Week 4: Rasquachismo and Domesticana

Rasquachismo is defined as an attitude or taste tending to favor the elaborate over the simple, acting as a form of resistance to majority culture and affirmation of cultural values for Chicano artists. Similarly, domesticana serves as Chicana rasquache, but it grows from women's restrictions with the culture. Fixed in the Chicano community are traditional values that set Chicanas in the domestic sphere, which includes home embellishments, home altar maintenance, healing traditions, and personal feminine pose or style. Chicanas aim to reposition themselves by opening up the domestic space. Their work revisits traditional forms and reflects on femininity and beauty.

I find both of these concepts new and interesting. I especially like how domesticana challenges established views by using memory to remember the past from a feminine view. Amelia Mesa-Bains shows this well with her altar that serves as an ofrenda. Mesa-Bains takes the icon of Dolores del Rio and revisits the personal with storytelling that she employs in telling of experience and memory. Her altar examines duality and the in-between.

In my home, my mother used to have an altar dedicated to la Virgen de Guadalupe. There was also a cross of Jesus that hung in the door frame. Overall, there were many devotional icons spread around the house, yet when we renovated they were all taken down and never put back up. I believe that this could be a form of forgotten memory in relation to objects that have been lost to time and change. The altares that my mother had set up and any home embellishments that were in the home prior to the renovation were gone, showing how the domestic sphere had been transformed unwittingly.