Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache

by

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ph.D.

Vernacular, vulgar, inferior, tasteless, and insensible are all terms

associated with kitsch. The discourse on kitsch and its relationship to
the postmodern avant-garde has been marked by multiple definitions.
The work of Gerardo Mosquera1 in particular has placed kitsch in a
recuperative setting, where the Cuban artist who stands outside the
everyday embellishments of kitsch can employ the "inferior" to speak
of the arbitrary definitions of the "superior." The examination is
expanded to make distinctions between mass-produced objects and
the intimate expressions of sincere decoration in the domestic space.
As Mosquera points out, there is a need for greater classificatory
information, and a more specific definition of this phenomenon. Within
this process of clarification, meaning and usage become even more
crucial. When is kitsch recuperated, by whom, and for what aesthetic
intention? Many of these same concerns for meaning and usage can be
brought to bear on the Chicano phenomenon of "rasquachismo," or the
view of the downtrodden. Tomas Ybarra-Frausto elaborates:

"Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective--los de

abajo . . . it presupposes a world view of the have not, but it is a quality
exemplified in objects and places and social comportment . . . it has
evolved as a bicultural sensibility."2

In rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to

make the most from the least. In rasquachismo, one has a stance that
is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from
discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires,
broken plates, plastic containers, which are recombined with elaborate
and bold display in yard shrines (capillas), domestic decor (altares),
and even embellishment of the car. In its broadest sense, it is a
combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the
Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity
to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken
mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of
rasquachismo.

The political positioning of Chicanos emerging from a working-class

sensibility called for just such a defiant stance. Raised in barrios, many
Chicano artists have lived through and from a rasquache
consciousness. Even the term "Chicano," with all its vernacular
connotations, is rasquache. Consequently, the sensibility of
rasquachismo is an obvious, and internally defined tool of artist-
activists. The intention was to provoke the accepted "superior" norms
of the Anglo-American with the everyday reality of Chicano cultural
practices. Whether through extensions and reinterpretations of the
domestic settings, the car, or the personal pose, rasquachismo is a
world view that provides an oppositional identity. Unlike the Cuban
recuperation of kitsch, rasquachismo is for the Chicano artists a facet
of internal exploration that acknowledges the meaning sedimented in
popular culture and practices. Rasquachismo then becomes for
Chicano artists and intellectuals a vehicle for both culture and identity.
This dual function of resistance and affirmation is essential to the
sensibility of rasquachismo.

In the counterpoint between kitsch and rasquachismo two major

differences are apparent. First, kitsch serves as a material or
phenomenon of taste through mass-produced objects or style of
personal expression in decoration, while rasquachismo contains both
the material expression but more importantly, a stance or attitudinal
position. Consequently, the meaning of each is inherently different.
Secondly, its usage reflects a radically opposed instrumentality for the
artists. Kitsch as a material expression is recuperated by artists who
stand outside the lived reality of its genesis. Conversely, rasquachismo
for Chicano artists is instrumental from within a shared barrio
sensibility. One can say that kitsch is appropriated while rasquachismo
is acclaimed or affirmed. Rasquachismo is consequently an integral
world view that serves as a basis for cultural identity and a s ocio-
political movement. As such, rasquachismo has not been limited to the
visual arts, but in fact has been used as a major sensibility in theatre,
music, and poetry. The tragicomic spirit of barrio life, as Ybarra-Frausto
details, has been a present form in the early actos of Luis Valdez's
"Teatro Campesino," in the poetry of Jose Montoya, in the works of the
Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, a conceptual artists' collective), in the
urban street pageantry of "ASCO" of Los Angeles, and in the border
spectacle of Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Rasquachismo can thus be seen
as a redemptive sensibility linked to a broadbased cultural movement
among Chicanos. As the first generation of their community to be
educated in universities (after hard-fought battles in the Civil Rights
period), these artists employed a bicultural sensibility. Operating as an
internally colonized community within the borders of the United States,
Chicanos forged a new cultural vocabulary composed of sustaining
elements of Mexican tradition and lived encounters in a hostile
environment. Fragmentation and recombination brought together
disparate elements such as corridos (Mexican historical ballads),
images of Walt Disney, Mexican cinema, and mass media advertising,
and even Mexican calendario graphics and American Pop art. This
encounter of two worlds could only be negotiated through the
sensibility of rasquachismo, a survivalist irreverence that functioned as
a vehicle of cultural continuity. In many respects, the rasquache
defiance of Chicano art production has served as an anecdotal history
for a community repudiated and denied in institutional history within
the nation as a whole. In so doing, rasquachismo provides the
anecdote that critical theorist Walter Benjamin refers to:

"Anecdote brings things closer to us in space, allows them to enter

our lives. Anecdote represents the extreme opposite of History . . . the
true method of making things present is to image them in our own
space."3

Within the visual arts, rasquachismo as a sensibility has been a major

force. The regional discourse in Chicano rasquache has been both rural
and urban. For example, the hubcap assemblage of David Avalos has
fused the amulets of Catholicism with urban car art into a new icon,
the "Milagro Hubcap." The rural ethos has been essential to the
rasquache sculpture series of Chiles in Traction by Chicano artist Ruben
Trejo.

Domesticana

To look within the rasquache production of Chicano art, and to locate

the work of women requires a description of both the barrio and family
experience and the examination of its representation. This examination
necessitates the application of feminist theory to this representation.
The day-to-day experience of working-class Chicanas is replete with
the practices within the domestic space. The sphere of the domestic
includes home embellishments, home altar maintenance, healing
traditions, and personal feminine pose or style.

The phenomenon of the home altar is perhaps the most prolific.

Established through continuities of spiritual belief, pre-Hispanic in
nature, the family altar functions for women as a counterpoint to male-
dominated rituals within Catholicism. Often located in bedrooms, the
home altar locates family history and cultural belief systems.
Arrangements of bric-a-brac, memorabilia, devotional icons, and
decorative elements are created by women who exercise a familial
aesthetic. Certain formal and continuing elements include saints,
flowers (plastic, dried, natural, and synthetic), family photos,
mementos, historic objects (military medals, flags, etc.), candles, and
offerings. Characterized by accumulation, display, and abundance, the
altars allow a commingling of history, faith, and the personal. Formal
structures often seen are nichos, or niche shelves, retablo, or box-like
containers highlighting special icons, and innovative uses of Christmas
lights, reflective materials, and miniaturization. As an extension of this
sacred home space, the frontyard shrine or capilla (little chapel) is a
larger-scale, more public presentation of the family spiritual aesthetic.
Capilla elaboration can include cement structures with mosaic mirror
decoration, makeshift use of tires, garden statuary, fountain lighting,
and plastic flowers. In both the home altar and capilla, the
transfiguration relies on an almost organic accruing of found objects
and differences in scale, which imply lived history over time. For many
Chicanas, the development of home shrines is the focus for the
refinement of domestic skills such as embroidery, crochet,
flowermaking, and handpainting.

Related to the creative functioning of the domestic sacred space is the

ongoing practice of healing skills. Special herbs, talismans, religious
imagery, and photos of historic faithhealers are essential to this
cultural tradition. Young women learn from older women practices such
as limpias with burned herbs, and the application of homeopathic
cures. Regional context contributes to the healing discipline,
particularly in the Southwest. In the larger area of domestic decoration,
the use of artesanias such as papercutting, carving, and handpainting
are prevalent. Added to the use of folk objects is the widespread
popularity of almenaques, or Mexican calendars and movie posters.
The centrality of family life directs the sensibility of "domesticana";
Chicanas are frequently raised in hierarchical roles of male over
female, old over young.

The emphasis on gender stratification creates boundaries within family

roles in which women gain responsibility for child rearing, healing and
health, home embellishment, and personal glamorization. This
traditional picture is enlarged in families within urban centers but
nonetheless remains relatively consistent. Chicana rasquache
(domesticana), like its male counterpart, has grown not only out of
both resistance to majority culture and affirmation of cultural values,
but from women's restrictions within the culture. A defiance of an
imposed Anglo-American cultural identity, and the defiance of
restrictive gender identity within Chicano culture has inspired a female
rasquacheism. Domesticana comes as a spirit of Chicana emancipation
grounded in advanced education, and to some degree, Anglo-American
expectations in a more open society. With new experiences of
opportunity, Chicanas were able to challenge existing community
restrictions regarding the role of women. Techniques of subversion
through play with traditional imagery and cultural material are
characteristic of domesticana. Within this body of work, we can begin
to apply critical viewpoints of feminist theory.

Feminist Theory

To understand domesticana Chicana, it is necessary to impose a

criticality that places art production as more than reflective of
ideology, but rather an art production that is constructive of ideology.
Art then becomes a social reality through which essential world views
and identities, individually lived, are constructed, reproduced, and
even redefined. The construction of the feminine through patriarchy
relies on a networkof psycho-socio relationships that produce meaning.
Such meanings are created by the ways in which patriarchy positions
us as wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. Theorist Griselda Pollack
elaborates:

The meaning of the term woman is effectively installed in social and

economic positions and it is constantly produced in language, in
representation made to those people in those social and economic
positionsÑfixing an identity, social place and sexual position and
disallowing any other.4 In this way, the domestic sphereÑwith all its
social roles and practicesÑculturally remains fixed in patriarchy unless
representation of that world calls into question such practices and
thereby contributes to its change. In particular, the feminine is charged
with this potential for emancipation. The bedroom and the kitchen
convey a centrality but also an imprisonment. With the advent of the
modern metropolis, the polarity of public (male) space and private
(female) space has taken on a splitting intensified by urbanization. In
addition, the rural traditions within the Chicano community have
encapsulated the private, restricted domain of women in a unique
fashion, while strong kinship patterns in extended families have
deepened the psycho-socio network of female roles. The domestic
chamber then has become a space imbued with both a sense of
saliency and isolation. Once again, PollackÕs work on feminine space
in representation becomes a critical frame: The spaces of femininity
operate not only at the level of what is represented in the drawing
room or sewing room. The spaces of femininity are those from which
femininity is lived as positionality in discourse and social practice. They
are a product of a lived sense of social relatedness, mobility and
visibility in the social relation of seeing and being seen. Shaped within
sexual politics of looking they demarcate a particular social
organization of gaze which itself works back to secure a particular
ordering of sexual difference. Femininity is both the condition and the
effect.
5

This condition and effect remain in place unless the representation, like
language, relocates or repositions the feminine. Spatial ambiguities
and metaphors can function to shake the foundational patriarchy in art
through challenging works. Domesticana begins to reposition the
Chicana through the working of feminine space.

Chicana Domesticana

The work of Chicana artists has long been concerned with the roles of
women, questioning of gender relations, and the opening of domestic
space. Devices of paradox, irony, and subversion are signs of the
conflictual and contradictory nature of the domestic and familial world
within the work of the Chicana artists.

In domesticana Chicana, the creation of a familial space serves as a

site for personal definition for the artist. For Chicana artists using the
rasquache stance, their work takes on a deeper meaning of domestic
tension as the signs of making do are both the affirmation of the
domestic life and a challenge to the subjugation of women in the
domestic sphere. This domestic tension signifies the contradiction
between the supportive aspects of the feminine and the struggle to
redefine restrictive roles. Cherished moments stand side by side with
examinations of self, culture, and history in visions of a domestic
chamber that is both paradise and prison. Characteristics of
domesticana include an emphasis on ephemeral site-specific works.
This emphasis arises from Chicano survivalist responses to the
dilemmas of migration and impermanent community celebrations.
Much of the work innovates on traditional forms such as the reliquary,
capilla, domestic memories of bedroom altars, vanity dressers,
ofrendas (or offerings for the Mexican Day of the Dead), and everyday
reflections of femininity and glamour. The extension of these forms
through domesticana serves as a retrieval of memory, capturing in
permanent imagery the remembrance of things past. Chicanas make
use of assemblage, bricolage, miniaturization and small box works,
photography, text, and memorabilia to create a mimetic world view
that retells the feminine past from a new position. Narratives of
domesticity and ruin are presented in a redemptive enunciation in the
language of domesticana. Artists use pop culture discards, remnants of
party materials, jewelry, kitchenware, toiletries, saints, holy cards, and
milagros in combined and recombined arrangements that reflect a
shattered glamour. Chicana artists working in domesticana may use
hyper-feminization juxtaposed with destruction and loss in a persistent
reevaluation of the domestic site. The works act as devices of intimate
storytelling through an aesthetic of accumulation of experience,
reference, memory, and transfiguration. Artists whose work embodies
domesticana Chicana include Santa Barraza, Carmen Lomas Garza,
Celia Munoz, Patricia Rodriguez, and Patssi Valdez.

Summary

The expansion of a feminine rasquachismo as domesticana has been

an attempt to elaborate both intercultural differences between Cuban
kitsch and Chicano rasquache as well as intracultural differences
between Chicana domesticana. Like all explorations, terminologies
must remain porous, sensibilities never completely named, and
categories shattered. As Victor Zamudio-Taylor reminds us, Chicano art
and domesticana "shatters the reified universe and breaks the
monopoly of the established discourse to define what is real and
true."6 The redefining of the feminine must come from the
representational vocabularies of women if we are to undo the wounds
of patriarchy and colonization. That is the challenge of new views of
space, of the new domesticana defiance.

Notes:
1 Gerardo Mosquera, "Bad Taste in Good Form," in Halan (1985).
2 Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Rasquache: A Chicano Sensibility
(Phoenix:MARS Artspace, 1988).
3Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York:Schocken, 1969).
4 Griselda Pollack, Visions of Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the
History of Art (Rutledge Press, 1988).
5 Ibid.
6 Victor Zamudio-Taylor, "Contemporary Commentary," in Ceremony of
Memory (Santa Fe, N.M.: Center for Contemporary Art, 1988), p. 14.

Return to Course Home Page