orange magazine
music
A New Creative Platform for Women of Color
Words by Jennifer Hernandez Photos by Aaron Dehn
In this club, you don’t need to recite a chant, wear your clothes a certain way or perform ridiculous tasks to get in. In fact, you don’t need to change a thing about yourself. Your individuality is enough—all you’ll need is a rad vinyl collection to go with it.
Chulita Vinyl Club is a collective composed of
In April, Resistencia Fest brought the community
has a massive following on social media with over
together at Austin’s Pan Am Park with music, food and voter registration. Families danced to the live music performed by local artists while others enjoyed fresh fruit with chili powder. Important community figures also made appearances, including Delia Garza, Austin’s first Latina City Council Member, to make an important point about getting the Latinx community involved in civic engagement efforts. Among the attendees were Jennifer Rother and Xochi Solis, Chulita Vinyl Club members who were ready to spin some vinyl for the crowd to enjoy. 68
self-identified women of color who provide music at different events within their community. There are currently seven Chulita Vinyl Clubs in the country including chapters in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Launched in December of 2014, the Chulita Vinyl Club already 15,000 followers on Instagram and over 6,000 followers on its Facebook page. Solis, who works as a full time visual artist, is the leader of the Austin chapter. “There’s no repertoire in the Chulitas,” Solis says. “I think what’s cool for us is to share each other’s personal tastes, and kind of have this larger umbrella of the collective to perform that music. We can perform anything from records that we got handed down [to us] from family members or grandparents, to new things we collect when we go shopping at the local record store.”
