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Rihanna & Karreuche halloween cultural appropriation of cholas


                          Rihanna and Karreuche

Thankfully, Halloween is over and we have a respite before being bombarded again with insensitive and downright racist costumes. This year, Rihanna and Karreuche Tran did their best to compete with Julianne Hough for the Most Culturally Insensitive Celebrity Costume award. Each posted pictures to Instagram and labelled their costumes “chola”. Rihanna went so far as to far as to give herself the chola name shygirl. These costumes are offensive and perpetuate racist stereotypes that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are violent, gang affiliated thugs. Mora (2011) speaks about the cholo stereotype in Hollywood film which portrays Mexicans/Mexican-Americans (in particular the youth) as abject who threaten the social order and how this negative archetype influences how police and the majority culture actually treat youth from this population. 

 The result is marginalization due to minority status, immigrant status, lower socioeconomic status and racial profiling.
These stereotypes not only damage Mexicans’/Mexican-Americans’ psyche and opportunities for success but also threatens personal safety. Mora (2011) points to two historic events, The People vs. Zammora trial and the “so-called” Zoot Suit Riot. In 1942, Los Angeles police accused six Chicano youths of killing Jose Diaz in a gang fight. During the People vs. Zamora trial, the prosecutors and witnesses statements were full of negative stereotypes about Mexicans. Captain Ed Duran Ayres, chief of the Sheriff’s Bureau of International Relations, concluded in his report that Mexicans, like their indigenous ancestors, are driven to kill by an inherently desire for blood. Mora explains the influence of these negative stereotypes on the White service men, police officers, and civilians, who, in June of 1943, invaded the barrios of Los Angeles assaulting Mexican American youth, specifically pachucos (Mexican-American zoot suiters). Even though the zoot suiters were not the perpetrators of the violence they were blamed.
 Karreuche Tran’s ridiculous friend’s mean mugging display reduces a real person’s experience to a mere caricature of a female Mexican/Mexican-American gang member. This caricature ignores the complex reasons why people enter gangs. According to anthropologist James Diego Vigil, the factors that turn Mexicans/Mexican-Americans into gang members are grounded on social and economic conditions. They are “considered among the working poor…and are part of a society that feels disenfranchised, fragmented, segmented, and really ground up, and in many instances have lost their coping skills.”
Gangs and the violence that affects communities is a real problem with real casualties. Mexican-American and African-American youth have lost family members and friends to gang violence. The trauma of living in communities where violent acts occur frequently coupled with the grief of losing many loved ones in their young lives had a profound impact on their functioning. A profound impact that was not reflected upon by Rihanna as she dressed in her zombie chola costume and painted the bleeding bullet hole on her chest.

Comments

  1. Rantings of a Foul Mouthed Prophet10 June 2022 at 14:21

    For the culture that loves to take shots at people for cultural appropriation they sure love to take from Mexican and Italians (looking at the rappers) as a costume.
    But no one wants to talk about that.

    ReplyDelete

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