2020CotomJohanna Week 4

During the Mexican/Chicano Art Movement, artist take initiative to redefine the term Rasquachismo, which had been negatively used to portray the lower & impoverished class. Art was transforming the “underdog perspective (los de abajo)” into a positive attitude that was rooted in resourcefulness & adaptability. Rasquachismo represents “neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or a taste”. Artist favored the elaborate over the simple; bright colors over the dark ones, shimmery and sparkly. Limited sources, meant reusing everything (hacer render las cosas) to achieve desired expressions, just like our “lived reality”. These aesthetic displays project a statement of irreverence, and both defiant & inventive. Their rasquachismo attitudes, show a combination of resistance and resilience for allowing the Chicano working class, to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. Rasquachismo “rediscovers & reconstructs community empowerment, & artistic/academic agency” for the Chicano community. Domesticana is used in the sense of rasquachismo art, because it reclaims what it means to be a woman in the domestic space. Concerned with the roles as women, artist create altars and capillary to resist majority culture and critics restrictive gender expectations within the Chicano culture, and to reclaim their identity.