Like other contests that may be held at a business, there is a line that, once crossed, can be legally problematic. With the money the contest brings in for clubs vying for larger crowds, the manager said, there are no plans to end it. The contest gave birth to a kind of competitive circuit. Clubs would hold finals and sometimes reward the winner with a car - though usually a used one.Īs other clubs began to allow contestants to strip down, customers came to expect more and staff found it harder to clamp down on the contest’s growing excesses, the manager said. In the 1980s, families would come watch and boyfriends were comfortable with their significant others participating. Women who bared too much were disqualified. When the contest first sprang up, it was exclusively for legs, the manager of a Pico Rivera club said. The bleary-eyed hours give the legs contest the feel of the forbidden - something that needs to be kept under wraps.īy then many of the people in the club have had more than a couple of drinks. It almost always begins well after midnight - sometimes at 1 or 2 a.m.
“But those of us who work in the environment, it’s a form of entertainment, a way to attract people.”
“People think it’s bad, that it’s vulgar,” said one club manager, who like most of those interviewed declined to be named. But they promote the contests on social media, blasting out photos on Facebook and Instagram showing women in their bras and underwear with money raining down on them. They have been part of the Mexican American club scene in Southern California for decades, a variation on the wet T-shirt competitions that has managed to endured as a subculture even in an era when some consider it offensive, crude and decidedly anachronistic.īar owners tend to be touchy about talking about the events. Security guards told her to put her shirt back on. One woman pulled off her top to flash her breasts, unleashing boisterous cheers from the grateful crowd.
The young women twerked, pulled up their skirts to reveal lacy thongs and crawled on the floor as they snatched dollar bills thrown by men clutching bottles of Corona, Modelo and Dos Equis.