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This chapter examines the ways in which Latina urban identities have been shaped by popular culture as the “chola/homegirl.” However, this chapter argues that Medina’s novel challenges the seemingly natural alignment of urban Latina identity with the chola by calling for a more expansive view of what it means to be a young, urban Latina. This chapter uses Chicana/Latina feminist theorizing that has examined the chola identity, in addition to sociological research that has studied the ways in which urban girls of color are constructed as “bad” or “delinquent.” This chapter examines the protagonist in light of these theories. Further, the chapter argues that Medina’s novel, in expanding what it means to be a young, urban Latina, questions the ways in which those Latinas who do not model themselves as cholas are victims of identity-policing, rendered not “really” Latina, and dismissed as weirdos or outsiders within this narrow gender/racial identity script that defines chola identity as the only “authentic” young, urban, Latina identity.

This chapter reads three contemporary Bolivian comics with the goal of analyzing their representations of indigenous Aymara or Quechua (chola) mothers. The author of this chapter demonstrates how normative Bolivian discourses of maternity frame cholas as grotesque but, how recent changes in government policies and in economic conditions, have empowered chola women and have resulted in changes in how they are represented in social arenas such as theater. In light of such shifts, this chapter asks whether comics too have evolved beyond monstrous representations of chola maternity.

This chapter examines adult–child interactions with a focus on how researchers can use a child-centered perspective to enter adolescent communities. This study, focused on Latino teen gang members in Phoenix, emphasizes that to understand young people's religious interpretations scholars must embrace teens' religious creativity, rather than measuring their understandings against an established norm. Cholos and cholas were not the “deviant” or unredeemable youth they were often portrayed as in the media. Gang members in South Phoenix invented religious rituals and symbols that were born out of dispossession and an intense yearning for love and acceptance. Ritualization of violence and desire was a “strategic way of acting.” Religious symbols had taken on new meaning in the barrio across generations—Christ and Mary were alive and walked with the men, women, and children who lived there.