Once a year, my girlfriends and I go on a Chicas’ Weekend trip. We talk, dance, and cook a lot. Gerrie, who is an excellent chef, once exclaimed while cooking, “Ay chinacos!” I had never heard the word chinacos before. I asked her what it meant and she didn’t know, either.
Somehow, that word stuck in my mind. When my daughter and I were trying to come up with a name for my online store, chinacos popped up. We decided to make it feminine, so ¡Ay Chinaca! was what we decided to use for the name.
We also checked to make sure it didn’t mean anything bad in any language. After a little bit of research we discovered that Chinacos was a word used to refer to the guerrilla fighters during the Mexican Revolutionary War. So, this is one of the reasons the main photo is of myself (from many years ago) and my fellow Mexican folk dancers posing as revolutionaries or, Chinacos!