Qué Chola The feminine mystique, Burqueña style
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, BURQUEÑA STYLE
S hestands proud, a cold stare emanating from eyes catted out by black eyeliner. Or she sits defiant, legs wide open and swathed in men’s khaki work pants. Her eyebrows are plucked into a high arch, her lips lined dark brown, and her Aqua Net-teased claw of hair defies all authority, including the law of gravity.
She is the chola — a Chicana whose tough glamour is associated with lowrider and gang culture — and the subject of Qué
Chola, an exhibit at the National Hispanic Cultural Center that runs through Aug. 4. In the show, the archetype of the chola becomes much more than a potentially dangerous woman with claw bangs: her distinctive style and demeanor mark her as an emerging symbol of cultural pride. As curator Jadira Gurulé writes, despite the chola’s ubiquity in Chicanx and, increasingly, popular culture, “the complexity of who and what she represents is a story that largely remains untold.”
Qué Chola’s tale is told via representations of the chola and her milieu by more than 25 mostly Southwestern artists, including santero Arthur López, painter Póla López, portraitist Gaspar Enríquez, and photographer Miguel Gandert. The groundbreaking show sees the chola figure straddling several contexts: folk art, feminist theory, Aztec and Catholic mysticism, and pop cultural appropriation.
Gurulé said she broached the idea of a chola-focused show to former NHCC director Rebecca Avitia during a visit to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. “It’s an idea that was really informed by my own reading of Chicana feminist scholarship about cholas and pachucas,” the Albuquerque-raised Gurulé said. “As a young woman deciding who I wanted to be in the world, I was always very attracted to chola figures. And a huge part of it was the way they got to be in the world — which was tough and in the public sphere, and saying and doing what they wanted.”
Chicana feminist writer Catherine S. Ramírez’s 2009 book, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press) argues that the chola’s precursor, the 1940s-era pachuca, was “rendered invisible by Chicano cultural nationalism.” The World War II-era pachucas were the female counterparts to pachucos, the Chicano rebels who dressed in baggy zoot suits that openly defied the wartime rationing of fabric. The hallmarks of early ’40s pachuca style — penciled eyebrows, dark lips, and teased hair — defined the pachuca, too, as an integral part of a sassy, quite possibly delinquent youth subculture. Her fashion sense was handed down to the chola.
Like many a chola herself, the word cholo has a mysterious and complicated past: Four hundred years ago, it was considered a racial insult, but beginning around the ’60s, it came to describe a new generation of southern California pachucos. According to the Spanish colonial casta system — a classification used to describe mestizos, or persons of mixed European, indigenous, and/or African heritage — cholo was a derogatory word. It was adopted by young Californians, following in the pachuco tradition, who used the term to designate themselves as the next generation of rebels operating outside mainstream Anglo-American society.
The rise of the cholo (and his embrace of the word) coincided with the Chicano Movement and its elevation of both mestizo and indigenous heritage, as cholo fashions evolved from zoot suits to nondescript work pants, T-shirts, and undershirts that recalled prison uniforms. By the 1990s, the cholo had become a recognizable part of pop culture, with films such as Blood In,
Blood Out (1993) and rapper Snoop Dogg’s embrace of Long Beach, California, lowrider culture. But as Ramírez and Gurulé argue, somewhere along the way, the chola — like the pachuca before her — never quite got her due.