Alejandra Campoverdi grew up with her immigrant mother, aunts, and grandparents, in a crowded Santa Monica apartment with fashion-magazine cutouts on bedroom walls. Her outfits gestured toward the status to which she aspired. She wore a plaid uniform skirt to what is now Saint Monica Preparatory, the Catholic school she attended thanks to financial aid and her grandma taking on work as a teacher’s aide. In high school, she connected with her Latina identity and her teen-age, gang-member boyfriend, Spider, by dressing like a chola—a female counterpart to a cholo, a term often used to describe a Mexican American gang member—with brown lipstick, baggy pants, and hair teased high.
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