Rasquachismo At McNay Art Museum In San Antonio

Rasquachismo doesn’t directly translate to any single English word. Scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined the term in his 1989 essay, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.”

“Rasquachismo is neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or a taste,” he wrote, further explaining it as an “irrepressible spirit manifested in the art and life of the Chicano community.”

Making do. Quick and dirty. Improvised. Resilient. Cheap, as in inexpensive. Working class.

The term derives from rasquacheslang for low class or bad taste; akin to tacky. Pink flamingos.

“To be rasquache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness seeking to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down—a witty, irreverent and impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established boundaries,” Ybarra-Frausto explained in his essay.

Rasquache is a way of life, a perspective on living. Rasquachismo is a genre of art, a cultural aesthetic and attitude informed by the experiences of Chicanos in the United States. Heavy on the attitude. Rasquachismo is Chicanx and Latinx artists taking inspiration from the streets, the barrio, homes, lawns, religious sites, and flea markets, incorporating “found objects”–a snooty art world term for “stuff laying around”–into their work, embodying the “do-with-what-you-have” resourcefulness of home decorators, tinkerers, grease monkeys, graffiti artists, and DIYers.

Rasquachismo goes high class through March 30, 2025, at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio during “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” a special exhibition celebrating the 35^th anniversary Ybarra-Frausto’s essay.

“Rasquachismo is not a cohesive movement, but instead an ethos or aesthetic,” Mia Lopez, the McNay Art Museum’s inaugural curator of Latinx art said when announcing the exhibition.

A vibe.

Distinctly San Antonio.

Rasquachismo’s connection to the McNay’s hometown was a driving factor for Lopez choosing it to center her debut exhibition at the museum. She was born and raised in San Antonio. Ybarra-Frausto is from there. The two have known each other for years, and Ybarra-Frausto helped with the show’s vision and installation. He also lent works from his personal collection to the presentation. As did contemporary artists from around San Antonio.

Two recent acquisitions will also be featured. Einar and Jamex de la Torre’s Mi Chicano Corazón uses blown glass and mixed media to capture the complexity of dual American and Mexican identities. Nivia Gonzalez’s Untitled was gifted to the McNay by the artist’s daughters. The work reverberates with quiet yet powerful symbolism paying tribute to Gonzalez’s deep roots in San Antonio and her significant contributions to the community.

The Same, But Different

Visitors to the “Rasquachismo” show may find themselves thinking, “I’ve seen this before.” Yes, in a sense. Rasquachismo is not dissimilar from other expressions of folk art found around the country. Yard art.

“What makes it distinct is the cultural influence,” Lopez told Forbes.com. “It really began within the Chicano, Chicanx community, but of course there’s iterations throughout the Latin American diaspora. Puerto Rican artists, Dominican artists, other people who think about things in this way. There’s a term Tomás was playing with when we were having conversations leading up to (the exhibition), and he was thinking about ‘Barrio Baroque,’ he really likes that.”

“Barrio”–Chicano neighborhoods. “Baroque”–the fashionable style of Western European art and architecture prevalent from about 1600 to 1750, remarkable for its flamboyancy and decorative flourish. Garish. Extra.

The makers and the place distinguish Rasquachismo. The places it’s made and the places its makers call home. Ingenious folk art creators can be found across the backroads of the South, on farms in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest, and in city centers from L.A. to New York, but that’s not Rasquachismo. Brothers by another mother, not the same. The Chicano/Chicanx experience defines Rasquachismo.

A note on terminology. Ybarra-Frausto’s essay uses the term Chicano in reference to Mexican American people. Chicanx is an inclusive, gender-neutral term referring to Mexican American people. The McNay Art Museum uses the term Latinx as an inclusive, gender-neutral term referring to people of Latin American descent now living in the United States.

Labels

Rasquachismo is a made-up term for a very real style of artwork. In the highfalutin world of fine art, labels matter. Labels clarify and provide context.

“What that term did was legitimize, particularly within academia, the artists, the writers, the creatives embracing (the style). (Rasquachismo) may have initially come out of an underdog sensibility, making do with what you have, but it also transcends the initial DIY impetus,” Lopez explained. “By adding that ‘ismo’ or ‘ism,’ (it’s) taking (the artform) and expanding it to the realm of the cultural sphere, positioning this with a new artistic frame to reclaim this cultural style that has often been dismissed.”

Dismissal.

Some Chicano/Chicanx artists who’ve labored a lifetime to be taken seriously, to have exhibitions at prestigious museums like the McNay, to be considered part of the contemporary art mainstream, bristle at the Rasquachismo label. Not all.

“Generationally, there’s a little bit of a difference,” Lopez said. “Your millennial and younger artists are really excited about the conceptual terms and the looseness of Rasquachismo and that defiance, but perhaps for a generation of artists that has worked so hard to cement their place within the artistic canon, to have a certain amount of visibility and respect, there is, for lack of a better word, there’s a little bit of apprehension around identifying as a scrappy, if you will.”

Understandable.

Ybarra-Frausto’s original essay, similarly, noted how Chicano families moving into the middle class were “the first to deny connection with anything remotely rasquache.”

For someone whose lived experience has been dismissal and marginalization from the mainstream, seeing this term of endearment hit the mainstream and wondering how it also might be used against you is a healthy concern. Does embracing low brow open a door for critics to whack you over the head with your own self-identification?

Ybarra-Frausto doesn’t think so.

“It is witty and ironic, but not mean-spirited,” he said in the “Rasquachismo” exhibition press release. “A sort of good taste of bad taste.”

As the ultimate cultural tastemakers, museums like the McNay, the first museum for modern art in Texas when it opened in 1954, have a responsibility to make sure the term isn’t abused and its artists given the respect they’ve earned.

“The McNay has always stood as an example of inclusivity and a celebration of diverse cultures,” Ybarra-Frausto, who’s been visiting the McNay for decades, added. “The Museum is grounded in the vision of its founder, Marion Koogler McNay, who ignited a legacy of collecting broadly a century ago—from Diego Rivera in the 1920s to Einar and Jamex de la Torre in 2024. It is heartening to have Ms. Lopez mount this exhibition in honor of that legacy and in celebration of our vibrant community, whose contributions to the cultural landscape are vast and significant.”

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