Week 4 Response

Rasquachismo is a specifically Chicano sensibility that is later expanded in Mesa-Bains’ text to include a feminine rasquachismo: Domesticana. The sensibility, even more elusive than an idea, is a self-referential term that celebrates the working class attitudes of the everyday Chicano/a. According to Ybarra-Frausto, it is a “logic of taste” (85) based on the tragicomic nature of the barrio, an affected kitsch that represents more than the mass cultural significance of its materials. Rasquachismo is embodied. It is an active logic that feeds the Chicano imagination and influences a Chicanx navigation of the world. It has inspired the visual, performing, and language arts. The materials, found and recycled, ornament and embellish that which has been considered insignificant and worthless to mainstream society. To be rasquache is to be funky and inventive, wild and alive on the fringes of cultural production. The knowledge offered by the rasquache, exemplified in the characters of the peladito or peladita, encourages improvisation and resilience in the face of increasing oppression.

Domesticana is the female subversion of the historically male dominated sensibility of rasquachismo. Responding to the day to day experience of working class Chicanas, artists like Patssi Valdez and Amalia Mesa-Bains urgently expand the vocabulary of rasquachismo to include those voices. Domesticana plays with themes of displacement and migration to challenge the domestic space in which Chicanas are historically placed. By charging the domestic space with bawdy statements, an artist employing Domesticana overwhelms the space with the potential for liberation. The hyperfeminization in presentation constructs a resistant attitude that is affirmed through recombinations of identity.