‘Everyone Was Shaking Ass Like Crazy’: The Rise Of Chuleo Club, Naarm’s Hottest Latinx Party
“At the end of the day, my community, the only thing that they want to do is come and shake ass. That’s all we want.”
Rosa Pistola At Chuleo Club (Credit: Supplied)
Lina Zabaleta is explaining the meaning of the Spanish word chuleo. “Chulo or chula is something that is hot, that is cute,” she says. “But then chuleo is the verb,” which loosely translates to English as “to be hot.”
Zabaleta – who DJs under the alias Zalina – is the founder and promoter of the Melbourne/Naarm-based Latinx club night Chuleo Club. True to its name, over the last 18 months, Chuleo has established itself as one of the city’s sexiest, queerest, and most freely expressive club nights.
“I don’t know how I did it, how that happened, but yeah, it’s crazy,” says Zabaleta.
Zabaleta grew up in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, before moving to Australia in the early 2010s. Homesickness compelled her to get behind the decks a handful of years ago. “I was a sook,” she says. “I always wanted Latinx music.”
It wasn’t just dembow rhythms and erotic, hip-moving perreo dance moves that Zabaleta craved, but a more all-consuming club experience than what she found in Naarm.
“The club scene here, the music is good, but everyone is chatting all the time. Talking, doing drugs. It’s like, I want to dance,” she says. “And then my friend was like, I can teach you the basics [of DJing]. And as soon as she taught me, I was hooked.”
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Chuleo Club launched in March 2024, but before that, Zabaleta had been hosting intimate parties at Avalon bar in Fitzroy, with a focus on reggaeton.
“Those parties were 120 people capacity,” she says. “So it was, like, very underground, very small, but I saw the potential for what it could be. I just saw how all the girlies were coming to dance, the queers.”
Chuleo Club was born after Zabaleta reached out to one of her heroes, Colombia-born, Mexico-based DJ Rosa Pistola, and practically demanded that she come and play in Australia.
“I’d been following her for so long,” Zabaleta says. “She, for some, reason followed me back on Instagram and I was like, ‘Babe you need to come to Australia. I’m going to book you. What’s your email?’ And she was like, ‘I have my agent.’ She does really serious tours, with money, and I was like, ‘I can do it.’”
Zabaleta was bluffing – she’d never organised a big club night before, and she’d never dealt with the financial overheads of booking an overseas artist. “I was just asking friends, ‘Can you help me? How does this work? What contracts?’”
But despite her inexperience, Zabaleta was confident it would work. “I’ve always been like that,” she says. “Like, I feel like I can risk it. I’m a generator manifester. When I manifest something, it happens. It sounds like a cliché, but it just always happens.”
In this case, it certainly did: Rosa Pistola locked in an Australian tour for March 2024, and Zabaleta was in charge of the Melbourne date. “[Her agent] was like, ‘You need to pay me up front,’” Zabaleta says. “I was so scared, but I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll pay.’ So, from my savings, I paid.”
The first-ever Chuleo Club went down at Miscellania in the Melbourne CBD on Saturday, March 16th. Pistola headlined, with Zalina and fellow Naarm-based Latinx DJs, Julia Towers and Mad Rhythm, also on the bill. To say it was an auspicious launch for Chuleo Club is an understatement.
“It was sold out,” says Zabaleta, shaking her head in disbelief. “It was one of my biggest Chuleos of last year. It was everyone: Australians, Latinxs, queers, all the girlies. Everyone was just shaking ass there like crazy.”
Zabaleta hadn’t done business with Miscellania prior to Chuleo’s launch, but the venue has become the party’s spiritual home.
“I always had this image of Miscellania being really sceney,” she says. “And for me to bring that energy to that venue, its image just completely changed. Tim [Fennell, Miscellania owner and promoter] and everyone from the staff was like, ‘We need Chuleo every month here.’”
The mood at Chuleo Club is typically crazed, with Zalina and her guest DJs facilitating a unique level of dancefloor freedom in a city often associated with crossed arms and ketamine.
Word of the club’s hot and expressive atmosphere quickly spread after its sold-out launch, and Zabaleta has since organised close to 20 Chuleo Clubs, including parties at Northcote Theatre, New Guernica, The Night Cat, Milney’s and House Of Plants.
“Every venue in Naarm is like, ‘Can you please do a Chuleo here?’” Zabaleta says. “But I’m very selective with the spaces that I use for Chuleo. I have to take care of my community.”
Chuleo has hosted some of the most significant names in Latin American club music, from Chilean neoperreo founder DJ Lizz to Colombian Latincore leader CRRDR, Venezuelan leftfield reggaeton artist Safety Trance, Brazilian baile funk feminist BADSISTA, and Argentinian Latinx club innovator TAYHANA.
“Chuleo became this anchor in Naarm,” says Zabaleta. “So, every time we have Latinx artists that come in, I’m the first contact.”
The club has made inroads elsewhere in the country, too: Manuka Honey headlined its Sydney debut last July, while BADSISTA was at the head of Chuleo’s first national tour, which visited Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane in March 2025.
Chuleo’s femme-led, loose-your-inhibitions signature is in high demand: Zalina and Chuleo’s resident DJ Tina Disco – as well as club regulars ŌLITA and Haus of Ralph – have played at festivals like Ballista, Pitch Music & Arts, RISING and Wonder Mountain under the Chuleo Club banner. Chuleo Club is on the lineup for Freeform Festival at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in October.
Over the first week of October, Chuleo will co-present the inaugural Cadena festival, a four-day celebration of Latinx creatives working across film, literature, photography and music. Cadena will wrap up with Tina Disco’s EP launch, followed by a Chuleo Club after party.
Chuleo Club presents a show on Skylab Radio every other month, and Zalina has done mixes for NTS, triple j and Rinse France. As her seriously steamy mix for triple j’s Mix Up shows, Zalina’s sets have branched out from their reggaeton roots to include a range of harder, faster and more ecstatic Latin club sounds.
“Now it’s hectic because I’m playing from 150-180 BPM and then I go down to reggaeton and then I go up again,” she says.
Zabaleta’s taste for what she calls “hectic” sounds mirrors a broader shift in Latin club music. “This new generation are producing this interpretation of Latin American music in electronic vibes," she says. "So, they’re doing all these mashups of reggaeton at 150 BPM, mixing it with trance and techno.”
But while the music might be evolving, the desires of those on the dancefloor remain much the same, says Zabaleta.
“At the end of the day, my community, the only thing that they want to do is come and shake ass. That’s all we want.”
The Cadena festival, co-presented by Chuleo Club launches on October 1st and runs until October 4th, with tickets on sale now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
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