SAN ANTONIO — The term “rasquachismo” describes a Chicanx aesthetics in which the banal is transformed into baroque exuberance through playful wit, as conceived by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in 1989. Rasquachismo: 35 years of a Chicano Sensibility at the McNay Museum illustrates this conceptual framework — a working-class attitude with a “rough-and-tumble slapdash vitality” — through works drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition makes its case most successfully with artworks made in the present. In Einar and Jamex de la Torre’s “Mi Chicano Corazon” (2023) at the center of the main gallery, for instance, a large glass and resin heart studded with amber plastic jewels rises out of a car wheel spewing arteries that bloom into nopales. In Antonio Lechuga’s “Fence Section #3” (2021), cobijas, or fleece blankets, bear pop patterns of snarling tigers, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or voluptuous roses. But they are wrapped around rhomboid scaffolding that suggests chain-link fencing, invoking the United States-Mexico border and attendant notions of trade, tariffs, and deportations.
In the second gallery, slightly older works embody the high-low hybrid of rasquachismo. Ruth Buentello’s “Last Supper” (2017) depicts a South Texas family dining on pizza, a wink at Leonardo da Vinci’s Italian origins; a small copy of his original hangs on the wall beside family photographs. And Juan de Dios Mora’s “Salimos Rachimiendo (We Left Squeaking)” (2012) is a sci-fi linocut print imagining low-rider-style spacecrafts made with car engines, wheel rims, plane propellers, and other discarded mechanical parts. Tactfully decorated with stickers and antennas, these DIY contraptions fly high against the backdrop of space, with just a peek of the earth below.
A following section introduces domesticana, a Chicana counterpart to rasquachismo as theorized by Amalia Mesa-Bains that championed emancipation via activism and education. Accordingly, Yolanda López’s poster, “Jaguar Woman Warrior” (1999) is dedicated to two community activist doctors, Sandra Hernandez and Nilda Alverio. The work, however, showcases a woman dressed in a jaguar tlahuiztli, or Aztec war suit, and accompanied by Laelia orchids, used by the Aztecs for ceremonies and medicine. This work, however, is difficult to characterize as rasquache, as the evocation of Mesoamerican history does not necessarily relate to the “irreverent survivalist” mentality of rasquachismo, which emphasizes the crafty utilization of limited resources.
Applying rasquachismo to older Chicanx artworks is also challenging. The work most incongruous with the theme is Luis A. Jiménez’s “Fiesta (Diptych)” (1985), which depicts a traditional Mexican couple’s dance called Jarabe Tapatío against a banner declaring “Fiesta.” Not all folk art can be rasquachismo, or all sense of history would collapse under its irreverent banner. Case in point, applying the concept to Jiménez’s earnest “Fiesta” threatens to flatten the dance into a mockery. As César Martínez, a Chicano artist who did not participate in the show, writes in the exhibition reader, “[t]hose who use the term ‘rasquache’ need to be more discerning about whom or what they apply it to.” This exhibition brings out the complexity of these distinctions.
Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility continues at the McNay Art Museum (6000 North New Braunfels Avenue, San Antonio, Texas) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Mia Lopez.
