YMMV / The Dirty Girls Social Club

• Anvilicious:
  • Not all Latinas are short, poor, brown-skinned maids or prostitutes, dammit! They're quite diverse, coming in all shapes, shades, temperaments, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
  • Latinas don't exist to satisfy white men's sexual fantasies or to serve as their "exotic pets".
  • One can be gay and still be religious.
  • Latino Jews exist.
  • Not all Latinos speak Spanish, and that's ok.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Sara's hyper-controlling, raging misogynistic husband Roberto had been battering her since they were kids, and nearly kills her (successfully killing their unborn daughter) when she is visited by Elizabeth, whom Roberto hates because she's a lesbian. It is becomes a major relief to Sara and the readers when he's killed in a car crash in the sequel while he was in the middle making another attempt on her life.
  • After spending the entire third novel hunting down Lauren trying to rape and kill her (and successfully killing her beloved cat), Jason Flynn finally gets his just desserts when John puts a bullet in his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.
  • While not really a villian, Usnavys falling into poverty in the third book. After overspending money she doesn't have on designer brands (instead of on her house payments), cheating on Juan, and looking down on the people of her neighbourhood, the fact that she now has to work at a ratty hair salon for a former classmate she hated and having a greatly reduced salary seems like the humbling moment for her.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Usnavys' shopping addiction seems to borderline oniomania.
• Moral Event Horizon: Usnavys stealing Juan's emergency money to continue her shopping addiction, right after they had lost their house. Her biggest complaint? That the fund was only $2000.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Amber, being the only sucia from a working-class background and a proud Chicana of Indigenous roots, would've been the perfect character to call out her friends' bourgeoisie, neo-colonialist mindsets. Instead she engages in a lot of cultural posturing (changing her name to Cuicatl and having an Aztec wedding ceremony) for its own sake rather than doing anything constructive for Indigenous Mexican community. Unsurprisingly, she "sells out" later on when presented with a million dollar deal to sing in English and Spanish (the two colonizer languages she had been bashing up until then), ultimately proving that Amber is almost as materialistic as her fellow sucias. She does make up for it by sticking to her Nahuatl name and employ only Indigenous and presumably Black people into her street team, but at that point it's hard for readers to take her serious. All in all, she's treated as nothing more than a caricature of a typical pro-raza Chicana.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The sucias are meant to be these proper, glorified Latinas whose every single problem is framed as the result of living in a racist, sexist society, but no hint of any personal responsibility. Most of their dialogue (especially Lauren's) make no secret of how little they think of poorer Latinas, and how little they'll occasionally think of themselves for being Latinas. Then there's their criticism of Chicanos and the civil rights, which comes off as hypocritical considering the six friends wouldn't be where they are today because of these movements.
• Values Dissonance: With the increasing awareness of racism within the Latin community, modern day readers probably wouldn't take too kindly to seeing Lauren, a racially white Latina, making derogatory comments towards darker Latinos, or criticising Latino social justice movements that are rooted in Black and Indigenous communities.
• Values Resonance:
  • Tokenism, as portrayed in the novel, is still a problem in real life, especially in higher-paying jobs. Lauren's speech of the higher-ups only valuing physical diversity but not diversity of ideas rings true until this day.
  • Latinas are frequently sexualized in the media, as is seen with Lauren and Elizabeth, whose jobs only respect for as long as they can sexualize them.
  • Machismo is still a problem in the Latin community, especially in how men assert dominance over women, and see them as little more than sex objects.