Installation view of “Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility,” 2024–25, at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, showing, at right, Chuck Ramirez’s Brooms: Pale Yellow (2007/11). Photo Jacklyn Velez/Courtesy the McNay Art Museum
Most people probably think of San Antonio as the “home of the Alamo,” and while the city may be the birthplace of a certain Texan imaginary, it’s also given rise to concepts that help visualize American culture in less nationalistic ways. One of those concepts is rasquachismo, an aesthetic sensibility that acts as a way to understand “an attitude or taste” prevalent within art made by Chicanos, as scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto wrote in his 1989 essay theorizing it. “To be rasquache,” Ybarra-Frausto wrote, “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.” In the decades since, rasquachismo has been a cornerstone of Chicanx studies. But until very recently, it was less widely recognized within the American art canon.
