ABSTRACT
When members of the grassroots Chola Pinup organization objected to the unauthorized use of their creative material by La Vicko Alvarez, an academic scholar and featured comic book artist on Latina.com, they found their concerns met with classist commentary and was dismissed by their readers. Where the Pachuca of the 1940s was reprimanded for claiming the public space of the street, the Chola as predecessor of La Pachuca, in this particular situation is chastised for transgressing the street, and interjecting herself into the privileged space of visible discourse. When commenting on a mainstream Latina publication, like Latina.com, a chola is seen as outside the epistemic privilege sphere of barrio, and is instead entering the public arena of Latinidad discourse. This discursive space is privileged because of the visibility offered to it through the large circulation of readership in the more marketable form of monolithic ethnicity that is Latinada, versus the overtly political, raced and classed embodiment of nonconforming ethnicity such as Chicana and Chola. As academics who produce knowledge on cultural subjects in our communities, it is our responsibility to know the past and present of our subjects.
