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During the summer of ’93, I asked my mom to buy me size 40 pants. At the time I was an awkward and gangly 13-year-old nerd. It wasn’t uncommon for my classmates to call me toothpick. In fact, all I wanted was to fill out my clothes with curves like the other girls and maybe even need an actual bra. But none of that mattered because that was the summer I became enthralled with ’90s Chicana style in Los Angeles and the chola aesthetic in particular.
Back then I didn’t understand the significance of chola subculture and its roots in combating systemic racism, discrimination, and displacement. I had no idea that pachucas, early cholas, emerged in LA in the 1950s and ’60s out of a sense of defiance and rebellion against norms of femininity and whiteness. This had morphed into the chola aesthetic of my teens in ’90s Southern California—a look that over time became more closely associated with gang culture, with its gold hoops, teased hair, baggy pants, and thick black eyeliner.
Looking back now, it makes sense that I was drawn to a way of dressing born of defiance and survival—because by the time I was rummaging through a pile of creased jeans at the Fox Swap Meet in Venice, I was also in search of armor.
My mom and I had recently fled the powder keg of a home we’d shared with her husband of under a year, and I was reeling. My stepfather’s verbal abuse had finally tipped toward physical abuse, and my mom had packed up our things after a particularly nasty fight, despite her very pregnant belly. To make matters worse, she was unexpectedly laid off from her job not long after.
We had to move into an affordable-housing unit, and my mom plummeted into postpartum depression after giving birth. It was not the life she envisioned for herself when she immigrated to the US from Mexico a few years before I was born: being a single mother twice over; struggling to stretch a dollar every month, like her own mother had; giving up on all of her dreams. In an effort to keep me distracted or simply out of the house, she’d drop me off at a local park each week to take writing classes at a creative-arts nonprofit for at-risk youth. The park just so happened to be one of the central meeting places of a gang on the Westside.
The first day my mom and I pulled up in her gold Honda Accord, my center of gravity shifted. As we got out of the car, I spotted about a dozen cholos in their teens and early 20s sitting on a set of picnic tables at the far end of the park, their Nike Cortez planted on the benches. They were carbon copies of one another, all wearing bright white T-shirts with baggy jeans or khaki pants and square-frame black Locs sunglasses. In the weeks that followed, the cholas I’d see hanging around them looked exactly the way I wanted to—tough and sexy, but most of all they radiated “don’t mess with me” energy.
So I wore the enormous jeans that summer, along with the stomach-baring crop tops, nameplate necklace, black pager, and heavy makeup. I’d trace my eyes and lips with black and brown lines in an attempt to absorb some of that pachuca tenacity through osmosis. It felt like I was putting on a shield to protect myself.
What attracted me to the chola aesthetic was the multidimensional femininity that it encapsulated: impeccably lined lips, winged eyes, long French-tipped nails, and gold jewelry paired with men’s shirts, Dickies work pants, and sneakers. The seamless blend of glamour and grit. The idea that I could be feminine but still formidable. When I dressed in the chola style, I felt both ways at the same time. For the first time. It was the intersection of feminine identities I had been taught were either-or.
My personal style evolved as the years passed, as it often does for first-generation young people attempting to survive in the wildly contradictory spaces that we gain access to. Social mobility seemed to require quick costume changes, and fitting into the dominant culture around me felt existential—for my future and my family. This exhaustive balancing act is one of the emotional tolls of being first-generation.
My social reference points had to recalibrate in real time. First came the knockoff plaid Abercrombie shorts and flip-flops when I got to USC. In graduate school at Harvard, the preppy boat shoes arrived. And there was also the unassuming Ann Taylor suits I wore when I worked as an aide to President Obama in the White House. I cosplayed belonging for decades before finally realizing that my journey as a first-gen Mexican American woman wasn’t so much about turning myself into who I thought I needed to be as becoming more of who I already was.
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Today, Nike Cortez sit next to stilettos in my closet. What they represent is much deeper than the fetishized depictions in movies or music videos. It’s what is often missed by the celebrities, fashion designers, and influencers who sample (and sometimes appropriate) the subversive chola street style: the radical female multidimensionality that is inextricably woven into the fabric of its bandanas, the idea that we can be simultaneously feminine and fierce, soft and hard. It’s what drew me in as a teen, along with my Latina pride, and still does.
Thirteen-year-old me may not have fully understood the storied history of Chicana style when she asked her mom for size 40 pants, yet there was no denying its legacy of resistance, rebellion, and cultural pride. Today when I see this style, I no longer experience it as armor but as audacity. It’s the resilience of Latinas who have worn it proudly for more than half a century. It’s the intersectional feminism that lives at its core. And it’s also the courage it gave to a 13-year-old girl—to imagine that she might have the power to break generational cycles of struggle and dictate her own future.
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Alejandra Campoverdi is the author of First Gen: A Memoir, which is out this week.