Eco Rasquachismo For An Age of Climate Crisis
Lourdes Jiménez Pulido, porque tu vida ha vivido en mi, 2018, mixed media. © 2018, Lourdes Jiménez Pulido.
In 2022, climate catastrophe grows increasingly evident on the horizon, driven in part by our consumerist culture and the tendency to make more things than we need, disposing and replacing items quickly. In the U.S, due to the size of our country and the colonialist view of the land, endless landfills hide trash and waste out of sight, especially in wealthier communities. The history of land is the history of us. Laura E. Pérez writes that “[o]ur care of the natural world is eventually reflected back to us within our own flesh…The loss of a physical sense of belonging within a landscape…has produced, over time, people torn between the once respected ways of our elders and those of the hostile, dominating culture imposing its claims to superiority.” (Pérez 2007, 148). Consumeristic capitalist ideology not only influences who has access to the land, but also the amount of trash we produce and what we do with it. We are the land, and we are our waste too. Rasquachismo, both a Chicanx ideology and art movement, is a model for rethinking our personal and communal relationship to waste. Rasquache artists use everyday objects, often ones that might otherwise be thrown away, in order to make critical interventions in society through critiques of nationalism, imperialism, and gender roles within their communities. By taking a leaf out of rasquache artists' book, we can reject consumerist and disposable societal attitudes and create art with objects that might otherwise be thrown away. Eco-rasquache is a Rasquachismo of the twenty-first century, one that centers on environmentalism and rejects the massive amounts of waste that we make every day. One way to approach this involves dyeing old textiles with food waste, reusing materials for a new purpose instead of throwing them away.
Most waste in the U.S. goes to landfills. The EPA has an interactive map of some landfills in the U.S. which provides incredible information. For every waste site our society has produced, we can see who operates the landfill, when it was opened, when it was closed or is anticipated to be closed, its capacity, and how much waste is already in it. One of the closest open landfills to where I live is scheduled to close in 2050. The city of Salina in Kansas has a landfill that will close in the year 2170. In a 2018 study, the EPA found that the U.S. produced 292.4 million tons of waste. 69 million tons and 25 million tons were recycled and composted respectively, accounting for 32.1 percent of the total waste. Another 6% of food waste was used for animal food, processing, and sewage and wastewater treatment. In total, 38.1% of our waste is disposed of outside of the landfill, while the rest is buried in our environment.
No single person is responsible for the decision to open a landfill, or the plan to keep it open for a half a century or more. These decisions have been and are currently made at a grander scale, and so our response to waste must be on a matching scale. Individually we can only do so much, but we can work towards challenging policy and current attitudes about waste to change the world we live in now. To do so, we all need to work on changing our cultural paradigm about waste and the disposability of land. In the face of the climate crisis, overconsumption and waste, I think of earlier social movements such as the labor activism of California farmworkers and the work of Chicanx artists in the late twentieth century. While the United Farm Workers marched and organized, artists like Ester Hernandez made art like the Sun Mad print (1982) to critique the mistreatment of farmworkers. Hernandez appropriated the symbols and imagery of the Sun Maid raisin brand as her form of rasquache, of using everyday images to transform them into scathing critique. In this print, she changes the little girl on the logo to a skull, also pointing to the harmful pesticides and herbicides that raisins are grown with. Hernandez's art is one way to think about rasquache, but other artists have used the actual objects people might otherwise throw away to critique consumerism.
Ester Hernandez, Sun Mad, 1982, screenprint on paper. © 1982, Ester Hernandez. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In the late twentieth century, many Chicanx artists created work around the aesthetics of rasquache. In the seminal work El desorden, nationalism and Chicana/o aesthetics, Laura E. Pérez discusses how rasquache aesthetics are a way for Chicanx artists to disrupt discourse through the recycling and reappropriation of certain images, as a way of putting systems of oppression into disarray. Rasquachismo is “cheap, economical, and thus doable,” according to Pérez. Rasquachismo is the creation of art that fits into the category of what is usually considered fine art but it is also art of the everyday. Anyone can reuse trash to make artistic altars, sculptures, and multimedia artwork. To me, rasquache art is the art of the neighborhood, like the older woman who grows plants in her collection of broken pottery instead of throwing the pottery away. Rasquache art is the act of opening a cookie tin to find sewing supplies. Rasquachismo not only sees the importance of our everyday interactions with the items we use, own, and throw away, but this style of art can also involve the re-use of these objects.
Marcos Raya, R.S.I. (Respective Strain Injury), 2000, mixed media installation. © 2000, Marcos Raya. Courtesy National Museum of Mexican Art.
Another rasquache artist, Marcos Raya, critiques factory work and lax safety guidelines for workers in memory of his mother. His multimedia artwork R.S.I. (Respective Strain Injury) (2000) features a painting of a fantastical factory that nearly envelops the sky. In the foreground of the painting is an elderly worker with a bionic arm and hand. Upon this worker’s head sits the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Surrounding the painting are over a dozen circular saw blades, some rusted and discolored, while others look almost brand new. The painting is also surrounded by various types of work gloves, which are stained and bear signs of heavy use. Situated below the painting are various objects like vintage oil cans, a plastic bucket of copper parts, tubing, safety goggles, and a cupboard. Draped on the metal cupboard is an orange safety glove, only this one has most of its fingers cut off, as if dismembered by one of the circular blades. Raya uses the everyday objects of a factory worker in dialogue with his painting to create a visceral understanding of the dangers of industrial labor.
A more recent example of rasquache is Lourdes Jiménez Pulido's porque tu vida ha vivido en mi (2018) which is in memory of their grandmother. In this artwork, they pair ceramics with embroidered aprons, lotería cards, and other household objects. The bright colorful aprons, rug, and lotería cards hang in contrast to the more muted earth tones of the ceramic sculptures. The ceramics are lighter in color the farther away they are from the colorful aprons and mat. The colorful focal point is, according to Jiménez Pulido, "growth from a formal mentality to a more authentic and cultural one." Not only do the objects and sculptures grow more colorful the closer to the aprons and mat, but objects become more layered and overlapped. Jiménez Pulido uses this layering to create a richer visual space and understanding of their culture. The reclamation of culture is tied to their memories and loss of their grandmother.
In their respective artworks, both Raya and Jiménez Pulido use and reuse different objects that might otherwise be forgotten. For Raya, the worn circular saw blades and safety gloves are terrifying reminders of the dangers of factory work, especially when labor rights are diminished. For Jiménez Pulido, colorful aprons and mats are a connection to their grandmother and also to their culture. Under a consumerist and capitalist ideology, many of these items would be used and then discarded, but rasquachismo invents a way for these objects to be reused and kept from the landfill. While Tomás Ybarra-Frausto did not necessarily have environmentalism and climate crisis in mind, his theorization on rasquachismo illustrates how this aesthetic rejects disposability as a show of making do, or hacer rendir las cosas. An eco rasquache art practice is rasquachismo for an age of climate crisis. Eco rasquache art should politicize our waste and the ways in which our country handles landfills. An eco rasquache art practice is the first step towards creating larger discussions and political organizing about our waste, our land, our landfills, and all the little things we get rid of day after day. Beyond prints, sculptures, and installations, eco rasquache can be the artful way of reusing and re-creating everyday objects into something more precious and therefore, less disposable.
One example of this commonplace eco rasquachismo is a patchwork pillowcase made of different floral fabrics which was passed down to me from my grandmother. These fabrics were recycled from flour bags that made many, many flour tortillas over the years. I still have this pillowcase and treasure the way it has lasted over time, moving from a Tejano household in the 1950s and eventually to my hands in the 2020s. Saving everyday objects and reusing waste is not just economical, but a form of art in the legacy of rasquache. This pillowcase is a recycled heirloom, one I treasure because of its intentional repurposing of waste, carefully pieced together creating something useful and beautiful. I can hold it in my hands and think about its history and the care imbued in it, along with the ways I’ve added to it, by mending a rip in it for example. It is not an unknown object to be sent to a landfill that will be open longer than I will be alive.
While flour does not usually come in fabric bags any longer, we can still think about textiles in our own lives and how we use them. For a shirt you may have stained, consider dyeing it instead of throwing it away. Not only can you hide the stain, but you can reject the disposability of fast fashion and keep the shirt away from the landfill while also making a wearable art object. Your new shirt is now a part of an eco rasquachismo and also makes a great talking point to discuss waste in many settings with diverse audiences. It may even become something precious to be saved for a future generation.
While commercial dyes are available at most stores, you can also create natural dyes with the leftover food waste to take your rasquache textiles to the next level. For example, avocado pits and dried onion skins can be used to make pinks and yellows respectively. Black tea creates shades of brown and doesn’t need anything added to make it color fast. Blueberries can produce purples, but the color gradually washes out. Turmeric can make yellow pigment, but it will fade in the sun. There are many other natural dye colors you can make with varying levels of difficulty and special care needed. Dyeing is a chemical process, so there are more in-depth formulas online. Dyeing can also be a fun exploratory and experimental project. Here is a basic recipe for natural dyes:
1. Pick a fabric that is made of natural fibers such as cotton, linen, or real silk. Natural dyes work best with natural fibers. Take a look at what food waste you have on a given day and identify items that can be used to dye textiles. You will also need a pot and a spatula that are dedicated to the dyeing process exclusively. Maybe you can finally use the burnt pot you haven’t gotten rid of yet or get something from the thrift store.
2. To make dye, gently boil your food waste of choice in water. You need enough water to cover the fabric you are dying. As for the food waste, experiment with amounts though more material will lead to stronger colors. Add a little salt too.
3. Remove the pot from the heat and strain out the food material. Compost that if you can. You can add alum, which is a food safe mordant that will help color stick to the fabric. Stir and then add your fabric (wet it in regular water first). Completely soak the fabric in the dye bath and leave it soaking overnight.
4. Rinse and air dry the colored textile. It’s normal for some color to run out during this process, and depending on what you used, the color might fade over time. You can always dye it again.
Marie Lerma received her PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University in 2020. She is a storyteller, writer, instructor, and interdisciplinary researcher who is interested in social justice, art, feminism, environmentalism, Latinx communities, and more.