Rasquachismo - Week 6

 Rasquachismo is making do with what you have. It's essentially a Chicano's do-it-yourself project. It was defined as coming from the perspective of the underdog. It's an aesthetic that working-class Chicanos have as they take normal everyday items and transform them to be of use, art, or for other purposes. Nothing goes to waste or things that were thrown away before become reused. It's a form of recycling. A thing around my household that represents rasquachismo is the reusing of tupperware. You can find sewing pins, needles, and thread in old sugar cookie tins. 

Image courtesy of Reddit

I grew up in a working-class household. Often times I wore my sister's hand-me-downs, and my mom was gifted clothes for me and my siblings from other family members with kids. I would happily wear this clothing and sometimes would cut it up, sew patches on it, or even style it differently than usual. I was big on fashion when I was a kid so I made do by making my colors match, putting ribbons in my hair, and picking the best shoes. It was almost as if I were my own canvas of rasquache. 

Another form of rasquache that was more traditionally artistic was arts and crafts. I'd paint over old picture frames and give them a different color. I once painted the merging of the American and Mexican flag to represent my Chicana heritage melding and blending into one another. Inside of it, I framed a poem I wrote and cut out a previous picture of me that was printed as a child. It was for my Chicanx 10A course where we had to be creative with our projects, but make do with what we had already lying around the house. At the time, I didn't know what rasquachismo was, but I realize this project asked us to do exactly that.