Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a derog. term for a Mexican or S. American, esp. one considered lower class or of mixed blood.

1847		J. Downey Cruise of the Portsmouth (1963) 60: ‘The English and Peruvians have had a muss, and the Old Admiral has give ’em twenty four hours to settle the hash, or else he was going to open his fire.’ [...] ‘By the Lord, if old Bull does get at them, he’ll knock their old Castle about their ears and the cholos will have to give leg bail.’.
1899		H.E. Hamblen Yarn of Bucko Mate 121: He was a ‘Cholo,’ the half-Indian race that is held in supreme contempt by the descendants of the Dons.
1912		D. Lowrie My Life in Prison 236: Chinese, Indians, negroes, cholos [...] have died in mid-air.
1935		N. Algren ‘Thundermug’ in Texas Stories (1995) 71: The car was full of spiks an’ cholos an’ shokes, an I just didn’t like it.
a.1946		‘The Open Book’ in G. Logsdon Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing (1995) 116: There’s the cholo from down in Chihuahua.
1953		R. Chandler Long Good-Bye 165: And don’t call me a cholo. I’m no wetback. My name is Juan Garcia de Soto y Sotomayor.
1971		E.E. Landy Underground Dict. (1972).
1979		E. Torres After Hours 15: The coke is with them ‘cholos’ from Colombia and Argentina.
1980		E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 56: Don’t be callin’ no ese Cholo or Chico if you don’ knowin’ d’ dude.
1995		J. Stahl Permanent Midnight 146: The Cholo slammed down his ballpoint.
1998		B. Gifford Sinaloa Story 218: In my closed mind lowriders are for cholos.
2000		J. Ellroy ‘Balls to the Wall’ in Destination: Morgue! (2004) 11: The cholos had heart. The cholos fought dirty. The cholos fucked goats.
2008		T. Piccirilli Fever Kill 46: Cholo. A Spanish word that had come to mean a tough guy, a cowboy.
2009		J. Stahl Pain Killers 273: A full-lipped, doe-eyed chola.
2019		S.M. Jones Lives Laid Away [ebook] ‘It’s midnight on a Monday and I’m a cholo holding a bloody knife over a neo-Nazi’.
2021		J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 91: Jimmy feeds the cholos their motivation [...] you want white pussy baaaaaad.
2021		T. Swerdlow Straight Dope [ebook] She had switched from literary critic back to Boyle Heights Chola.

2. a teenage gang member; thus chola, cholita, a female gang member.

1959		W. Brown Teen-Age Mafia 72: That was what the cholo in uniform had done to her. [Ibid.] 147: I’m comin’ down after you, cholo.
1985		‘Jennifer Blowdryer’ Modern English 59: cholo (n): Bato Loco, Pachuco and Cholo are terms meaning social identity among Latinos [...] they are generational terms, Pachuco belonged more to the ’40s and ’50s, Bato Loco to the ’60s, and Cholo to the ’80s.
1990		S. Morgan Homeboy 83: She’d [...] got into it with a cholita who called her a comicbook whore.
1993		L. Rodríguez Always Running (1996) 5: This lifestyle originated with the Mexican Pachuco gangs of the 1930s and 1940s, and was later recreated with the Cholos.
1993		L. Rodríguez Always Running (1996) 44: Cholas [...] had long, teased hair, often peroxided black or red. They had heavy makeup, skirts which hugged their behinds, and they were all the time fighting.
1997		(ref. to 1930s–40s) G. Sikes 8 Ball Chicks (1998) 18: Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, neighborhood street gangs formed for protection and identity. Their members were called cholos, ‘people trapped between worlds,’ originally referring to those on the fringes of indigenous Indian and Spanish colonial cultures in Mexico. In America it meant poor second-generation kids whose parents remained Mexican at heart.
1997		G. Sikes 8 Ball Chicks (1998) 19: The early cholas wore short skirts, mesh stockings and pompadours.
2000		W. Shaw Westsiders 103: These cholos ride up in the red car and start throwing gang signs and shit.
2007		J. Stahl ‘Pure’ in Love Without 169: Some Cholita, walking by with a pair of pit bulls.
2008		www.wikihow.com 🌐 A Cholo is a Latino gangster (aka, Gangsta) these days, and it seems many people would like to be gangsta.
2011		Chamillionaire ‘Slow It Down’ 🎵 Burn off in my whip while hittin switches like a cholo.
2013		J. Stahl Happy Mutant Baby Pills 107: A trio of Cholitas pushing strollers stopped to stare.
2015		P. Beatty Sellout (2016) 236: The two cholos walked into deep center field [...] sharing the last of the marijuana.