De La Rosa, Ana K (Week 4)

    According to Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, “rasquachismo is neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or taste” (pg. 83). This means that although people try to pinpoint things that are considered ‘rasquachismo’ it means different things to different people indifferent class ranks. Higher class ranks see rasquachismo as not aesthetically pleasing because they have the means to purchase everything intended for its purpose. This can have an impact on artists that do not have the means to create art in the conventional way because they do not have the tools, but they create art with what they have available, and the use of their imagination is remarkable because when one sees a useless thing and artist sees it as an opportunity to express their imagination.

    Necessity makes people creative and there is nothing better than reusing things in different ways in which they are not intended to. Personally, I knew people that were embarrassed about how things looked because they were recycled or because they had hand me downs from older siblings. As they grew up, they wanted to stay away from those ideas because they were embarrassed for how they lived.

    A few personal examples of rasquachismo are adding water to dish soaps, shampoo, hair conditioner, and cutting the toothpaste tube to ensure that one used all the product provided in the bottle/tube. This helped to elongate the time in which one had to go buy a new product. When the recycling movement became a big advertised idea on YouTube many Mexican Americans started making memes about those ideas because their families had been doing it for years before it was “cool”. Recycling of containers to store food is something that one can see in many households, I know my mother’s fridge was filled with containers and it was a mission to find the food one was looking for.