This panel brings together scholars exploring Chicanx/Latinx experiences at the
intersections of music, fashion, and identity across diverse subcultures and
geographies, emphasizing how sound and style become tools for negotiating belonging
and resistance. In their own musical world, each paper underscores how sound and
style are the building blocks of building and rebuilding Chicanx/Latinx identity at the
personal, collective, and transnational horizon. Together, these papers explore the diversity
of Chicanx/Latinx music and fashion interests and the nuances of how music and fashion act
as mediums for finding yourself and “your people,” even if those people are outsiders or on the
other side of the planet.
INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS
Eddy F. Alvarez, Finding Sequins in the Rubble and Sonic and Style Memories
of Jotería in Los Angeles: An Autobiographical Perspective
Reading Richard T. Rodriguez’s book, A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic
Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022) inspired part of this paper, the
author’s sonic memories transporting me to my own childhood and teen sonic
memories, and to what Francisco Galarte calls “style memories” ( 2015). Using the
concepts of “jotería listening” or listening queerly and carefully to present and past
sounds, music, and memories, through a queer Latinx lens, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s
“autohistoria-teoria,” I stitch together memories of my nine-year-old self listening to both
English language artists like Madonna and Stacy Q as well as Mexican pop bands and
singers like Flans and Gloria Trevi and Mexican regional music like Los Tigres del
Norte, memories of how I created extravagant fashion designs on cardboard paper or
put together outfits with my sister to recreate music videos, memories of Jonathan, a
precocious awkward, queer Central American kid and my neighbor, a few years older,
who dressed like Prince, talked to me about the new wave scene, and allegedly went to
parties where he met Prince and Apollonia, and memories of my high school days,
listening to house music, going to Arena nightclub, and shopping for polyester shirts,
golfer pants, mechanic shirts, and furry coats at vintage stores like Goodwill, Salvation
Army, and Aardvark’s on Melrose Ave. These musical, sonic, fashion and style
memories are central to the autobiographical foundations of my theorization of “finding
sequins in the rubble” a framework for how jotería in Los Angeles find joy, love and
community in the midst of and despite violence, trauma, and debris of many forms.
Kristy Martinez, Finding Emo in the S.G.V.
I will explore the fashion and impact of subcultures in the San Gabriel Valley in Southern
California, with special attention on the revival of the genre of Emo (emotional hardcore)
in the early to mid-2000s. Emo fashion typically rejected gender stereotypes-- an
androgynous style with band t-shirts, red flannel, black eyeliner, femme skinny jeans,
canvas shoes, chunky skateboard shoes, cowboy boots, or sneakers. Popular
accessories of emo include snakebite lip rings, bracelets, studded belts, and scarves.
Scene hair was either teased, side swept heavy bangs, straight jet-black dyed hair,
raccoon streaks, razor severely cut hair, extensions, and bright colors. Themes in emo
lyrics, imagery and its fashion include fatalism, birds, roses, and broken hearts. Post 9-
11, there was a theatrical, goth and vaudeville element with bands like Avenged
Sevenfold, My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. I argue that emo in the
2000s was the antithesis of the colorful palette of Y2K style, which has made a
comeback recently--Von Dutch wear, Ed Hardy, velour, reality television, bubbly pop,
and heiress/debutante obsession. In regard to displaying the fashion, I look to social
media platforms (still here or gone), such as MySpace, Photobucket, LiveJournal,
Facebook and the ever popular Los Angeles and Inland Empire nightclub photos.
I will use the work on emo in Mexico by scholar Marissa Lopez and explore how
households of color rejected or embraced emo. I include the Black emos that inspired
me, living in Moreno Valley with my grandparents.
Jose Anguiano and Nicholas Centino, Rolas y Garras de Nipon: Listening for the
Chicanx-Japanese Cultural Bridges in Music and Fashion
The globalization of Chicanx culture represents a cultural bridge and opportunity for reciprocity between Chicanx cultural makers and Japanese audiences and consumers in Japan. A subset of Working-class and middle-class Japanese youth immerse themselves in Chicanx cultural production by embracing lowriders, Cholo fashion, barrio iconography, tattoos, and music. Recent media coverage about Japanese affinity Chicanx culture brought accusations of cultural appropriation. However, the music scene championed by Shin Miyata represents a mutually beneficial relationship and cultural exchange between Chicanx musicians and their Japanese audience. Anguiano argues that music generates a different type of relationship because music is less reliant on static images (open to stereotypes), and the efforts of Miyata have produced a more direct relationship and not just a distant consumption of cultural products. Nicholas Centino will discuss how fashion functions as a unique medium of embodied cultural exchange. This multi-layered appropriation speaks to the unique ways in which the memories of historic intercultural exchanges can either be deployed or ignored in self-fashioning practices of dress and style. From the 1940s “pachucos” and “pachuke” to today’s contemporary fashion artisans of greater Los Angeles, Chicanx-Latinx/ Japanese fashion vocabularies continue to intermingle in uniquely hybrid ways. Thus, a focus on music and fashion expands our understanding of cultural exchanges and the boundaries of Chicano culture.
Rudy Aguilar. ¿Hecho en Mexico?: Rupturing the National, the Transnational, and the
Hemispheric in Ya No estoy aqui (2019)
As 21st century Mexican society embraces neoliberalism while policing culture within their borders, this paper pays close attention how the Mexican subculture Kolombia ruptures cultural “hecho en Mexico” sensibilities when Monterrey youth adopt Colombian musical identities. Kolombia youth find themselves in opposition to normative articulations of Mexicanidad and are criminalized by greater Mexican society. Their fashion choices and hairstyles place them outside the national imaginary of respectable Mexican citizenry. Yet, it is their unique mutations of Colombian soundscapes which place Kolombias at the center of a two-fold cultural debate. Kolombias’ fusion of Colombian and Mexican sensibilities, including cumbia rebajada, poses challenges to Mexican methodological logics in Mexico and its extended U.S. immigrant communities. The second component of this debate relates to altering Colombian aesthetic beyond recognition to many Latin Americans. This essay explores these ruptures with a close reading of the film, Ya no estoy aqui. I highlight how the Kolombia subculture, as depicted in the film, generates contemporary articulations of rupturing conventional Mexican identities, resulting in what I call Hemispheric Mexicanidad. I argue that Ulises and his Kolombia peers in the film produce a hemispheric Mexicanidad that stimulates excitement and anxiety across the Americas by calling into question static, one-dimensional articulations of Mexican youth identity.
