Not a Monolith is a Teen Vogue series for Latinx Heritage Month 2023, highlighting the diversity of those in the Latinx community. From disability rights activists to rappers to drag queens, we're showing the range of not just backgrounds, but experiences that inform Latinx culture today. In this essay, Skyli Alvarez identifies the long-lasting influence Chonga culture has on trends and aesthetics by interviewing Miami natives — from where the style originates — and fashion historians.
To Latinx Miami natives, the term “chonga” may conjure up the image of a woman strutting through Little Havana in her chancletas, head held high and hair slicked back. A triple threat in her hoop earrings, bangles, and a stack of necklaces, she’s perceived as the life of the quinces or your annual family reunion. She’s framed, all at once, as an emblem of confidence, of gender-nonconformity, and of excess. For those unfamiliar with chongas, simply searching the word online yields images of lip liner, skinny jeans, and skinnier eyebrows, but chonga style goes deeper than surface-level dressing.
“Miami is [a] place where your body is kind of your best accessory,” native pop-culture aficionado Tefi Pessoa tells Teen Vogue. “I mean, it’s so hot.” Thus, it’s no surprise that the city bears witness to tankinis, fitted shorts, and slides all year long. But despite this regional dress code’s practical roots, the image of the chonga is still divisive. Over the past several decades, the distinct visual characteristics of this working-class, South Floridian style have been everything from critiqued to admired to appropriated and mocked by others, both within and outside of Latinx communities. The nuanced identity has evolved and expanded beyond just looks, but it remains contested, taking on varying definitions depending on who you talk to.
“Wikipedia describes what I would say is a confident attitude as being ‘aggressive,’” says musician La Goony Chonga. Though she’s identified as a chonga since the sixth grade, she remembers how being called one in South Florida used to almost exclusively be insulting, especially as her middle school peers began shifting to a preppier 2000s style.
Stereotypes have run rampant across both digital and IRL spaces, not only regarding style sense but how chongas have been assumed to act. Much of it is rooted in racially-charged, classist thoughts. The identity’s refusal to remain invisible, as Goony explains, gets wrongfully passed off as arrogance, while the ornamental excess that’s so heavily associated with it disrupts and demands attention. As a result, discomforted outsiders may be quick to mark the style as abrasively “cheap” or “other.”
“[Chonga fashion] is informed by Afro-Caribbean and African American style melding with this sort of creolized Latinx style,” says scholar, curator, and community arts educator Jillian Hernandez. In her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, she writes that chongas express a disregard for acculturated whiteness “by embracing intricate and dramatic modes of hair, nail, and makeup styling that signal ethnic difference,” thus making “class burn.”
Growing up in Hialeah, Florida, Priscilla Del Castillo recalls how her elders saw chongas as “feminine, exotic, and loud.” “The people I was surrounded by, [like] my family, were very particular in how they viewed their life and how they wanted to be viewed in America,” says the Cuban-American model, whose grandmother fled Cuba in 1969 to escape socio-political repression.
There exists a sort of “idea that if [one] could perform proper womanhood, [it] would help generationally improve [their] position,” Hernandez says. “I'm always really careful about not critiquing respectability politics…because they come from a place of sort of love and well intention.” The significance of such performance was made all the more clear when Hernandez moved from a Catholic private school in New Jersey to Florida in the seventh grade. Though her chonga classmates were often seen as “tacky,” they were nonetheless among the most popular students, had lots of friends, and always looked good. Even later on, in the late 2000s, when YouTube mock-music video Chongalicious had just begun making its rounds online, and Y2K style was in full force, Hernandez recalls the style being subject to simultaneous admiration and mockery.
As Goony notes, the “certain level of ‘campiness’” integral to the traditional chonga look adds further nuance to this duality. In almost a full circle, the reintroduction of Y2K, McBling fashion into the mainstream over recent years has brought along with it major chonga elements. Those raised around the style have begun re-tapping into such influences associated with their childhood, while younger generations are adding their own spin to it by synthesizing the look with other styles, like “preppy chonga” and “goth chonga,” as Goony observes.
“I think Latinx [people] today have exposure to a lot of different styles and expressions because of social media,” says Pessoa. It thrills her to see the look elevated and individualized. She recently paid homage to her childhood chonga-inspired self by getting a lower-back tattoo, something she would’ve wanted in her early teens.
Similarly, there are moments when Del Castillo has seen accessories and certain garments reminiscent of the fashion she grew up around out in the wild. Now, on the occasion, she finds herself beginning to weave adjacent pieces into her current wardrobe and wonders how and if she would have been perceived differently had she incorporated this dress into her own as a child in Miami.
“'Chongivity' is a revolution,” Pessoa says. “I was in Japan in April and saw someone wearing butterfly clips, really thin penciled-in brows, low-rise yoga pants, [with a] pink Playboy shirt, and I thought, ‘Ella tiene un poquito de tumbao.’” (ICYMI: In recent years, Japanese subcultures have taken heavy cues from those of Latinxs, Cholas in particular.)
As the chonga look, its reception, and subsequent reclamation have transformed, Hernandez notes that “chonga beauty practices actually can become a way of creating place, a way of creating relations with other Latina femmes. [There’s been] a huge difference, just in the last decade, of what that looks like.” She cites visual artists Crystal Pearl Molinary and Joel Gaìtan, as well as Goony, as contributors to such developments.
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Over the past several years, Goony has specifically expanded the breadth of her “chongivity” by way of her Chongafied video series. Not only has she used this project to celebrate all things chonga, but she also utilizes it to highlight her peers’ talent and artistry. From “ghoul goth” model Gabbriette Bechtel to DJ Xtranjera, guests undergo head-to-toe style makeovers, highlighting the before, the after, and the process of it all. Goony begins each video by introducing her guests before they embark on a sourcing trip together using a “chongafied checklist” to ensure they find the perfect accessories, pumps, baby tees, and a plethora of other items for ultimate chongafication.
After the outfit is selected, MUA Leslie Castillo completes the process by creating coordinated makeup looks. To her, the elements of fun and play that go into the transformations make them most memorable, reminiscent of the joy gained from experimenting with and “doing makeovers as a little kid.”
“Chonga is and will always be about embracing my Latinidad,” says Goony. “It proves that you can look super cute and have confidence without necessarily having to wear a designer or anything expensive. More than just the style itself, for me, chonga is all about lifestyle.”
Chongafied is very much a communal and collaborative effort between all involved, and it celebrates both the thrill of getting ready and the end look. The aforementioned affordability of the style makes it so readily accessible and is a testament to the fact that costliness need not compromise self-expression through dress. “The body is the site of creativity and resistance and pleasure and power,” says Hernandez. For many, the chonga identity is a means of tapping into such freedom through fashion and all else. “It’s about looking fly no matter the price of your clothes and having that confidence,” Goony adds. “It’s something that's in you, not on you.”
