Bratísima y Asqueada: Chicano Performance of Refusal
Teresa Covarrubias of The Brat, 1982. Courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
In 2024, it included a Bic lighter; slipping into white négligée, no bra; being a girlish mess in an Uber Black; a notes app flurry of cultural references. It was trashy antics; It Girl bravado. recession pop hyperindulgence—born out of political necessity, the need to look away during a painfully oppressive year, enduring out of sheer marketing prowess. Ultimately, though, Brat was a product. Its trademark rebellion was primarily aesthetic, its unruliness controlled. Brat supplied the release to cry, scream, party, and drown out the latent existential dread but also presented a distinctly curated rebellion. By avoiding political rigor, packaging itself in hedonistic resistance, Brat involved a kind of dissent that flattered the algorithm. To be one was to adopt a convincing promise that you, a brat, did not give a fuck—but only in a way that still played by market rules.
Almost 50 years before its current renaissance, what it meant to be a Brat was being newly coined in the punk and avant-garde scene of East Los Angeles, where Chicano youth redefined rebellion through art and music in a radical assertion of identity. Outside of the commercial glitter of West Hollywood, a DIY alternative arena was blooming in basements, Franciscan churches, on Lorena Street, and in Boyle Heights backyards. The underground birthed artists and punkeros like Asco and The Brat, who were building a socio-aesthetic language to provoke, subvert, and challenge Chicano cultural and political reality. Beyond 2024’s slime green, sans serif typeface, the Brat of the ‘70s and ‘80s was about refusing stereotypes, forming new utopian possibilities for what Chicano art could be, and what environments and attitudes it could create space for.
“The underground birthed artists and punkeros like Asco and The Brat, who were building a socio-aesthetic language to provoke, subvert, and challenge Chicano cultural and political reality. ”
The seeds of what would become the Chicano avant-garde took root during the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the early 1970s when a newly mobilized class of Mexican-American youth organized against war, systemic racism, police brutality, and white supremacist cultural hegemony. In 1968, the Chicano Blowouts seized the city when thousands of students walked out of public high schools to protest the educational disparity in their communities.
Two years later in Laguna Park, a crowd of 30,000 demonstrators marched in the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, carrying Mexican flags, wearing brown berets, and playing revolutionary folk music. In the largest minority-led anti-war protest in the U.S., Chicanos peacefully protested the incommensurate number of people of color drafted and killed, until the demonstration burst into a frenzy of police brutality. The Los Angeles Police Department descended upon protesters; beating them, throwing tear gas canisters, and killing Rubén Salazar, a Chicano journalist with the Los Angeles Times.
Among the sea of protesters were grieving artists, writers, poets, and musicians attempting to make sense of the brutality. This reckoning involved the creation of projects like Regeneración, a political literary journal, and spaces like Self-Help Graphics, an arts organization that a Franciscan archdiocese in Boyle Heights continues to host. Breaking away from paintings and muralism, many Chicano artists on the margins were looking to make work that would externalize their radical politicization. In 1971, Regeración’s editor Harry Gamboa Jr. and contributors Gronk (Guglio Nicandro), Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herón staged a street performance on Whittier Boulevard, the site of the Chicano Moratorium. The group, dressed in costume, walked in a silent procession carrying a massive cardboard cross into the crowd of onlookers and pedestrians. Gronk channeled a queer Pontius Pilate, baptizing the ground with popcorn from a woman's handbag; Gamboa as an altar boy in skeletal face paint; and Willie Herrón as a deviant Jesus or dead man. The artists planted the cross in the U.S. Marine recruiting station, blocking its entrance in a “ritual of resistance.” The performance piece, entitled Stations of the Cross, became the first work of the guerilla arts collective Asco, as in “me da asco,” Spanish for “it disgusts me.”
Asco’s early performance art in the 1970s weaponized absurdity. The group's performances reintroduced Catholic imagery and Mexican motifs through an irreverent and unpolished DIY visual language, which Gronk referred to as an “aesthetic of poverty.” Their ethos was deeply Rasquache—strung together with limited resources but spilling over with creative defiance. Rasquachismo embraced the makeshift, the excessive, the gaudy; it turned discarded materials into costumes and performance props for “No Movies”—cinematic vignettes that reversed and satirized Hollywood feature films. The group’s world derived from what was available, not what was sanctioned—transforming everyday scraps into symbols of resistance.
Punk flyer, Sean Carrillo papers, UCSB Archives. Courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
Playfully provocative, Asco’s work also teetered on the dangerous, as its improvised performances often took place in heavily policed and criminalized urban backdrop of East LA. At the time, the FBI had also named Gamboa one of the “Top 100 Most Dangerous and Violent Subversives” in the country for his role in organizing the Chicano Blowouts at Garfield High School.
Violence was the undercurrent of Asco’s reversal. The collective turned “hit and runs” into an artistic method, a way to arrange impromptu performances and staged images, rather than violent attacks. Shooting was a way to document the role of a camera rather than a gun. Its persistent edge earned Asco the “guerilla” title, which it wore like a badge of honor amid increasingly risky actions. For instance, in its performance Spray Paint LACMA (1972), members tagged their names on the facade of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a way to claim ownership of white, elite art institutions. Its vandalist interventions also parodied and rejected the grandeur and convention of Mexican muralism and gang graffiti. Even as the group gained legitimacy, it continued to contest what was normal and good: Asco’s first exhibition at Self-Help Graphics was a collection of its worst work.
Performance became the crux of the Chicano avant-garde in the ‘70s. Spaces that nurtured Chicano artists now grappled with the need to evolve—expanding to support a new wave of artists experimenting with music, photography, and other forms of countercultural performance. Sister Karen Boccalero, the Franciscan nun who ran Self-Help Graphics from her archdiocese, and Asco’s Herrón repurposed the second floor of Self-Help into a performance venue.
More than just a stage, The Vex at Self-Help became an enclave for interdisciplinary dialogue and the perpetual haunt of alternative Chicano youth. The venue would host performances from emerging Chicano punk bands, like Herrón’s Los Illegals, the Undertakers, and The Brat, whose blistering sound and politically charged lyrics crystallized the defiant spirit of the scene. The Brat’s frontwoman Teresa Covarrubias exuded a distinctly Rasquache energy in her look and performances, rejecting the polished, industry-molded image of both a sexy Latina and a skinhead punk in favor of something sharper and scrappier.
The Brat, 1982. Courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
Teresa Covarrubias grew up in the Resurrection Parish in Boyle Heights, one of seven siblings in a Mexican working-class family. Growing up in East LA, Covarrubias never strayed too far from her neighborhood—she describes being exclusively surrounded by other kids who reflected her cultural and socioeconomic background. Something shifted for Covarrubias when she took a trip to Disneyland as a teenager and recognized for the first time how starkly different her identity was from that of white Americans. A new sense of Chicanidad awakened in her, along with a nascent fascination with art that catered to the outsider: DIY subculture, punk fanzines, Dadaism and absurdity, and alternative music.
The avant-garde microcosm in LA made space for childhood friends to rediscover each other, creating new coalitions rooted in a shared artistic sensibility. Lifelong friends and artistic partners Covarrubias and Sean Carrillo, photographer of the burgeoning subculture, grew up in the same parish and attended the same schools. It wasn’t until Covarrubias appeared one day at church with a safety pin through her ear that Carrillo approached her and asked, “Are you into punk?”
From there, the pair entered a new stage of friendship, sharing art and music, eventually collaborating on more experimental projects as their work progressed. Inspiration was everywhere in the idiosyncratic, near-fantastical characters of East LA. Figures like Carrillo’s campy barber would simultaneously play piano and cut his hair, and his neighbor, Tomasa, sat barefoot in her Boyle Heights storefront. Carrillo recalls that, “Growing up in East LA was like growing up in a Fellini movie, if you were at that date and time, if you were like us.”
The Brat flyer, 1980 - Sean Carrillo Papers, UCSB Archives. Courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
The Brat made its debut as a cover band in 1978. Covarrubias and bandmates Rudy and Sidney Medina would play in backyards and high schools in East LA, unable to break into the segregated and largely white West LA venues. But East LA was experiencing the essence of Brat-mania. The band was hugely popular among Chicanos and was growing a wider audience in Hollywood, as Tito Larriva of The Plugz and Yolanda Comparan Ferrer founded a record label to release The Brat’s original music. Their first EP, Attitudes, was released in 1981 under the newly formed Fatima Records.
The Brat’s original music spoke to the proverbial outsider who captured Covarrubias as she came into her identity. Songs like “Misogyny (Her Song),” “Pledge of Allegiance,” and “The Wolf” explored Chicanidad, the female experience, poverty, fascism, and American social inequality. The music was a transculturation of its inspirations and references—UK punk, reggae, and rock—shifted to accommodate its cultural and political consciousness. Covarrubias also integrated these elements into her inventive self-fashioning. She loved extreme makeup, which to her was somewhat reminiscent of the chola look: big hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, thick cat-eye liner. She liked that it had echoes of what she knew from her neighborhood but with the slapped-together, thrifted elements of punk. She adored styles that were feminine, but also aggressive, and that they did not play into preconceived notions of femme beauty. Rather than employ the nihilistic attitude of many white West Hollywood punks of the time, The Brat chose a glamorous and artistic approach to the music that centered collective struggle.
“The country runs right through us
And it doesn’t even blink an eye
Living off the poor man’s labor
Sucking all our spirit dry
We say this democracy
Is laced with their hypocrisyIt’s true.”
—The Wolf (and the Lamb), The Brat
The Vex was where punk and performance art intersected. Gamboa and Covarrubias met after a gig when Gamboa jokingly introduced himself as a photographer for Rolling Stone and asked to take some photos of the band. Covarrubias was struck by Asco’s outrageousness and boundlessness, the fact that Asco simply didn’t care. What captured her was the fact that no one else was doing what Asco was doing in East LA. She admired the way the collective broke away from preconceived notions of what it meant to be Chicano. Asco confronted, head-on, what it meant to create Chicano art beyond the familiar images of the cholo, the muralist, or the farmworker—while also challenging the very boundaries of art itself.
FMLN Paper Dress, 1981. Photo courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
Moda Chicana, 1981. Photo courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
At the time, Asco had been active for a few years and was entering a new period of experimentation with narrative: writing plays and developing fotonovelas. Alongside the reckoning came a desire to introduce new characters, including Carrillo and Covarrubias. Carrillo served as a sort of technical director for Asco’s plays and performances, arranging the lighting, audio, and photography. Carrillo also directed Asco’s Paper Fashions (1980) Exploratorium runway show alongside artist Diane Gamboa in an early experimentation with dance, punk, and fashion. Over a soundtrack of punk rock and mariachi background music, Chicanas modeled assembled Rasquache garments of folded, cut, and torn paper as they danced and twirled on a makeshift stage. The models weren’t just walking a runway; they were performing a kind of transience, moving with an energy that made the paper flutter, tear, and reshape itself in real time. It was punk in its disposability, its rawness, and its refusal to be preserved in its striking temporality. Covarrubias wore a dress that paid homage to Asco’s Patssi Valdez, borrowing from iconic images of La Virgen de Guadalupe.
Covarrubias was a familiar face in many of Asco’s performances in its later years—the Yes Woman to Gronk and Gamboa’s eccentric orchestration. Some of her favorite pieces to participate in were fotonovelas, or “No Movies”—in particular Titanic (1980) and X Party (1983). Covarrubias was most excited by the boldness and improvisational energy of the fotonovelas, especially the way they rejected preciousness and embraced spontaneity.
In X Party, shot inside her apartment, the space itself became a kind of living set—walls plastered with newspapers and scraps, a chaotic backdrop for a scripted dialogue that barely mattered. The art wasn’t in the words, but in the energy of the moment, in the willingness to create without over-explaining. Titanic was even looser: shot at The Vex with no set, no costumes, just Gamboa’s vague direction and the performers’ instincts. In one take, Covarrubias and Gronk sat at a table, holding a piece of cake. Then, on impulse, she threw it at whoever was next to her. The moment erupted into an unscripted cake fight—messy, absurd, and completely right. “I don’t think that was supposed to happen,” she says. “But I think that’s how all his stuff was, it would go with the flow.”
That rejection of control, of leaving no careful thumbprint on the work, resonated deeply with her. It didn’t have to be neat, logical, or even make sense—what mattered was the act itself, the refusal to conform to conventional storytelling or marketable artistry.
However, despite the profound admiration from its coconspirators, the reception of Asco’s more absurd pieces was tenuous. When the collective held plays, fashion shows, and exhibitions at the Hispanic Urban Center, there was often a maximum of 20 to 30 people in the audience. Carrillo attributes this to the lag between truly progressive and avant-garde work: “Gronk told me something a long time ago. He said, ‘Don’t decorate.’ I didn’t understand it for a while, but what he meant was don’t sit on the fence. Take a stance. Make a statement. Get in people’s faces. Say something controversial. I think that’s it, and I think The Brat was the same thing; that was their commonality. They didn’t decorate; they had something to say.”
Covarrubias asserts that collaborations with Asco most influenced her electric performance style, ethos, and artistic development with The Brat. Through the group, she learned how to relate to a camera, how to hold space, how to be playful and joyous and theatrical on a stage. Asco’s influence reverberated in how Covarrubias presented herself and expanded upon the narrow ideas of Chicana self-presentation. Identity as a site of representation, experimentation, and commodification felt like an impossible paradox for Covarrubias to navigate as she found herself caught between cultural expectations and systemic neglect in the industry. “I’m Chicana so I just tried to be genuine about myself,” she says. “What I needed to do as an artist and as someone who created was more important to me than how other people interpreted my Chicananess.”
The Brat flyer clipping 2, Sean Carrillo Papers, UCSB Archives. Courtesy of Sean Carrillo.
The Brat was one of the rare East LA bands that had recorded and released their music, one of few that were playing on the radio, opening for major bands. The exposure led them to be the target of immense scrutiny and interrogations over their identity. On one end, Covarrubias was the target of immense criticism from other Chicanos, who projected upon her what she needed to do to represent them, like speak Spanish, or write more radical music. “We got criticized sometimes that we weren’t political enough because we wrote love songs,” she says. “I always felt like, ‘Fuck your gatekeeping. What, we can’t love?’”
On the other hand, as label representatives were circling, the band found itself caught in a battle over marketability and image. The industry’s attempt to mold the group into an “authentically Chicano band,” revealed the limits of packaged diversity: Executives didn’t want their politics unless it fit into a familiar, consumable stereotype. Covarrubias, in particular, became a target as A&R reps tried to mold her into a spicy, exotic frontwoman. When she buzzed her hair, label execs reprimanded her. When she resisted the label’s attempts to manufacture a “cholo” aesthetic, they labeled her “difficult.” She called it what it was: brownface.
In one particularly absurd marketing stunt, the label tried pitching The Brat’s new album to executives by driving them around Hollywood in lowriders blasting the band’s music through speakers, flattening them to a commercialized stereotype of East LA rebellion. The desire to remain unmarketable but authentic led to the eventual dissolution of the band in 1985. It was the kind of aesthetic stand that was not rewarded, but to Covarrubias, it was the only one that mattered.
Over the past year, the band has reentered the contemporary bratty arena, playing a handful of live shows across LA. Its music resurfaced in 2018 with the fraught rerelease of Straight Outta East LA—a project Covarrubias was deliberately cut from, a final punishment for her refusal to bend to managerial ploys and industry demands. The echoes of Covarrubias’s refusal are visible in The Brat’s band name—Covarrubias’s bandmates chose it because she was difficult and uncooperative, because she resisted. The Brat was never just a name; it was a stance, an ethos, a child of its moment—resistant by design, it was the essence of the avant-garde itself. Covarrubias and Asco occupied a world that insisted on complexity, rejected erasure and commodification, and refused to be one thing. It was play as rebellion, absurdity as critique, messiness as meaning—carving out space where none existed. The art, the music, the performances weren’t meant to be pinned down; they were meant to be lived and felt. And in the end, it was that refusal—that unwillingness to be boxed in, bleached, browned, or made palatable—that made it real Chicano art.