Growing up Chola

Hello, my name is Gabriella Wise. I am a senior at Trinity anxiously awaiting the moment that they call my name to cross the graduation stage. One thing few strangers can discern about me is that I am half Salvadoran, albeit an extremely pale Salvadoran. My mother is from El Salvador and my father is Texan. I spent four years in high school striving to be more Latina by trying to attain the “Chola” look in order to overcompensate for my caucasian features.

A true Chola is a Latina associated with a gang from a certain barrio. They wear a distinctive style of makeup, accompanied by excessive gel in their hair. Old-school Cholas would fill in their eyebrows with a sharpie marker. My freshman year of high school I realized that truly anyone can look like a Chola.

Sandra Bullock impersonating a Chola

I lacked the means and the ambition to become a real cholafied Latina. I had no gang connections, and worse yet I had no Hispanic friends. I became an impersonation of a Chola,
with my dark lipliner, penciled in eyebrows and copious amounts of eyeliner and gold jewelry. My mother chose not to intervene in my identity crisis, even when I started speaking as if I was from South LA.

Most teenagers go through some sort of existential crisis. My question was, “why am I not Latina enough?” When I got to college, I no longer felt the need to prove that I was Hispanic. I learned that no one being can take away my Hispanic culture; it will always be a part of me, no matter how pale I get. I am against discriminating based on the color of one’s skin, yet I realized I was discriminating against myself.

With my identity crisis already out in the open, one last noteworthy detail about myself is that I often cry during football games. I am what many people call a “fair weather fan.” No matter who is playing, I get emotional during games, as if I was personally invested in them. My dream career would be to work on the marketing team for an NFL football team, or to work in the cosmetic industry.

If my story has intrigued you, watch this tutorial and you, too, can be a Chola.