Too loud, too sexy: The ‘chonga’ woman isn’t about fitting in
How a viral video unearthed a Latina subculture we almost missed
This is the second article in a series on influential youth subcultures in history. Read the first here.
In 1980s South Florida, she wore white bike shorts over neon thong panties, fake gold hoops, and thinly arched eyebrows. In the ’90s, she added dark lip liner and gelled her baby hairs into a tight ponytail. Usually the daughter of Cuban immigrants, she hung out at the Hialeah mall in Miami-Dade County, flicking through racks of colorful, tight jeans.
While mainstream American pop culture sulked over Nirvana albums and middle-class teenage angst, the chonga woman was influenced by hip-hop and reggaeton artists like Pitbull and Daddy Yankee, and Caribbean culture, which celebrated the female body and a fierce attitude — even when most Americans, including her own community, laughed and looked the other way.
For years, chonga was a vibrant but regional subculture — a working-class identity relegated to the insular world of brown-skinned communities near Miami. Then in 2007, a pair of high school seniors suddenly made chongas a nationwide conversation.
Laura DiLorenzo and Mimi Davila, both 17 at the time, were bored one night when they decided to make a music video. After writing the lyrics to “Chongalicious,” set to the music of “Fergalicious,” they enlisted a friend to film them applying Sharpie lip liner, gluing down their bangs, and writhing atop a Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot.
Chongalicious definition arch my eyebrows high.
They always starin’ at my booty and my panty line.
You could see me, you could read me, ’cause my name is on my earrings.
Girls got reasons why dey hate me ’cause dey boyfriends wanna date me.
Chongalicious.
The Chonga Girls characters are naive, performative; they need to be seen but also to fit in. Davila says the parody is an extreme version of how they acted and dressed in middle school. She herself was a nerdy Cuban-American girl who was trying to be tough.
The video was intended as an affectionate joke but soon spread across MySpace, and became the most requested song on Miami’s Power 96 radio station. DiLorenzo and Davila were invited to interviews, photo shoots, and video spots with Pitbull. Across the country, people asked, “What’s a chonga?”
The slang word “chonga” may have derived from the Cuban “chusma,” a stigmatized term for a loud, lower-class woman who subverts sexual norms. In South Florida, people sometimes hurled the word as an insult at Latina girls who were dressed “too sexy,” acted “too aggressively” or spoke Spanglish. Some experts believe chongas split in the 1980s from a group known as “las plásticas” (the plastics), and were inspired by the tools their mothers and grandmothers used to present femininity in a foreign land, such as manicured nails and Sunday dresses.
On the other hand, “the chonga identity is one in which, whether it’s intended to or not, totally resists assimilation…and respectability politics,” says Dr. Jillian Hernandez, a UCSD professor of ethnic and critical gender studies who is from Miami.
For most people, the video was just fun. South Florida fans enjoyed seeing versions of themselves or their friends on the country’s stage — finally. They followed DiLorenzo and Davila everywhere. Some posed with the girls for “booty photos” at autograph signings.
“You got to see people’s initial reaction to this subculture that they lived with but wasn’t represented in media,” says Davila.
Even when the chonga identity became more well known, images of young women in belly shirts and dark lipstick didn’t always translate. To mainstream American culture — which Davila calls “puritanical” — they were still teen girls flaunting their sexuality. In fact, chonga style is a direct reflection of Caribbean culture, where the climate is hot and women’s bodies are celebrated as beautiful. “Showing off your body is normal,” says Davila. “It symbolizes your independence as a woman. Like, ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m tough. I’m sexy’…The style was a way of communicating what you stood for.”
In 2009 self-described chongas appeared on the popular Univision talk show Cristina, where they defended their identities to critical audience members. “It became this really interesting space where chongas were talking back and complicating what was going on in the show: an obvious attempt to regulate them and change them into something more ‘normal,’” says Hernandez. She says complex Latina identities like the chonga are still needed, especially ones that reflect the nuances of the working class. She points to Miami-based artist Crystal Pearl as one example of an evolving, complex chonga woman.
Long after the video, still more Latina women are penning empowering essays, getting chonga makeovers, and wearing #chonga t-shirts, reclaiming their chonga roots much the same way working-class Mexican-Americans reclaimed the once-denigrative term “chola” during the Chicano Power movement of the 1960s. “Chongas are outgoing Latinas who are the life of the party,” Jeanette Rivera, 23, told Latina Magazine in 2015. “She will wear her hair in a ponytail and have big bamboo earrings and know that she’s cute even if society doesn’t agree and looks down on her.”
As for the Chonga Girls, they’re back making videos years later. Their aesthetic hasn’t changed much — they still wear heavy makeup and make wide gestures with their braceleted arms. But now they film in Los Angeles, and are reenacting on video Davila’s and DiLorenzo’s real-life exodus from Miami into an America that doesn’t fully understand them.
“So many people in America have such a distorted body image,” says Davila. “When we dress up that way, all of that shit comes out.”
But dressing in costume as “Chonga Mimi” actually feels liberating, she says. When asked whether her character inspires her, she pauses for the first time. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying,” she laughs. “The Chonga Mimi is me. She is just more assertive, will speak her mind, more unapologetic, doesn’t mind if she’s offending people. She keeps it real all the time. But it always comes from a harmless, good-intentioned place. Like me, myself.
“Be proud! Be unapologetic!” she shouts.
After all, part of being a chonga means never settling for invisibility. Quite the opposite.
