Niñe Mini October 2022

Niñe

Niñe

MODA TEAM

Photography by Luc Marchessault, Staff Photographer

Directed by Elise Wilson, Editorial Direc tor and Jane Houseal, Fashion Editor

Layout Design by Jessica Tenenbaum, Creative Director

LATINX HERITAGE MONTH COMMITTEE

Modeled by Nurit Gutierrez-Cuate, Bar bara Vaquero Peña, Xitlalic Castañe da-Cerda, Katheryn Saavedra-Ballesteros, Alexandra Moreno, Media Committee Co-chair, Cassie Guzman, Rayane Prado Nunes, and Shelby Jantz

Contributons by Barbara Vaquero, Xitlalic Castañeda-Cerda, Eileen Gomez Zamu dio, Contemporary Committee Co-Chair, Katheryn Saavedra-Ballesteros, and Cristian Noriega Sagastume

Anyone on TikTok can attest to experi encing the dreaded “trend-cycle,” and the abundance of fashion aesthetics. While these trends seem to emerge as fast as they go away, there is always a larger sto ry behind their origins. As we began our preparations for this year’s Latinx Heritage Month, we could not separate our theme of Expression Beyond the Margins from the current context that we see as the “trend-fication” of Latinx cultural staples.

The proof of such is seen in the rise of the “Little Mexican Girl” core and the “Clean Girl” aesthetic. “Little Mexican Girl” core was met with an onslaught of parodied and more realistic portrayals of what Mex ican girls’ lived reality entails. The sum mer has been filled with other critiques of “reinterpretations” of Latino individu als and culture by white, micro influencers. For example, cultural staples have been revamped using terms like “spa water,” “cowboy caviar” and “Hailey Bieber lips.” Scroll a little more, and you’ll find a mirage of white women donning the “Clean Girl” aesthetic, a trend that is characterized as women with slicked back hair, gold hoops, glossy lips and natural beauty. But for many of us from Black and Brown commu nities, these “new” trends are not new at all — they have been constants in our lives.

Niñe represents an asterisk on the “girl” portion of all of these aesthetics. It en courages us to expand the simplistic cate gories that define how we picture femme presenting Latinx individuals.

We speak as individuals from the Latinx Community at UW and share our person al narratives in hopes of illuminating the fact that for every trend, there is power and privilege in the use of our culture as aesthetics without ever acknowledging the meat of conflict and tension that sew them together.

Eileen’s

Narrative

When I was a little Mexican girl, I spoke bro ken English. My black hair was either cut into a neat little bob or pulled back into a ponytail, and I liked to read books. For show and tell, I took my favorite stuffed animal and wore the same purple sweater every day of first grade. What a strange fetishization it is to try to dress like an idea of me.

While it can be much easier to imagine a ho mogenous Latinx community that looks, dress es and talks the same, we are such a large and diverse group of people. It is hard to under state the power of clothes as an expression of both our individuality and our community. When there is already such a limited span of representation, it’s quite surreal to see peo ple pick apart a form of cultural expression into “pieces” to wear. This especially rings true when a trend results in adults looking like an infantilized version of me.

Barbara’s Narrative

Being part of the Latinx community means you are surrounded by beautiful music, food, tra ditions, history and languages. However, the recent trendification of Latinx culture in the media dismisses the many issues and struggles, such as colorism and sexism, that shape who we are — it provides a limited perspective.

A moment that will forever be ingrained in my memory is when my mother told me the story of my birth. My grandma explained “that she was so thankful that I was born pale —“bien chela’’— and had little resemblance to my fa ther’s dark “Indio’’ skin. While many Latinos face discrimination from other communities, the colorism within our own serves as a way to divide us. As I continued to grow, this narrative of “mejorar la raza,” along with terms such as Prieta, Indio, Morena — although at times used as terms of endearment — were used to tease and even diminish dark or brown skinned fam ily members. Oftentimes, darker skinned wom en within our community are not seen as truly feminine or at times not considered truly Latinx because of their skin.

Navigating the different aspects of one’s cul ture impacts one’s idea of self and can be quite strenuous. This struggle is further aggravated for Latinx individuals when outside commu nities gentrify specific aspects of our culture that are newly considered socially acceptable. It presents a white-created derivative of the traditions and practices that Latinx individuals have always utilized and been criticized for. In reality, Latinx culture is a complex culmination of years of history that comprise both the pos itive and the negative and cannot be morphed to fit a single narrative.

Trends in media are constantly changing, so when aspects of Latinx culture get “trendified” it strips our fashion and customs from their ori gins, hollowing them out for anyone to partake in. Brown and Black communities are never credited as the creators of their own cultural staples. When we are getting dressed in the morning, we aren’t imitating an aesthetic, we are living it.

The 2022 Latinx Heritage Month strives to chal lenge the UW-Madison community to think be yond the homogenous and stereotypical per ceptions of Latinx people. There will never be a single definition of what it means to be Latinx; we are a community that is far too vibrant and diverse to be reduced to one idea. As individ uals from the UW-Madison Latinx community, we decide to break and define our own labels by striving to use expression as a gateway to find our authenticity.