#rasquache

I assigned Roberto Bedoya’s 2014 essay “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City” for one of my classes this semester. Bedoya’s work has been a touchstone as I think about placemaking. 

As I presented a talk on the politics of belonging and dis-belonging as they relate to practices of “creative placemaking,” I drifted away from my consideration of artists as placemakers to ask the audience who among them knew the term Rasquache. No hands were raised. I then pivoted and said that I was not interested in unpacking how gentrification operates; instead I wanted to talk about how places are made through Rasquachification. As the gentry moves the working class and poor out of cities, what unsanctioned means will the newly displaced residents use to style their next locale? How might this form of artistic expression, this form of speech, provide a counterframe to gentrification and the homogenizing aesthetic of the white spatial imaginary?

The scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes Rasquache as a Chicano aesthetic with an “attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.” Evoking rasquachismo from an artist’s perspective, Amalia Mesa-Bains calls it “the capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado.” 

When I think of rasquachismo, I think of repurposing a tire into a flowerpot that you would never find at Home Depot. Such an object signifies the imaginary structured by resourcefulness, and prompted by poverty, which is distinct from the imaginary imposed by the monetization of neighborhoods, a prevailing objective in urban development.

For my students, the majority of whom grew up in Los Angeles and its environs, embedded within Latinx neighborhoods and families, the word rasquache was easily understood if not well known. They related it to San Diego’s Chicano Park, or the homes built by residents of Chavez Ravine.

I was curious to learn that “rasquachismo” has been used as a label for contemporary art.

A lesson in “rasquachismo” art: Chicano aesthetics & the “sensibilities of the barrio” by Maria Anderson (Smithsonian Insider, 2017)

In her review of a 1989 rasquachismo show at Denver’s Chicano Humanities and Art Council Gallery, art critic Jennifer Heath noted: “The zoot suit-era car arrived with a stranger from Colorado Springs, who had telephoned CHAC Director Carmen Atilano just before the opening to ask if he could display it. That’s the nature of rasquache. It belongs to the people, and is nothing more, nor less, than Chicano aesthetics, the sensibilities of the barrio, that mingle Mexican and Anglo-American experiences into everyday life. In Spanish, rasquache means ‘leftover’ or ‘of no value.’ In Chicano vernacular, it describes an attitude, the taste or lifestyle of the underdog.”

Yet in the fine art world, rasquachismo is a conceptual aesthetic category

Why the Chicano Underdog Aesthetic ‘Rasquachismo’ Is Finally Having Its Day by Haleema Shah (Smithsonian.com, 2019)

...actor and director Cheech Marin opines on the Chicano art sensibility that is defiant, tacky and wildly creative

When Chicano artists in L.A. wanted to show their art, they were told by the-powers-that-be at museums that Chicanos don’t make fine art. They make agitprop folk art,” he says, “agitational propaganda.”

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/graffiti-short-film-art-drama#/

Hey y’all! No #photooftheday today but here’s something that’s more important!

I’m production designing my friend Antonio’s advanced thesis. It’s about a young latino graffiti artist who learns to use his art to protest. In the process, a woman teaches him the power of his art.

When we talked about this film months and months ago, we often used the word “dystopia.” Yet, when Antonio pitched it to his class (on November 9), not only was it difficult day to pitch, but we realized that the film wasn’t “dyspotic” after all.

Gray animal walking on green grass

Rasquache inserted into the realm of anti-politics allows us to take what we want and leave behind that which does not suit our needs. To build our own vision despite what the gatekeepers of good taste and orthodoxy may want us to align with. This is why I have chose to join the call of the return of joy and antagonism of the Situationist International, but leave behind its fetishization of worker’s councils; why I can talk about the material conditions which lead to the rise of the riot, yet also echo the insurrectionary fervor of Alfredo Bonanno; why I choose to still call myself a Chicano despite the fact that my (anti-) politics fall outside the realm of The Chicano Movement; why despite the fact the the Partido Liberal Mexicano called itself “liberal,” I admire it as an openly-insurrectionary agent for anarchist revolution; why I can hope to one day loot a jacuzzi with friends, yet still have a critique of commodity fe- tishism. Anywayz, a revolution is not the collective action of angels.

Those who take very few steps to put their politics to the test of experimentation by engaging with the world find it easy to stay within their dull ivory tower. Being in a room with people you may not know and speaking your piece is how one learns to blend, to mix, to re-purpose, to discard and to re-imagine. Of course, this is already the history of those whom are forced to live between cultures & traditions. But we are also told that some things are not for mixing, not for blending, not for re-purposing, not for discarding, not for re-imagining.

The rasquache way is a liberation of our desires from the stifling world of orthodox radical politics.