Amalia Mesa-Bains and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in Conversation
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I (or The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End), 1993/2022 (detail); courtesy the artist and the Rena Bransten Gallery; ©Amalia Mesa-Bains; photo: Katherine du Tiel.
“Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective—a view from los des abajo. An attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style."
—Tomás Ybarra-Frausto
Nearly 40 years ago, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined the term “Rasquachismo” in his seminal 1989 essay, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” Meanwhile, frequent collaborator Amalia Mesa-Bains introduced us to the term “Domesticana,” the feminist version of Rasquache, in “Domesticana: the sensibility of Chicana rasquache.”
Since the publication of their essays, these terms—developed within the context of art history and visual cultural analysis to appreciate Latinx aesthetics—have become key concepts in Latinx social thought. Today, despite living in a decidedly different world, Latinx scholars and artists across disciplines continue to uncover Rasquache and Domesticana, adding their interpretations of Latinx creativity, resourcefulness, and originality.
We reached out to the veteran critics and asked them to reflect on the confluence of events that led to the creation of terms that have had such a lasting impact. Here’s what they had to say.
Amalia Mesa-Bains and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto were honorees of The Latinx Project’s annual Spring Celebration in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Arlene Dávila organized and led the following interview, and Intervenxions staff edited this interview for clarity and concision. We also thank Mia Lopez, curator of Latinx Art at the McNay Art Museum, for her assistance.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: We were the first generation looking back at what either we or our parents had lost in the Americanization that happened. We wanted to reclaim that, so one of the terms you or I, or we, coined was “cultural reclamation.”
One of the particularities of the Chicano worldview is you take the negative and make it positive. So the word “Chicano” was already a derogatory term in our parents’ and grandparents’ generation. We made it our own identity.
And I think in some ways “Rasquachismo” rose up because it was a term sometimes used to poke fun at other people because they were a little bit down at the heel. This idea of taking what is the worst and making it the best is very much a Chicano practice. And when you first started talking about Rasquachismo and writing about it, I remember thinking to myself, “That makes sense to me,” because it wasn't a term I knew.
That's part of the idea of reclaiming is taking back what was erased from us or reinventing ourselves. We lived with a negative definition from the outside society that we were constantly having to respond to. Rather than do that, we reinvented ourselves and said, “Well, this is what we are.”
“One of the particularities of the Chicano worldview is you take the negative and make it positive.”
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: When we talked about cultural reclamation, it was a moment when we wanted to self-invent ourselves. We wanted to go back to historical reclamation. And sort of say, “This is who we are. This is where we come from. Recuerdo, descubrimiento, y voluntad were the axis from which we derived usual strategies.” Our cultural reclamation project found visual stimulation and nutrient sources from la casa, la calle, y la comunidad.
I read …y no se lo tragó la tierra, and the question was, “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?” These are great big questions that people answer at specific times in their historical development. We took those questions literally and said, “Who am I? Where do I come from?”
Amalia Mesa-Bains: My grandmother Amalia put my mother, Marina, in an Italian Catholic convent school, which was also an orphanage. When Amalia ran out of money and didn't come back, they moved my mother into the orphanage. When I was growing up, my mother had a little altar in the bedroom, which had the Virgin Mary. I spent half my life with my grandmother Mariana Escobedo Mesa. Mariana, who was mixed race, had a beautiful altar on the top of her dresser in her bedroom. Having grown up in Mexico, born in the late 1800s, she had the Virgen Guadalupe and San Martin, the Black saint.
So I had these two ideas about the home altar. We didn't do ofrendas until Yolanda Garfias Woo, my mentor, introduced me. She was Oaxacan. My whole life changed. I took on the role of an altarista, someone who put together a combination of either home altars or offerings to the dead.
When I was thinking about the woman’s version of Rasquachismo, I asked myself: “What is it about women? How do we make the most from the least? How do we survive? What is it in our domestic spaces that we have learned from our families, particularly in mothers and grandmothers?” The crocheting of the doilies on the altar, the papel picado, the decorations—those were the things we learned and that in some way moved me into thinking about Domesticana.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: When I talked about Rasquachismo, to me, the carpas are a very important source. The carpas were raggle-taggle groups of people, and they made little scenes. For example, we used to go to the movies—the Mexican movies, another source because there we learned about the Mexican Revolution and Indigenous communities of Mexico.
They had these little skits in the carpas—this is a time in the 1950s when there was a lot of massive migration from Mexico into the United States, particularly into San Antonio—so a lot of my source for Rasquachismo was this interplay between the Mexican and American ideas of how to live, what it meant to be who you were.
“A lot of my source for Rasquachismo was this interplay between the Mexican and American ideas of how to live, what it meant to be who you were. ”
Amalia Mesa-Bains: When you decided to write the Rasquachismo article, I think we knew there were people using those sort of spontaneous styles of making. I think of Ruben Trejo.
Or David Avalos with the Hubcap Milagros series—the taking everyday objects and refining them into interesting forms.
He did one that had a circular saw in the back, so they had jagged edges. Then it had a hub cap, and in the center, something held a lipstick. I remember thinking, “Wow, that is so wild” because he had mixed together working-class tools, cars, and then there was the presence of the woman in terms of the lipstick.
That was when I started thinking, “But when women do something that we might call Rasquache, making the most from the least, finding discards, using materials that they learned styles from their family. How do women do it?” And that was one of the reasons I first started Domesticana.
The other one I don't know if you remember, Gerardo Mosquera was going to do a book on kitsch. I said, “Oh, Tomás, we should write for it.” And you said, “No, we shouldn’t be in a book about kitsch because it will confuse them, and they’ll think that what we do is kitsch.”
We decided what distinguished us from kitsch—besides that it was mass-produced and imposed from the outside—is that Rasquachismo came from within. The lived experience, the voice of the community, the way of life, the stance, the pose, the bravado—all the things we felt we needed to survive against the onslaught of discrimination and racism.
What provoked me further was that from around about the ‘80s on, I felt as a Chicana, white feminism, was a resistance I couldn't quite understand. It didn't really have a kind of resonance for us.
I started looking around for our interpretation of Chicana feminism, and the only major writer I found from the white feminist camp was Griselda Pollock, who wrote a piece mentioning patriarchy in the home, in the drawing room, and the sewing room, and that's when the light went off in my head that is like, “But we don’t have drawing rooms.”
But we do have these traditions of working with our hands that we’ve learned from our mothers and grandmothers and the altars. That’s where I need to start looking at how women resist—not just the outside world, but how they resist the masculine patriarchy within their families.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: We were reading massively because I remember having conversations about scholars, thinkers, theorists from all over the world. I was particularly interested, of course, in Mexico stuff, because that was my background. And I remember Carlos Monsiváis wrote an essay about how people in poverty make do with what they had and put things together that were maybe not of the same kind. It was poverty, but also in our community, we don't discard. We don't throw things away. We use whatever is there to make something out of nothing. In the social arena, three words describe the context for building knowledge about the American Hemisphere: conocimiento, confianza, and convivencia . . . The shared socio-cultural framework for intercultural communications across the Americas.
From there, if I looked around in my community, I saw how people didn't throw things away. They saved them. For example, they use tires to make the soles of shoes, or they cut the tires and make a receptacle for plants, for flowers.
Out of the detritus of the community, they began making art. The community was very inventive in using all these things. And it's this that I think was important for me in terms of beginning to think about Rasquachismo—and of course, it was a term that was already a part of the vocabulary of the community.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: In the early days, we were making art about our experience, and we were making it for our communities—not for galleries, not for the museum, or art world. What we discovered is there had to be places to show the art, so we began building our institutions—Galeria de la Raza, Self Help Graphics, Guadalupe Center. And then we realized that for the teachers, the children who were in our community to understand what we were doing, someone had to build educational models for it.
I went into Teacher Corps in 1969 and came out in ‘71, and from then on, taught in public schools. A lot of the work I was doing while I was at the Galeria, besides making my art and working, was putting shows together, was actually building curriculum—not just Chicanos, but a sort of multicultural curriculum. What was absent was the scholarly understanding of what we were doing.
I think we were the first generation that was trying to craft a language, a scholarly language, that could help people in our community, but even outside of our community, to understand who we were, who our artists were, what they were making. Maybe it was not such a conscious drive, but it was part of the work we did, making a language that could extend to generations after us.
“In the early days, we were making art about our experience, and we were making it for our communities—not for galleries, not for the museum, or art world. ”
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: A lot of the creation was of people who were already at universities. They were making art; they were teaching in universities; they had taught in high schools; they were university-educated. They had a whole range of things from their scholarship.
We have to erase this notion that we came out of nowhere. No, the artists were already going to universities. Like you, they were teaching in universities. They were creating. They were creating a curriculum. They were building scholarship. They were part of the intellectual cosmos.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Memory played a role in the work I was doing because of the Day of the Dead and the expansion of home altars and the innovation of that.
But also, when I started curating, I was using memory as a strategy. I started looking at the ways in which Chicano and Latino communities all began to interact across some of these tropes, and Rasquachismo was one of them, making the most from the least. I met people like Juan Boza, Angel Rosado, and Pepón Osorio, who were making work from their spiritual traditions, from found objects, from chuchería.
Rasquache practices are so similar. This idea that in Ceremony of Memory and Ceremony of Spirit, which I curated, was the first time I could start to make connections between how we as Chicanos work, and how Latinos—particularly Puerto Rican and Caribbean artists—work. We began to see the exchange of cultural material, exchange of scholarship. And now we see several generations later that the work we've done has had that impact.
Recently, Susanna Temkin talked to me about an exhibition ahead of time that was based on my Domesticana essay, and it was called Domesticanx. Because it was the new generation of young artists, queer artists, trans artists, artists using everything from pottery to sewing to make work that fit our traditions and theirs.
That was the first time I saw how much the work has passed on now to a third generation, and how it inspires them in some way to look at how they work. They have their own vocabularies that are coming up, and I think the period we're in now is one of great richness, where there are many shows that have come up in the last few years, especially around the whole Caribbean diaspora.
When I look at what we have done and how it has played some small part in what’s happening now, I think about how we began to craft that vocabulary, that sense of—you did it better than anybody—awe and magic.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: You were very important. We should credit you because you were traveling to the East Coast. You were bringing in ideas from the West Coast. You were talking about those artists, and we were learning there was some connection between this diaspora that came in from South America, from Central America, and our diaspora that came mainly from Mexico on the other side. So you were very important in bringing this information. You did shows in New York, the first Chicano show in New York City. Can you talk about that show?
Amalia Mesa-Bains: One of the salient people I met in my travels was Inverna Lockpez and Inverna had already been showing David Avalos. She'd already been showing people from all different, not just Chicano, but Latino and Korean backgrounds. She took an interest, and that show opened up doors for us, and eventually, it brought me a solo show there.
We found a kind of synergy, particularly with people coming from the diaspora, especially in the Caribbean. It was something we knew from years back that the Puerto Rican Chicano connection was always there, whether it was the Brown Berets or the Young Lords—we both face similar oppression and have similar organizing responses.
Before I ever started writing about art, I was reading people like Tomás Almaguer and Mario Barrera, writing about internal colonialism and that that old saying, “We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us” was based on that understanding that our communities have been there for eons, and that they were swept over, first by the Spanish and later by the Anglo movements to take over the land.
Juan Gómez-Quiñones said the people most concerned with issues of identity are those in most peril of losing it, and I never forgot it. I thought, “Oh my God, he's talking about Chicanos in California.” I always joked that Chicanos in California are always at peril because we could follow the ocean at any time because they weren't so land-embedded like people in Texas, where they had generations of understanding who they were.
I think you know all of that language and the development of what later came to be seen as theories were really mechanisms of survival. We were simply trying to set the record straight, so people would stop making fun of us. And so we took terms like “Rasquachismo” as a way of saying, “Well, you can say that about us, but we'll say it about ourselves first, and we'll say it with dignity, and we'll say it with beauty and language.”
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: The point you made that no matter what national group you were—Colombian, Dominican, Mexican, or anyone from the more than 20 countries that were now coming into the United States—they shared certain historical experiences. One was colonization. The other one was immigration. We all came from someplace.
We were socialized into the American process of assimilation. We all went through that in different ways. So the relationship among all these countries from Latin America was the beginning of making art that reflected this universe, not only of the U.S., Mexico, but also of all the Americas.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: This was also a time of reckoning about the museum and the ethnographic projects that gave rise to it. We were the offspring of the anonymous artisan. We were the makers of the ethnographic objects, but now we were in museums, and the museum world didn't know how to deal with us. And I'm thinking even of people like Guillermo Gomez Peña, Fred Wilson, or so many people challenging the museum.
There was this sense of incredible wonder, and what I wanted to be able to do was to reappropriate what had been appropriated. In other words, Europeans had come into the New World, misunderstood everything, mislabeled it, completely confused it, and took it back and put it in their palaces. In our generation, we took it back, and we put it in our front rooms, and I put it in museums and galerías. What I really wanted to do was to recreate the miraculous wonderment of that combination, which to me was a little bit Rasquache. So to me, we were taking a big step in both challenging the structures of the museum but reappropriating things that in a way had been taken from us, stolen from us, and we brought them back again on our own terms.
I think you and I began many, many, years ago, talking over coffee, sitting around wondering about things. And it led us to a lifetime of work. I feel such a kinship with you and such a pride. I know we don't have much time left, so I just wanted on the record to say that you have been an inspiration in my life for so many years, and I will be forever grateful—particularly because the new book on my work you wrote is out and in of itself is miraculous. I just want to tell you that it means everything to me that we accomplished that together.
“I think this is a period where we’re building a new social contract, a new way of looking at the world in a globalized way. ”
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto: Amalia, it’s the other way around. You have been one of the steadfast guardians of our community knowledge. I don't know why I think in threes, but I think in this period that we're now in, it's about conocimiento, convivencia, and confianza.
Conocimiento is that we're beginning to learn from people throughout the Americas—how we are different; how we are together; how we can build a new community. Then convivencia is living together. How can we live together?
And we have to have confidence that none of us is any better than the other. We share a lot of things in common that we've already talked about. And so I think this is a period where we're building a new social contract, a new way of looking at the world in a globalized way.