Rasquachismo in Education: Corridos and Zine-Making as Rasquache Praxis

• In Event: 43.020 - Women of Color Modalities of Meaning-Making: Endarkened Feminist Knowledge Production in Education

Abstract

This presentation focuses on how Chicana/o cultural production, specifically rasquachismo, can inform and transform education. Known as “a uniquely working-class aesthetic of Mexican origin – resourceful, excessive, ironic, and, in its transformation of utilitarian articles into sacred or aesthetic objects, highly metaphoric,” Chicana/o artists embody and employ a rasquache aesthetic to identify and express their everyday lives as beautiful, abstract, and complex (Gaspar de Alba, 1998). Rather than accept dominant standards of art that are Eurocentric and colonizing, Chicana/o artists through rasquachismo center the social practices and aesthetics of the oppressed, recognizing the beauty within the everyday practices and lives of Chicana/o communities. Similarly, I argue the incorporation of rasquachismo into education represents an ethnic studies praxis rooted in resistance towards hegemonic standards within schools that are bound up in the historic and continued oppression of students of color. By incorporating rasquachismo through a Chicana feminist lens in classrooms, educators and students can co-create educative spaces that are rooted in students material realities and lived experiences and co-create curriculum that is culturally sustaining, engaging, academically rigorous and humanizing.
Framework:
Through incorporating rasquachismo, a Chicana/o aesthetic typically associated with art and art production, into the classroom, educators can focus on students holistically, by recognizing and centering their students’ material realities and everyday lived experiences. In doing so, educators can co-create curriculum with students that is reflective of not only their realities, but their desires, forms of expression, and creativity. Through the incorporation of music, such as corridos, and zines (self published magazines) not only as classroom content, but as praxis, students engage in DIY projects that allow for them to express themselves, their realities, while reflecting on their lives in connection to Ethnic Studies course material.
Methods/Data Sources:
Through a Chicana feminist framework, fusing the work of Tomas Ybarra Frausto with Chicanx/Latinx educational research, I present an ethnic studies praxis rooted in the material realities of Chicanx communities that draws from the ways in which Chicanx communities are often forced to survive, thrive, and create in the face of structural oppression. This study analyzes corridos and zines created by community college students in Southern California that reflect not only how the students were understanding the classroom content, but also themselves and their larger communities as they created their own creative works.
Findings:
I found the incorporation of rasquachismo into the classroom contributed to the creation of a space in which low-income Chicanx/Latinx community college students not only saw themselves reflected in the curriculum, but could also produce their own stories and speak back to a history of structural oppression through creating their own corridos and zines.
Significance:
A Chicana feminist rasquache approach to education invites students of color to reflect on and share their material realities, through creative forms of expression that are often culturally sustaining, such as music and art. This is significant as it presents one approach towards an Ethnic Studies praxis as schools across the U.S. fight to institutional Ethnic Studies courses.

Author

• Sylvia Mendoza, Palomar College