Originally a derogatory racial category in 18th-century Spanish America, cholo referred to a person of three-quarters Indigenous and one-quarter Spanish ancestry within the colonial casta system. Its etymology is complex: Fray Alonso de Molina traced it to the Nahuatl word xolo for servant in 1571, while Inca Garcilaso de la Vega documented in 1609/1616 that it meant "dog" of disreputable origin. Over centuries, the term evolved dramatically, appearing in colonial Mexican casta paintings, describing mestiza women in Indigenous attire in Ecuador, and being used contemptuously by Chilean officers against Peruvians during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), while entering English through Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in 1851. In the modern United States, particularly Southern California, it became informal slang for low-income Latinos—often of Mexican, Salvadoran, or other Latin American descent—who dress in flannels, bandanas, and baggy khakis and are frequently associated with street gang culture. Today, cholo is not always negative, signifying anything from a distinct US subculture aesthetic to a pejorative for "gangster" in Mexico or an insult in some South American countries.