Chonga Identity Has Been Everything From Coveted to Critiqued, but Its Influence Endures

Not a Monolith is a Teen Vogue sequence for Latinx Heritage Month 2023, highlighting the range of these within the Latinx neighborhood. From incapacity rights activists to rappers to tug queens, we’re exhibiting the vary of not simply backgrounds, however experiences that inform Latinx tradition in the present day. On this essay, Skyli Alvarez identifies the long-lasting affect Chonga tradition has on developments and aesthetics by interviewing Miami natives — from the place the fashion originates — and vogue historians.

To Latinx Miami natives, the time period “chonga” could conjure up the picture of a girl strutting by way of Little Havana in her chancletas, head held excessive and hair slicked again. A triple menace in her hoop earrings, bangles, and a stack of necklaces, she’s perceived because the lifetime of the quinces or your annual household reunion. She’s framed, all of sudden, as an emblem of confidence, of gender-nonconformity, and of extra. For these unfamiliar with chongas, merely looking out the phrase on-line yields photos of lip liner, skinny denims, and skinnier eyebrows, however chonga fashion goes deeper than surface-level dressing.

“Miami is [a] place the place your physique is form of your greatest accent,” native pop-culture aficionado Tefi Pessoa tells Teen Vogue. “I imply, it’s so sizzling.” Thus, it’s no shock that town bears witness to tankinis, fitted shorts, and slides all yr lengthy. However regardless of this regional costume code’s sensible roots, the picture of the chonga continues to be divisive. Over the previous a number of many years, the distinct visible traits of this working-class, South Floridian fashion have been every thing from critiqued to admired to appropriated and mocked by others, each inside and outdoors of Latinx communities. The nuanced id has advanced and expanded past simply seems, however it stays contested, taking over various definitions relying on who you discuss to.

“Wikipedia describes what I’d say is a assured angle as being ‘aggressive,’” says musician La Goony Chonga. Although she’s recognized as a chonga because the sixth grade, she remembers how being known as one in South Florida used to virtually completely be insulting, particularly as her center college friends started shifting to a preppier 2000s fashion.

Stereotypes have run rampant throughout each digital and IRL areas, not solely relating to fashion sense however how chongas have been assumed to behave. A lot of it’s rooted in racially-charged, classist ideas. The id’s refusal to stay invisible, as Goony explains, will get wrongfully handed off as conceitedness, whereas the decorative extra that’s so closely related to it disrupts and calls for consideration. Because of this, discomforted outsiders could also be fast to mark the fashion as abrasively “low cost” or “different.”