“Firme ass chola like me”: Raciolinguistic ideologies on YouTube

Drawing on raciolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, the current study analyzes lexical choice and other semiotic resources utilized in four YouTube parodies of the chola “Chicana gangster” persona. Through the performances, certain negative social values are enregistered, including social backwardness, perceptions of poverty, and performative unintelligence. As an intertextual speech chain, these videos provide evidence for the development of this figure as an entextualizable stereotype with excerptable parts and, in the process, it is argued that these parodies are indexical of raciolinguistic ideologies relating to standard language and white supremacy, treating the chola as a racialized Other.