
idea of the cultural background or street politics associated
with it," says Hellabreezy. "It's easy for young privileged girls
to want to have the look, but when they are done dressing
up in their 'chola costume,' they don't have to go back home
to the hood and deal with discrimination, violence, and
poverty... We can't just brush the Aquanet off our hair, take
our hoops off, and go back to normal suburban life like they
can because this is our reality. We live this every day."