Most individuals in all probability consider San Antonio because the “house of the Alamo,” and whereas the town will be the birthplace of a sure Texan imaginary, it’s additionally given rise to ideas that assist visualize American tradition in much less nationalistic methods. A kind of ideas is rasquachismo, an aesthetic sensibility that acts as a solution to perceive “an angle or style” prevalent inside artwork made by Chicanos, as scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto wrote in his 1989 essay theorizing it.
“To be rasquache,” Ybarra-Frausto wrote, “is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness looking for to subvert and switch ruling paradigms the wrong way up—a witty, irreverent and impertinent posture that recodes and strikes exterior established boundaries.” Within the many years since, rasquachismo has been a cornerstone of Chicanx research. However till very lately, it was much less widely known throughout the American artwork canon.
To mark the thirty fifth anniversary of Ybarra-Frausto’s essay, San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum lately mounted an exhibition, “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,”to honor this homegrown thought. In some ways, the exhibition, which opened final December and closed in March, was a “celebration of San Antonio” and a “recognition that the town itself has such a definite aesthetic character,” in line with the exhibition’s curator, Mia Lopez. “There was a seed that was planted on this metropolis, a seed that was planted on this establishment, and the way that then grew into the framework for one thing like rasquachismo, to me, was actually particular.”
“It feels prefer it’s coming again house,” Ybarra-Frausto stated earlier this yr of the exhibition, noting that guests had informed him that strolling by way of the present, they have been in a position to grasp the idea due to how that they had skilled it in day by day life in San Antonio. “‘I see rasquachismo in all places—I get it. I do know what you’re speaking about.’ In order that’s affirmation to me that what I intuited is definitely not solely instinct, but it surely’s actuality. It has added to the vocabulary of American tradition.”
Lopez described rasquachismo as “the great style of dangerous style.” The exhibition included work in a variety of supplies by main figures inside Chicanx artists, together with Yolanda M. López, Carmen Lomas Garza, Santa Barraza, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero, Patssi Valdez, and Luis Jiménez. Youthful artists featured included Ruth Buentello, Juan de Dios Mora, and Jimmy James Canales.
Ruth Leonela Buentello, Underneath the Mexican Colchas, 2012.
Picture BETH DEVILLIER/Assortment of the artist
Ybarra-Frausto credit Mi Tierra Cafe y Panaderia, a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio’s Historic Market Sq. that he has visited often since he was a child, as being essential to his essential eye, describing it as a “hotbed of rasquachismo.” The partitions and ceiling of the restaurant are lined with images, piñatas, string lights, and papel picado, with ofrendas positioned in a number of elements of the spacious cafe. “Every thing is roofed with stuff there,” he stated. “All of the area is stuffed up. There was type of a horror vacui, a concern of an empty area.”
It wasn’t till years later, when he started writing “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,”that he thought again to the aesthetics of a spot like Mi Tierra. “In pondering of the connection between Mexican artwork and European artwork, particularly the Baroque, I started pondering that rasquachismo is a barrio Baroque. Mi Tierra is an ideal instance of that.”
“Tomás isn’t any accident. He comes from a protracted line of San Antonio intellectuals,” stated San Antonio–based mostly artist Cruz Ortiz, who painted a portrait of Ybarra-Frausto now owned by the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and presently on view in its “twentieth Century Individuals: 2000 to Current” galleries. “An important factor about Tomás is that he helped begin the Chicano mental lexicon. You possibly can’t have a revolution with no lexicon. You possibly can’t have a motion with out it. He made a map for us.”
Ybarra-Frausto stated he discovered it fulfilling that the McNay mounted its latest rasquachismo tribute, because the museum helped foster his love for artwork from an early age. But the exhibition additionally had resonance for the neighborhood, in a metropolis that’s greater than 60 % Latinx, as a result of it signified an necessary change within the McNay’s curatorial path. In 2023, the museum employed Lopez as its first-ever curator of Latinx artwork, making it one of many few museums within the US to have such a job.
Salvador Jiménez-Flores, La resistencia de los nopales híbridos / The Resistance of Hybrid Cacti, 2016.
Courtesy the artist
Lopez, who first got here throughout Ybarra-Frausto’s essay within the early 2000s, knew she needed to focus on the affect of the essay, and to point out “how the idea of rasquachismo continued to permeate inside, not simply establishments, however artists’ studios.” By the use of instance, she pointed to Salvador Jiménez-Flores, who identifies as a “rasquache futurist” and who was represented by 5 sculptures within the exhibition. The biggest of those was La resistencia de los nopales híbridos / The Resistance of Hybrid Cacti (2016), by which faces, a tongue, and an eye fixed emerge from a towering inexperienced nopal, a metaphor for the way Chicanos have wanted to grow to be hybrids to persist and resist within the US.
Whereas the exhibition was meant to talk to these already accustomed to rasquachismo, Lopez additionally needed to introduce the idea to a wider viewers, highlighting the way it “resonates with so many different cultural types, whether or not it’s Arte Povera, punk and DIY tradition, assemblage, just a little little bit of visionary artwork,” she stated, including “Chicanos name it rasquachismo, however they could name it one thing else in different cultures.”
Working by way of the exhibition have been the three pillars of the place somebody may encounter rasquachismo that Ybarra-Frausto outlined as “la casa, la calle, y la comunidad” (the house, the road, and the neighborhood). In these encounters, “you study concerning the tradition typically in sudden methods, whether or not it’s by way of a calendar or an commercial. You start to ask, ‘The place did that image come from? The place did that icon originate?’ You begin to notice that these symbols have lengthy histories.”
For the show, Lopez opted for a salon-style cling, seeing it as “an intimate method of displaying work.” She additionally collaborated on a “hybrid of an ofrenda and a Wunderkammer” with Ybarra-Frausto, drawing numerous objects from every of their private collections, like images, posters, candles, tchotchkes.
Set up view of “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” 2024–25, at McNay Artwork Museum, San Antonio.
Picture Jacklyn Velez/Courtesy the McNay Artwork Museum
In his essay, Ybarra-Frausto checked out a variety of works to outline rasquachismo, together with Daniel Villegas’s 1928 novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, or cuando los pericos mamen, about “the trials and tribulations of a Mexican laborer as he maladapts to life in the USA,” or the early works of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, which he described as “[a]rticulating and validating the rasquache sensibility in dramatic type.” Different examples embrace the sculptures of Ruben Trejo, the efficiency items of Guillermo Gomez Peña, and the prints and murals by the Royal Chicano Air Drive.
Ybarra-Frausto’s textual content went heavy on male artists—and went on to encourage one other essay, this one by artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, who in 1995 wrote “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” which supplied a feminist perspective on rasquachismo. She wrote that Chicanas have been key to the event of this aesthetic, notably by way of the development of house altars for home areas, as a type of emancipation inside a patriarchal society. “Essential to the technique of domesticana is the standard of paradox,” she wrote. “Purity and debasement, magnificence and resistance, devotion and emancipation are features of the paradoxical that activate Chicana domesticana as feminist intervention.” Ybarra-Frausto described Mesa-Bains’s essay because the “twin” to his.
Each essays have impressed generations of artists and curators. This yr, the Latinx Undertaking at NYU established the Tomás Ybarra-Frausto Curatorial Fund with a $150,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to help “the professionalization of curators within the subject of Latinx artwork.” A 2024 exhibition organized by Josh T. Franco on the ICA Philadelphia took up the concept of yard art, grounding it inside a rasquachismo framework. In 2022, El Museo del Barrio mounted “DOMESTICANX,” which expanded these ideas to incorporate Latinx artists who don’t establish as Chicanx and added a queer lens for understanding Ybarra-Frausto’s idea. Lopez equally needed to “disrupt just a little little bit of that gender siloing” that has inherent in domesticana. Included within the present is Rolando Briseño’s On the Spherical Desk on the Bellagio (1991), a fiber piece that exhibits a desk with arms reaching towards it.
Set up view of “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” 2024–25, at McNay Artwork Museum, San Antonio, displaying, at heart Rolando Briseño’s On the Spherical Desk on the Bellagio (1991).
Picture Jacklyn Velez/Courtesy the McNay Artwork Museum
The McNay exhibition featured each historic artists who predate the conception of rasquachismo and rising artists who had by no means even heard of the time period beforehand. In doing a dive into the McNay’s assortment, Lopez discovered two ballpoint pen drawings by Consuelo “Chelo” Gonzalez that had been donated within the ’90s however by no means exhibited on the museum. Gonzalez can be vital throughout the museum’s historical past, as the primary Chicana to ever obtain a solo exhibition there in 1968. Ybarra-Frausto, who noticed that present, stated, “She herself was thought-about an outsider artist as a result of she was a lady. She was crucial to me as a progenitor of Chicano artwork.”
On the opposite finish of the spectrum is an artist like Laredo-based Mickey Rodriguez, whom Lopez stated was much less accustomed to the idea however after studying the essay was “overjoyed,” feeling as if there was lastly language to explain one thing she had “seen [her] complete life.” Rodriguez contributed two wall-hung sculptures to the exhibition that collect quite a lot of supplies, assembled right here to type maximalist, bric-a-brac constructions. Lopez added, “That was thrilling to me, too, to unfold the gospel of rasquachismo.”
Set up view of “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” 2024–25, at McNay Artwork Museum, San Antonio, displaying an set up by Victoria Martinez.
Picture Jacklyn Velez/Courtesy the McNay Artwork Museum
Lopez additionally needed to sign that one thing totally different was occurring within the museum. Within the McNay’s octagonal entryway, she put in a dangling fiber work by Victoria Martinez, a Chicago-based artist who has lived within the metropolis’s historic Latinx neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village. In an alcove close by have been painted bricks. Each of Martinez’s installations use discovered objects from these neighborhoods as a method to consider how quickly they’re gentrifying.
“Her capability to search out magnificence within the fragments of the town that she experiences turns into this mini-monument to the issues which might be misplaced or ignored in neighborhoods as they remodel,” Lopez stated.
Victoria Martinez, Puzzle Items: Introduce Your self to San Antonio, Texas, 2024.
Courtesy the artist
That emphasis on seemingly mundane and on a regular basis supplies can be current within the work of Dallas-based artist Antonio Lechuga, whose makes use of cobijas, vibrant fleece blankets which might be considerable in Chicanx and Mexican households and are sometimes bought at border crossings or in flea markets, as his materials. Fence Part #3 (2021), for instance, makes use of scraps from totally different cobijas to create an summary lattice form; its title, nonetheless, clarifies that it’s actually a illustration of the US-Mexico border.
“Lots of the supplies and the conversations which might be occurring listed here are on the intersection not solely of tradition but additionally of sophistication,” Lopez stated, noting that rasquachismo’s growth inside working-class communities was core to the idea.
Antonio Lechuga, Fence Part #3 (element), 2021.
Courtesy the artist
Works like Lechuga’s and Martinez’s embody this ingenious method to supplies that could be a basis of the rasquache aesthetic. “Resilience and resourcefulness spring from making do with what’s at hand (hacer rendir las cosas),” Ybarra-Frausto wrote in 1989. Throughout our latest dialog, Ybarra-Frausto pointed to {a photograph} by late artist Chuck Ramirez, a lifelong San Antonio resident who died in 2010. Brooms: Pale Yellow (2007/11) exhibits the highest of a really worn-out broom. To Ybarra-Frausto, Ramirez’s give attention to “how a brush may very well be used till it was worn right down to the nubs and you then would discover a objective from the broomstick” is emblematic of rasquachismo.
Set up view of “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” 2024–25, at McNay Artwork Museum, San Antonio, displaying, at proper, Chuck Ramirez’s Brooms: Pale Yellow (2007/11).
Picture Jacklyn Velez/Courtesy the McNay Artwork Museum
Cruz Ortiz, the artist who painted Ybarra-Frausto’s portrait, warned towards seeing rasquachismo as only a “intelligent use of fabric. No, this can be a big mental and foundational kind of understanding of how the Texas Mexican thoughts works. What can I do with this shitty factor that was purported to be thrown away? That’s when the mental half occurs.”
In our present political second, Ortiz sees in rasquachismo a method ahead, or “a mannequin for taking a look at society and politics. How can I exploit the mental discourse about rasquache and apply that to how we repair an issue? How can we repair the issue of girls not gaining access to abortion right here in Texas in a rasquache method? I don’t have the reply as a result of it’s not simply my reply. That has to return from the neighborhood—it must be colectiva [collective]. That’s what I’m enthusiastic about, utilizing rasquache concept in apply to make change.”
