As a chavalito, my mamá was so dang busy teaching, planning assignments, creating her own bilingual elementary school textbooks, and holding down the casita as a single parent that my hair went mostly unnoticed. That is, until visits to or from abuelita, when a bowl and clippers cut raggedy long locks into what’s known today as, “The Edgar.”
At the time I gave a caca about my appearance, especially my hair. At home I spent most of my waking—and sleeping—hours sporting one of my precious pulga-purchased máscaras: El Santo, Blue Demon, or Batman. At school, sans mascara, there were enough of us running around with the same bowl cut that the taunts and the stink-eyes were far and few between.
Today, it’s a thing. #Edgar is all over Insta, TikTok, and more. And, like everything amplified by social media, #Edgar celebrates the positive. From the complexity of the cut (today), the affirmation of indigenous ancestry (Colton Valentine's "They Not Like Us"), and detoxifying of rigid gender and sexuality divisions. It’s also used in the negative, to identify those with the Edgar as threats, criminals—bad hombres.
Like nearly everything these days, it’s been weaponized. This isn’t the first- or last-time hair and style have been targeted. Think of yesteryear’s pachucos in El Paso, East LA, and Chicago, who wore with pride bootleg-tailored (or self-made) super suave drape suits, pomade-slicked ducktail hair, or high coifed bouffant hairdos. Simple and quiet affirmations of being neither Mexican nor American, but something new and in-between became weaponized by outsiders. The pachucos, or Zoot Suiters, were framed within the criminal racialized cognitive schemas. Think: the 1943 East LA’s so-called “Zoot Suit Riots.”
Framing those who choose to embrace an identity through their intentionally constructed Look isn’t unique to Latinos. There’s a long and parallel history with Blacks in Harlem, Detroit, and Chicago in the ‘30s and ‘40s who strutted pridefully custom-tailored voluminous suits. And, across the proverbial pond, working-class youth in '50s-'60s UK, known as the Mods (modernists,) chose to buck mainstream conservative expectation by sporting fine-tailored, Italian-styled suits and clean, geometric haircuts.
In the ‘70s working-class youth began DIY repurposing sounds (rock ‘n’ roll) and objects (safety-pins to hold together ripped clothes and toilet chain flushers as neck collars, for instance), as well as sporting short and choppy hair or the sharp pointed Mowhawk. Everything about the Mods and Punks was intentional: to affirm and celebrate their respective subcultural identities and to push back against the mainstream schemas sought to target and/or assimilate working-class youth.
For working-class youth around the world, agency can come through the intentional ways one celebrates an ethos by constructing a subcultural: refashioning objects, footwear, clothes, and hairdos. It’s a way to intentionally affirm the Otherness that a conformist mainstream throws at youth. It’s a way to purposefully redirect the disdain aimed at those deemed different. It’s a way to actively re-structure feelings about oneself and foster positive, shared emotions within a community of likeminded individuals.
I think readily of two of my fave contemporary Latinx authors: Myriam Gurba (Creep) and Gume Laurel III (Samson & Domingo). Both sport Edgars , and with great intentionality: to re-structure rigid structures of feeling and cognitive schemas about gender and sexuality—and what it means to be a Latinx author.
Whether it’s Gurba or Gume shaking up expectation, a San Anton mural artwork that features the Edgar to honor Jumano ancestry, social media memes, TikToks, or my sobrina declaring her preference for partners who sport the Edgar, I say, let people do their thing. Let the Edgar, be the Edgar.
Perhaps, instead of putting energy into bans and the weaponizing of the Edgar, we can work together to call out systemic issues such as our current K-12 education with its push-out and lock-out systems that disproportionally impact Latinx youth. Perhaps we can focus on advocating for inclusive and supportive measures for robust after-school programs, tutoring centers, access to healthy cafeteria food, 21st century educational resources like whiteboards and tablets in classrooms, and better pay for our maestras like my late mamá.
See also Rhyma Castillo's recent piece for the San Antonio News Express HERE.
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