The Impact of 'Rebelde' on a Young, Latinx Pop-Punk Generation

There are some TV shows so good, you’d cross a border for them.

Stephanía Lara-Cuéllar grew up on the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Every morning, she would make the trek across the international bridge with thousands of other students from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, to attend school. And every afternoon, she would dash home to watch the early-aughts teen show Rebelde.

“School ended at 3 p.m., and we would run across the bridge back to Mexico to make it back in time for the 6 p.m. slot. We’d watch it, and as soon as it was over, me and my friends would log on to MSN Messenger and talk about it all night,” she says, laughing. “We would change all of our icons and screen names.”

Coming of age between two cities, Lara-Cuéllar, who is now a marketing professional, was able to pick and choose between Mexican and American culture. But when she remembers her teen years, nearly two decades later, she always goes back to Rebelde.

First broadcast on Televisa, one of Mexico's largest cable networks, in 2004, the show revolves around boarding school students and their unwavering desire to form a pop band. Spanish-speaking audiences grew up with actors Christopher Von Uckermann, Christian Chávez, Anahí, Alfonso Herrera, Dulce María, and Maite Perroni, watching them transform from young teenagers into worldwide music icons over a span of 440 episodes. Rebelde’s front-runners went on to create their own band, RBD, touring all over the globe with a 2000s sound that rivaled Green Day and Paramore.

It’s hard to overstate the show’s reverberating impact; it demonstrated to audiences everywhere that Latinx-fronted stories weren’t just about street gang-fueled violence and steamy sex. During prime-time hours, Monday through Friday, tweens would head home from school, kick off their sneakers, and sit in front of the television to manifest a life that the Rebelde kids had.

“What had dominated at the time were people like Britney Spears and NSYNC. We went to school every day and saw it, but it was like a glass ceiling of accessibility. So when things filtered through the other side, it was like a cultural reset,” Lara-Cuéllar says. “It opened up this possibility of being something else. It made me more Mexican.”

Rodrigo Varela//Getty Images

Like most elements of Latinx youth culture at the time, Rebelde’s fashion was filtered through an American lens. Costume designers Gabriela Ortiz, Hector Flores, and José Tapia made sure that the show’s It girls wore the Y2K trends seen in the United States. Cable-knit cardigans, sequined purses, and bedazzled denim personified a fictional generation living off their parent’s wealth and nepotism. It’s a fantasy many tried to emulate, writer and designer José Criales-Unzueta tells BAZAAR.com.

To children growing up in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, American brands like Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch were symbols of luxury and wealth. Some families made yearly shopping pilgrimages to the States, creating a vacation out of trips to outlet malls in cities like Orlando and Dallas. For those who couldn’t hop on a plane, eager tíos and tías—uncles and aunts—could bring back suitcases filled with the hottest items for their communities to enjoy. Although Criales-Unzueta couldn’t get the same top that fictional pop star Alma Rey was wearing on the show, he sure could style one just like it.

“My interaction with American fashion was through the filter of accessibility. When you put Rebelde in the picture, that’s the styling that we were all mimicking,” Criales-Unzueta explains. “The leather bracelets that all the boys used to wear, popping the collar on your button-down and opening it a little bit, wearing stiletto boots with your uniform skirt … it wasn’t giving what we thought it was giving, but in our heads we were like, ‘You’re Diego. You’re Miguel. You’re the girl.’”

Alexander Tamargo//Getty Images

Alexander Tamargo//Getty Images

Criales-Unzueta remembers buying into the Rebelde fantasy with his friends. At their Bolivian Catholic school, they would channel their favorite characters for the day, like a real-life form of cosplay.

“Rebelde provided me with an understanding of the range in which all of my friends could exist. In the way that some girls are like, ‘Oh, I’m such a Carrie,’ we were talking like, ‘Oh, I’m such a Lupita.’ It started with the characters and it bled into the fashion,” he explains. “It was going back into these archetypes of [characters] and being like, ‘Are you feeling more tomboyish? Are you feeling grungy? Are you feeling punk?’”

Punk was a novel idea not often associated with the monjitas that ran Catholic schools—much less a conservative, Latin American society. For a generation growing up with dial-up Internet, the idea of rebelling against tradition was enticing, whether it was by hemming dresses past complete function or by wearing sticker stars on their foreheads during religion class. The style revolution was celebrated by Latinx teens, much to the raised eyebrows of their old-school parents.

At the time, Rebelde was the only show that felt like a true representation of female-led sexuality, Mario Lugo, an advertising consultant, says. Characters on the show wore what they wanted simply because they felt like it, inspiring viewers to do the same. When a character like Mia Colucci or Roberta Pardo showed up to the mall in high heels and a bikini top, the outfit wasn’t used primarily to pander to the sleazy male gaze, but rather to embody her personal style.

“Young kids, especially queer young kids, could turn on the television and see the ways in which both male and female characters presented their identities within costume,” Lugo, who identifies as nonbinary, says. “In Mexico, there’s an overwhelming sense of a male-dominated, conservative culture perpetrated by old ways of thinking. Anything that falls beyond that binary is vilified. Rebelde was the first time that fighting back against a confined society was validated” in a mainstream way.

As RBD—the show’s companion band—was touring, it wasn’t hard to find leather corsets, plaid dresses, and chunky, stomp-on-me boots onstage. The pop-punk aesthetic, catapulted by stars of the time like Avril Lavigne and Hayley Williams of Paramore, coursed its way through Latin America and abroad. For a society built upon toxic machismo, Rebelde was a cultural shock to the system. It showed that women who dressed revealingly could have brains. That men who dyed their hair like Giovanni Méndez López—whose actor came out after the show—weren’t odd commodities. That people who wore tattered jeans to school and used slang could be respected, celebrated even.

Rebelde walked so Elite—another telenovela about rich, Spanish-speaking students—could run. At Rebelde’s fictional boarding school, a rotating roster of New England prep-inspired uniforms was the apparel of choice. Red blazers with matching tartan ties and miniskirts shorter than the show’s plotlines were worn by all. Frances Solá-Santiago, a fashion writer at Refinery29, says that the show’s costumes reflected the quintessential style at the time. Last month, she penned a piece about the importance of school uniforms on the show, citing their impact in developing personal identity and style at a pivotal age.

“We think so much about low-rise jeans and Y2K skirts, but we forget the schoolgirl, preppy aesthetic that also came in the 2000s. We’re seeing Olivia Rodrigo, especially in the ‘Brutal’ music video, channel that image so much right now,” Solá-Santiago explains.

For many of the characters on the show, customization was an act of insurrection. No one at Elite Way School followed the dress code. For every pressed white dress shirt and immaculately tailored pair of slacks came a distressed jean jacket or teeny crop top. The outward rejection of society’s standards didn’t come through just the scandalous plotlines, but rather, skimpy outfits that left little to the imagination and unorthodox accessories that defined an era in Televisa’s history. It’s punk if we’ve ever heard of it.

As a rebooted version of Rebelde prepares to hit Netflix next year, many are holding their breath to see if the original’s boundary-pushing style will translate to the new decade. There will still be campy uniforms, romantic ballads, and box-dyed hair streaks for nostalgia’s sake, but the show feels like it’s fit for a Gen-Z crowd who is revolutionizing what it means to proudly be themselves.

Rebelde 2.0’s costume stylist, Nayeli de Alba, told ELLE Mexico that she’s placing a heightened importance on homegrown brands. The thought could prove radical, redefining what It brands are to Latinx communities, Criales-Unzueta says. After all, these fantasy narratives that revolve around wealth usually use European or American brands to tell their stories. A trendsetting, influential character who highlights the talent flourishing in their own backyard could be monumental.

“The proposition could do so much for the industry in Mexico,” he says. “If they’re wearing a homegrown designer and they desire the brand, that means you, the viewer, should desire it as well. If the new Mia Colucci is wearing whatever Mexican brand with her pink Razor [phone], I’m into it. I’m buying what she’s buying.”

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