Below is an excerpt from the new book, Making the Miami Cubanita: A Pop Cultural Genealogy, available to purchase by clicking here.
Laura: You can’t take Miami and put it inside a little box. It’s within you. You can’t put a yellow cardigan on and say, “Oh, Miami, I am going to cover you up with my little yellow caca cardigan.” It can’t happen that way.
Jenny: Okay. Well, let’s take the tetas out.
— Laura Di Lorenzo and Jenny Lorenzo on Pero Like Presents: “Women Transform into Chongas”
What follows is the story of a group of young women who empowered themselves by exaggerating ownership of an ethno-racial identity they were explicitly forbidden to assume. Amid communal efforts to scramble back to the white side of the color line, llegaron las chongas (the chongas arrived), but they were gyrating in the opposite direction. Nobody knows exactly when the term “chonga” was first hurled as an insult, but at some point in the late 1980s a gaggle of Miami cubanitas redefined cubanidad on their own terms. Growing ubiquitous in South Florida in subsequent decades, their signature aesthetic provoked ridicule and enmity in the Cuban exile community, which coined the term “chonga” to describe these wayward daughters. This was not typical intergenerational conflict; older and established Cuban exiles were waging a battle for the hard-won ethnic capital that had once propelled them to the top of immigrant prestige. The sparkle was wearing off the Golden Exiles, and every flick of a chonga’s thick black eyeliner stained the community’s white skin brown. The insult was a call for hegemony, a protection of privilege, and a battle for whiteness. Miami Cubans had come too far to let these little niñas ruin their model-minority status with lip liner.
Elsewhere, I argue that chongaism was born at a time of deteriorating racial privilege and was a way to assert and define an identity that was increasingly contested. By the late 1980s, abiding by middle-class norms of white respectability was no longer the protective or viable measure it had once been for Miami’s Cuban community. In defiance of an unobtainable standard, many young women embraced the pan- Latin classification that their parents had long resisted, adopting sartorial signifiers of a tough sexuality that proudly advertised their otherness. To Cubans driving around with “Yo no soy hispano . . . yo soy cubano” (I’m not Hispanic . . . I’m Cuban) bumper stickers, watching these young cubanas don expressions of brownness was una barbaridad (a barbarity) because it jeopardized the ethnic capital their parents and grandparents had carefully cultivated.
Although the practice of regulating the behavior and appearance of young women is not exclusive to any one community, I contend that this particular struggle (of the chongas) in this particular community (Cuban Miami) at this particular time (the late 1980s and early 1990s) and in this particular space (South Florida) differed from typical intergenerational conflict because of the particular sociopolitical import carried by the image and reputation of young cubanas at the time…
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the city was under a microscope. Across disciplines, scholars and cultural critics published books investigating Miami. While their perspectives differed, they agreed on one inescapable principle: Miami at this time was like no other place on Earth, and part of what made it so was a frightening acceptance of exile-on-exile domestic terrorism. The following examples of contemporary works about Miami establish the lengths the exile community underwent to punish anybody not in line with a narrowly defined understanding of cubanidad. Some of the works cited below claimed that a de-escalation of terrorism occurred by the early 1990s, but in both 1992 and 1994, Human Rights Watch issued separate reports strongly condemning the city for violence and intimidation against those exiles who were not in line with the community’s right-wing ideology.
In 1987 celebrated author Joan Didion published Miami, a social and political analysis in which she marveled at the impact Cuban exiles had had on the city. As a well- traveled white woman, she noted that Miami was hardly the only American city with a sizable Spanish-speaking population. But unlike cities such as Houston and Los Angeles, where Spanish was “ambient noise” spoken by underclass service people such as waiters and car washers, in Miami, Spanish was spoken by the movers and the shakers, the people who ate at restaurants and drove expensive cars and adorned their fancy houses with expensive landscaping. Arguing Miami Cubans operated in a parallel culture to the once-dominant Anglo structure, she warned of a dangerous underside to the Golden Exiles. Much of Didion’s work focused on the prevalence and social acceptance of exilic political violence.
In 1993 sociologists Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick illuminated the exile community’s response to its drastic change in reputation after the 1980 Mariel boatlift in City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. They argued that first-wave Cubans turned their attention inward and silenced detractors, ramping up efforts to present a monolithic and positive image. Journalist David Rieff’s 1993 The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami and historian María Cristina García’s 1996 Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959– 1994 also focused on terrorism. Rieff and García addressed the Miami Cuban community’s anxiety over the Americanization of the next generation more than did the aforementioned authors, but they still did not draw attention to chongaism, the burgeoning subculture I explore in part 2 of this book.
These authors writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s omitted important voices, which were discounted and overlooked because they belonged to those preteen and adolescent girls who were quickly earning their community’s scorn— the chongas. Originally used to stigmatize cubanitas challenging their community’s white-centered acculturation, staid gender norms, and stifling behavioral mandates, the label has now blossomed into something much bigger. It is important to recognize that the impulse behind intra-exile political violence and this derogatory label of “chonga” were not unrelated. Both were based on an us-against-them mentality and were intended to punish those exiles who refused to conform to a narrow understanding of Cuban American identity. Exiles attempted to create a unified vertical community by punishing political dissidents, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, suspected communists were not the only victims of their aggressive repudiations of difference. Nobody was ever bombed or killed for being too “chongalicious,” but the bravery of young women performing non-whiteness at a time when their volatile community was desperately trying to reanimate their once-pristine and whitewashed reputation amid drastic status reversal should not be discounted.
