"Fregado pero no jodido" "Down, but not out" is one of the ways that Tomás Ybarra-Frausto first articulated his theory of rasquachismo in 1988. Rasquachismo, he wrote, is "a vernacular system of taste" that results from "making do with what is at hand (hacer rendir las cosas)."[i]According to Ybarra-Frausto, rasquachismo "is rooted in Chicano structures of thinking, feeling, and aesthetic choice" and as such, is one idiom through which Chicanos/as can "theorize about their creations and their lives."[ii] Rasquachismo, for Ybarra-Frausto, is about "survival and inventiveness," an attitude that comes from dealing directing "with the material level of existence or subsistence."[iii] According to Amalia Mesa-Bains, rasquachismo is "[t]he capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado."[iv] Ybarra-Frausto notes the appearance of the rasquache in the 'low-and-slow' tradition of Chicano youth fixing up their cars, the personal altares found in many Chicanos' homes, and ways of dressing in Chicano communities. Ybarra-Fausto points out that rasquachismo is not a style or a form but a sensibility: "an understanding of a particular aesthetic code in any particular community and it comes out of the experience of living in that community."[v] This distinguished rasquachismo from an attempt to define a multitude of experiences in a given community under a singular idiom. Since rasquachismo is not a fixed style or form, there are infinite ways to express it. As a sensibility, rasquachismo may manifest itself in any number of works and media. "To be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to favor the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe."[vi]
"A politicized Mexican American" Thatis how the artist Santos Martinez defined Chicano/a in the early 1970's. Rasquachismo can also be a Chicano/a political articulation. Matters of 'taste' are usually identified with class and often race, but expressions of a rasquachismo sensibility in Chicano popular culture, art, and protest are active and "necessary response[s]" to dominant white culture. Ybarra-Frausto writes about how, during the Chicano Movement of the 1960's, Chicano/ artists, activists, and intellectuals "found strength and recovered meaning in the layers of everyday life practices" like rasquachismo.[vii] These everyday life practices of Chicano/a people and their communities had been unsavory, even "scorned as un-American"[viii] by the dominant culture of the United States. In response, the Chicano Movement and its actors began to "disown imposed categories of culture and identity" in an effort to create "a Chicano self-vision of wholeness and completion."[ix] As such, rasquachismo once "a sensibility of the downtrodden"[x] is re-elaborated as a valuable everyday expression of culture and worldview, as well as a viable framework from which Chicano and Chicana artists can make and view their artworks. |
Rasquachismo/Re-appropriation Miss Chief Eagle Testickle's use of standardized Western markers of her own Native identity and culture is politically similar to rasquache expression and identification. Miss Chief's practice of re-appropriation echoes Ybarra-Frausto's second strategy for rasquache art: for "the artwork to evoke a rasquache sensibility through self-conscious manipulation of materials or iconography."[xii] Ybarra-Frausto writes that in rasquachismo, "Signs and symbols that those in power manipulated to signal unworthiness and deficiencies were mobilized and turned into markers of pride and affirmation."[xiii] By re-appropriating these markers, she draws attention to the inaccuracy and insensitivity of the "signs and symbols" that white dominant culture deploys in representing indigeneity. Miss Chief's practice of re-appropriation is not perfectly aligned with rasquachismo, even beyond the fact that rasquachismo is meant to be a distinctly Chicano/Chican@ personal and artistic articulation or description. Namely, Miss Chief's performances and costuming critique a less overt system of signaling Native "unworthiness and deficiencies." Instead, her work parodies the way that dominant white culture has implicitly parodied several distinct American Indigenous cultures by creating a singular, fictive, and poorly articulated vision of a Native American culture that it claims to revere. However, the head-dress-dream-catcher stereotype and its perpetuation into the present is a degradation of Indigenous cultures, and Miss Chief is correct to point that out. Moreover, her re-contextualization of those degrading symbols into the lesser-known world of queer indigeneity is a symbol of "pride and affirmation" of a Native reality that Western constructors of Indian existence often refuse to acknowledge.
Who is kitsch for? Meanwhile, Amalia Mesa-Bains, feminist Chicana scholar, might align Miss Chief's works more closely with her definition of kitsch. In "Domesticana," she differentiates kitsch as a system of taste "through mass produced objects" while rasquachismo represents a system of taste as well, but "more importantly, a stance or attitudinal position."[xiv] Miss Chief's use of mass-produced objects and the stereotypes they engender, then, may be more kitsch than rasquache. Again, Mesa-Bains explains that kitsch is "recuperated by artists who stand outside the lived reality of its genesis." Miss Chief's headdress could be called a "recuperation" of the war bonnet whose "genesis" pre-exists her. The war bonnet is a complicated example because on the one hand, it is hardly ubiquitous dress in present-day Indian communities. On the other, as far as "traditional" dancing and costuming persists in present day communities at pow-wows and ceremonial dances, the war bonnet remains a visibly tangible part of Native American communities. However, the example of the war bonnet, the dream catchers, et cetera as traditional items for Native Americans and their subsequent appropriation by white culture in demeaning and degrading fashions corresponds to Mesa-Bains' description of rasquachismo as a "new cultural vocabulary." Miss Chief's queer indigenous drag vocabulary is made up both of "elements of [Indigenous] tradition"[xv] as in the war bonnet, the beadwork, the quiver of bows, and the dream catcher. Meanwhile, her parodic customizations of these objects echo "lived encounters in a hostile environment"[xvi] in which a dominant culture attempts to commodify these once-authentic objects at every step. As with rasquachismo, Miss Chief and other Native artists-activists express themselves from a place "de los abjaos,"[xvii] from an "internally colonized community within the borders of the United States."[xviii] |