Overview
- The viral videos feature youths with clown-style face paint walking through gritty urban settings to the cumbia “Ojitos mentirosos,” a format lifted from Gael García Bernal’s 2019 film Chicuarotes.
- New criticism targets socially privileged creators posting polished versions from comfortable settings, with users accusing “whitexicans” of co‑opting a context they do not live.
- Commentators, including TikToker Giordano Ortega, frame the makeup and forced smiles as a visual code for performing happiness under economic and social precarity.
- Media reports conflict on the song’s origin, with some attributing it to Tropicalísimo Apache in 1993 and others to Tropicalísimo Fantasía in the 1980s.
- The aesthetic has been widely replicated across Latin America, with reactions split between viewing it as cultural reclamation and warning that it can romanticize poverty and reinforce stigma.