Week 6- Rasquachismo and Domesticana

Photo taken from my living room

The terms rasquachismo and domesticana are new to me. From what I can understand rasquachismo is a mentality, a way of being, or as Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes, “an attitude or a taste.” Rasquachismo is often understood as a style because it is often shown through a way a person decorates and adorns themselves or the environment in which they find themselves. This attitude and taste is a manifestation of resourcefulness, adaptability, and creativity and is found within the Chicanx community, where in America, their lived reality is one that forces a person to have these qualities because they are not a part of the dominant culture and power dynamics. Ybarra-Frausto explains that this mentality is found within the working class and its presence is a display of resilience, resourcefulness, and making do with what one has. Examples of physical displays of this attitude is heavy ornamentation that is elaborate and the use of a multitude of materials, with different colors, textures and materials, that are often recycled. This leads to the understanding of domesticana which is as much defiant and resourceful as rasquachismo, but this entails women specifically claiming space within  environments they have been bounded to and rejecting constricting gender identities and roles within patriarchal Western and Chicano cultures. These environments mainly consist of domestic spheres and is where women revert these spaces into places where they can assert their own agency and create art that proclaims this. Examples of domesticana are domestic bedroom altars, vanity dressers, and reliquaries. Amalia Mesa-Bains describes these work acts as “ devices of intimate story-telling through an aesthetic of accumulations of experience, reference, memory, and transfiguration.” I find this to be very beautiful and this reminds me of one place in my house that is dedicated to memories revolving around maternal figures and that we, my mother, sister, and I, have decorated with plants and objects that we have found and collected. In the picture that accompanies this text, there is a picture of my mother as a child, her mother, and reflected in the mirror above is a portrait of my great grandmother, their mother and grandmother. These spaces, that almost seem to happen naturally and that some women find themselves doing, is something powerful that I have never thought of before in such a way.