I think we need more threads like this. I moved to L.A. three years ago and I loved learning about *****/Chola cluture. I wish we had more threads on these style tribes. I think they bring unexpected inspiration.
From the movie Mi Vida Loca
from the LA Times
from "http://thisistenspeed.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_archive.html"
Cholas y ******
"
Growing up, my neighbor Laurie had the best hair. She was Latina, but it was bleached white-yellow and looked like an outgrown bowl-cut, curled up all along the edges. She wore blue eyeshadow and tight Sergio Valente jeans and white wifebeaters, and the heaviest mascara and dramatic eyeshadow. Laurie sauntered around the neighborhood and smoked on the back porch, we sat on her stoop, talking to her as she casually laughed at my brother's jokes and verbally stumbled over slang and the valley-girlisms of the day with her slight lisp-touched Chicana accent. She was, proudly, a chola.
Back then Cholas (and their male counterparts, ******) were gang members. An aesthetic probably best represented in Hollywood by
Mi Vida Loca. To me, she was the glamour girl of the neighborhood and later as I grew older and Laurie moved away. I could see this subculture falling to the wayside, gangs from LA moved into our suburbs. The teenage me saw the difference between the airbrushed low-riders, the dickies, the claiming of a two-block area and knife and fistfights to the use of firearms, wearing of football team jerseys, and pants too baggy to stay up. Later things seemed more dangerous at school as I got older. (Of course this was during the time when Latino and Black gang-related activity was making the
news.)
I don't hope to glamourize a bygone gang era and perhaps Laurie was disturbed (though I doubt it), but to my youthful self the definitive and sometimes, beautifully stark aesthetics of the cholas and ****** who lived in my 'hood are forever etched.
Good to see you around.
