Riyadh Chicanos

Submission 873

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

Riyadh Chicanos refers to memes and jokes about a pair of Saudi Arabian TikTokers who emulate '90s Chicano culture and post videos about it online. Posting under the handle @slooow.shop, the TikTokers began posting videos about American fashion, automobiles and basketball culture in 2024. Their videos were reposted to Twitter / X in August 2024, where people commented on how the video exemplifies American cultural hegemony.

Origin

TikTokers @slooow.shop posted their first video to their new TikTok^[1] on April 30th, 2024, gathering over 20,000 views in four months. The video showed a young boy gazing wide-eyed at an older man playing basketball while dressed in a jersey with the logos of every major NBA team.

On August 8th, 2024, the duo posted a video^[2] showing off bicycles they have for sale, gathering over 3 million views and 90,000 likes on a video in which they are dressed up in oversized blue shirts.

Various commenters on the video noted the disconnect between the TikToker's accents, their nationality and their behavior, joking about how the duo is from "Middle East LA."

Spread

On August 26th, 2024, X^[3] user @MazMHussain reposted the aforementioned video, writing, "Guys in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia now imitating the aesthetics and lifestyle of 90s South Central LA Latino gang members. They even have the contemporaneous vehicles." The post gathered over 28,000 likes in two days.

Various X users reacted to the video of the men from Riyadh emulating "'90s South Central LA Latino gang members," with X^[4] user @CameronCorduroy writing, "the Gulf States are a fascinating social experiment to see what happens if the 'poor person wins the lottery and then spends it all on stupid shit' phenomenon happened to a whole country," and gathering over 15,000 likes in a day.

On August 26th, X^[5] user @ayatr0llah joked that the TikTokers were the inverse of "the Latino Bitcoin influencer who goes by Sheikh Roberto and wears exclusively Saudi attire," in reference to X^[6] user @roberto_saudi.

Also on August 26th, 2024, X^[7] user @ByYourLogic wrote, "I think we need to revise how we conceive of Pangea. it’s very likely that there was once a single contiguous landmass and it was a supercontinent form of Mexico. all cultures now yearn to converge back to their Latino origins," gathering over 16,000 likes in two days.