Official music video from Lean Like a Chola © 2011 Carmen Lokz
Professor Hernandez’s article
“Miss, You Look Like a Bratz Doll”: On Chonga Girls and Sexual-Aesthetic Excess, reminded of the YouTube video, “Lean Like a Chola” which parodies the song
“Lean Like a Cholo” by Down AKA Kilo. I thought it might be something the rest of the class might enjoy via the blog.
This song, like “Chongalicious,” presents the chola as a spectacle that is different from the rest of society’s women. Like the chonga, the chola’s “firme” attitude is adored and enjoyed by those who do not share her socioeconomic status and situation. She is perceived as a confident and self-empowered woman who does not take shit from anybody. However, the chola is simultaneously repudiated for her devious and uncultured behavior, and the manner in which she emulates Mexican American women to the rest of the world. She is the symbol of deviance and one that does not fulfill the hegemonic expectations of what a woman in the United States should act or appear like. The chola is the “other” which must be policed andnsecluded from the rest of society.
