FAQs
What is Ponte Your Moños?
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Ponte Your Moños is a community-driven project born as an act of care, resistance, and visibility. It started as a response to a hostile immigration climate and grew into a collective space where culture, history, and solidarity meet. What began as a simple gesture, wearing braids and bows, became a way to show up for each other.
Who founded Ponte Your Moños?
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Ponte Your Moños was founded by Angie Portillo, a Mexican (raised and born in Puebla, Veracruz, Cd. Neza, Monterrey, CDMX) migrant creative, and Dulce Flores, a U.S.-born strategist. Coming from different sides of the border, their shared experiences led them to create something together, something rooted in history, identity, and collective care.
Why did Ponte Your Moños start?
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Ponte Your Moños started at a moment when staying quiet wasn’t an option. When fear entered our streets, homes, and bodies, we leaned into what we know best: history, culture, and showing up together. Instead of staying silent, we chose to respond through creativity in an unexpected way.
Why do you say fashion is political?
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Because Chicana bodies have always been politicized. Clothing, hair, and presentation became ways to reclaim agency when laws, borders, and institutions tried to take it away. Fashion is political when visibility itself becomes an act of resistance.
What does “Ponte Your Moños” mean beyond the literal translation?
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Braids have long been used within communities of origin across Latin America and the Americas, as well as within Chicana cultures, as symbols of connection, strength, and memory.
They are also a form of cultural maximalism, intentional, time-intensive, layered, and impossible to make small. Braids require repetition, care, and presence. They refuse speed and simplicity in a world that constantly asks marginalized bodies to shrink.
Bows add softness without surrender. Together, braids and bows hold a tension that defines our history: resilience and tenderness coexisting loudly on politicized bodies.
What is the Chicana history behind Ponte Your Moños?
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Chicana culture has always used style as language. From hair and clothing to makeup and posture, these choices have historically been used to claim space in a society that tried to erase or police our bodies. Ponte Your Moños draws directly from that legacy.
Why braids and bows? What do they represent historically?
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“Ponte Your Moños” is Spanglish by design. It reflects the in-between language of Chicanas, neither fully translated nor fully assimilated. It means: get ready, show up, and take space without asking for permission.
Where you can find us?
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You can currently find us through pop-ups in Santa Ana, Los Angeles, and San Diego, creating spaces for visibility, care, and collective healing.
We are also expanding, bringing Ponte Your Moños to other states and cities shaped by migration and Latina communities, with upcoming pop-ups in places like Chicago and beyond.
Wherever we go, we show up the same way: visibly, intentionally, and together.
Follow us to stay connected and learn about upcoming events!