The popularity of “Catholic Mexican Girl” style — white dresses, braids, crucifixes — raises questions about how U.S. consumers represent Latin American culture.
its name a potential reference to the Virgin Mary, was so popular that it led to countless fast-fashion knockoffs.
“What do we share across Latino ethnic groups?” asks Brian Eugenio Herrera, an associate professor of theater at Princeton University. “It’s different encounters with the apparatus of Spanish coloniality, which is Catholicism, which is architecture, which is language.”Similar to how aesthetics such as “tradwife” and dark academia are being taken up and celebrated on social media, Catholic Mexican Girl plays into a broader trend among certain internet circles to fetishize traditionalist tropes.
And yet the term has proved lasting, fueled by an array of global brands interpreting the look. This summer, the British fast-fashion brand Motel launched its La Rossa collection, a clear nod to these stereotypically Latin American Catholic aesthetics.
Critics say that, by viewing Latin American culture strictly through the lens of Spanish colonialism, Black and Indigenous people are essentially erased from view. “In some ways, the simplicity of the white dress also ends up reasserting the whiteness of Latinos,” Herrera said. Gómez collects images of the Virgin Mary and describes herself as “culturally Catholic.” Speaking of the Catholic Mexican Girl trend and its fixation on Marian imagery, she said she was “really excited to see something like this get taken up outside of my niche communities. On the other hand, the secularization of an aesthetic that is very much complicated, historically, religiously and culturally, struck me as very problematic.”At issue, she said, is its “uncritical” approach.
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