This panel centers Chicana/o and Latina/o punk chola and pachucas/os musical stylings, sonics,
and aesthetics that announce a politics of social critique and refusal. Presenters reflect on the
dissenting potentialities of the pachuco ‘cuban heel,’ the chola fan hair, and the visual noise and
poetics of punk style. These sonic styles are different yet parallel and overlapping as in Michelle
Habell-Pallán’s articulation of “Punk Chola aesthetics,” wherein the various styles of
pachuquismo, chola, punk, and new wave merge (2011). Taken together, the papers in this panel
demonstrate how these sonic and sartorial styles share Chicana/o histories of dissent and enact
strategic refusals of the heteronormative and heteropatriarchal status quo, including neoliberal
proper subjectivity. Silvestre's paper argues that the interplay of visual and sonic elements in
Shizu Saldamando’s artwork emphasizes punk's political capacity to signal futurities.
Highlighting the work of Chicana poet Alma Rosa Rivera, Sepulveda argues how the Chicana
punk musical styles and aesthetics evoked in the poem “Ska y Frijoles” amplifies marginalized
Chicana subjectivities that refuse the status quo. Engaging the “Jalisco” shoe by fashion designer
Willy Chavarria, Galarte’s close reading, situates how style transcends gender boundaries but
more so the potentialities of “heel-ing” masculinity. In Hernandez’s exploration of cultural
productions from the 1990s, she examines chola aesthetics, such as the Chola fan hairstyle that
gained popularity in early 90s beauty salon culture. She argues that these aesthetic expressions
serve as cultural and political forms of resistance, asserting identity against the violence of the
nation-state. The texts discussed in this panel illustrate how the intersecting sonic stylings of
punk chola and Pachuca/o aesthetics engage in an “attitude of distortion and refusal” (Habell-
Pallán 2011) to offer new and creative ways of imagining Chicana/o and Latina/o subjectivities.
INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS
Francisco J. Galarte, “What Heels Chicano Masculinity?”
Chicano fashion designer Willy Chavarria recently declared, “I am the new Chicano Ralph
Lauren, and my clothes are for everybody.” Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired clothing has garnered
him the honor of CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year two years in a row (2023,2024). In this
paper, I engage in a case study of Chavarria’s first shoe design, the “Jalisco,” produced in
partnership with the iconic American shoemaker Allen Edmonds. This study focuses on
Chavarria’s take on the dressy derby shoe and the choice of modifying the traditional shoe design
by adding a 54mm Cuban heel. Chavarria imagines the silhouette as the “new ‘unformal’ shoe
that will transcend seasons, occasions and gender boundaries.” Through a close reading of the
silhouette of the shoe, the sonics of his recent fashion show, and the accompanying ad campaign,
I argue that Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired designs fashion new forms of masculinity informed by
the “stylized and highly visible refusal” of pachuca/o youth (Habell-Pallan, 345).
Moreover, I argue that Chavarria’s design does more than “transcend gender boundaries.”
Instead, his work “heels” masculinity. By invoking the lineage of pachuca/o fashions in these
designs and highlighting the excesses of pachuca/o flamboyance, Chavarria’s garments offer a
new form of racialized, classed, and gendered Chicana/o style. This opens discussions within
Chicana/o style politics as well as new possibilities for Chicana/o subjects to enact a politics of
style that is untethered from regressive heteronormative and heteropatriarchal underpinnings of
the traditional masculine archetypes within Chicano realist aesthetics. In other words,
Chavarria’s heels are designed to keep toxic masculinities at bay and open new worlds where the
wearer can explore the vicissitudes of the pleasure(s) within unbounded brown masculinities.
Bernadine Marie Hernandez, “Your Hair is Infused with Meaning: The Politics, Aesthetics,
and History of the Chola Backcombing Fan Hair”
This talk examines and interrogates the history and aesthetics of the chola Fan Hair that was
popularized in the early 90’s and took popular culture by storm in the late 90’s. Some call it just
“The Fan,” while others call it “The Aqua Net Wave,” “Prom Bangs,” “Woody Bangs,” “The
Rooster,” or the “Cha-Cha Hair.” Depending on which region you lived in, there were other
names for this hairstyle. The hairstyle required many steps to finish and many tools and products
to produce. It required an intricate knowledge of backcombing to create the perfect fan shape and
a lot of Aqua net aerosol hair spray (and the knock off brands if that was too expensive). It
required beauty salon skills to shape and keep it held up, defying gravity. Where does this
hairstyle come from and why did so many brown women claim this hairstyle as their own in the
early 90s? How is this hairstyle connected to the chola aesthetics?
We know that mainstream culture has commodified chola aesthetics as seen by way of Vogue
covering “Mi Vida Chola” as early as 2013, however, how have chola’s narrated this hair style
and taken it up as a ritual against nation-state violence on their own terms and through cultural
production? Beauty salon culture is deeply connected and central to chola aesthetics and while
chola’s may not go into the salon to get their hair done, they are historically connected to beauty
salon culture; from the backcombing of the Pachuca pompadour, the bouffant and/or beehive, to
the Fan Hair. This talk will look at the different iterations of the hairstyle and the history and
politics that are connected to it in the United States, specifically the geo-political spaces by the
U.S-Mexico border. This talk looks at different cultural productions like the song and video
Scandalous by Psycho Realm, the 1993 film, Mi Vida Loca, Mary Helen Ponce’s novel The
Wedding, Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as series, and Miguel Gandert’s photography of cholas in
East San Jose in Albuquerque, NM.
Susana Sepulveda, “‘Weird & Brown’: Amplifying the Poetics of Refusal in Chicana
Punk Self-Fashioned Styles”
Chicana spoken word poet and punk Alma Rosa Rivera pays homage to Chicana punk, and more
specifically Chicana punk subjects, in her notable poem “Ska y Frijoles” (2016). The themes of
food, gendered and racialized struggles, and punk musical stylings intermingle within the poem’s
stanzas. Through my methodology of travesando that describes the traversals of Chicana punk
research, I conduct a close reading of “Ska y Frijoles” listening to the visual and sonic stylings
and aesthetics of punk embodied by Chicana subjects, or rather the “weird and brown” (Rivera,
2016). I argue that this poetic homage amplifies the everyday practices of refusal that Chicana
punks enact through self-fashioned sartorial styles and aesthetics that are grounded in but not
limited to punk music. I draw on Michelle Habell-Pallán’s framing of “Punk Chola aesthetics”
that describes the stylistic intersections of pachuquismo, chola, punk, and new wave styles that
the art collective ASCO embraced in the early 1980s and “turn[ed] inside out, using sardonic
humor as part of their social critique” (2011). I underscore that this coalescence of styles and
aesthetics continued to shape Chicana punk social formations and cultural productions well into
the 2000s and can be seen and heard within Chicana / Latina literary works. By close reading and
“listening in detail” (Vasquez, 2013) to the literary soundscapes of Chicana punk in Rivera's
poem, I illustrate how it amplifies and renders visible marginalized Chicana subjectivities that
refuse the status quo, including imposed racialized and gendered expectations.
