De Los Abajos: Rasquache Movidas Toward Critical, Culturally, and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies (Poster 4)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

Purposes:
In this paper, we ask how social studies teachers, researchers, and students might put rasquache to work in practicing and theorizing a more culturally and linguistically relevant social studies. Toward such ends, we make the case for, rasquachismx(a/o) as a lens that centers youth’s cultural spaces, frames of references, assets, and communities of belonging in social studies pedagogy and curriculum. We suggest that rasquachismx (Aviña & Morales, 2022; Mesa-Bains, 1999; Monreal, 2019; Pizzaro, 1999; Ybarra-Frausto, 1989, 199) – a Chicanx concept for the collection of improvisational movidas rooted in making do with what’s at hand (hacer para rendir cosas) – opens up novel and underutilized spaces to challenge dominant pedagogical and curricular social studies understandings (especially dominant ways of ‘knowing’ Latinx in social studies education; see Santiago, 2017).

Perspectives:
We suggest that an explicit teaching of rasquachismx necessarily locates the knowledge, movidas, y jugadas from los de abajo as un camino toward radical, asset-based civics education toward social transformation (Monreal, 2021; Sinclair et al., 2022; Urrieta Jr., 2009). To be rasquache is to reclaim scrappy survival as intentional acts of boastful inventiveness; it is a way of living that is proudly resourceful, resilient, and gaudy. Informed by material struggle, working class grittiness, and Mexican American/Chicanx culture, rasquachismx loudly and vibrantly ‘flips the script’ to showcase that which should be shameful. Thus, if instruction (and curriculum) starts with youths’ (and their communidades’) rasquache ways of being with, becoming in, and knowing their worlds, social studies can both “counteract white-normed conceptions of civic knowledge” (Sinclair et al, 2022, p. 5) and offer a culturally and linguistically relevant (and radical) asset-based social studies education.

Data Sources and Evidence:
In the full paper we expand on four areas that connect directly to rasquache pedagogical and curricular frames for teaching culturally and linguistically relevant social studies - 1) language, 2) art, 3) political participation/critical hope, and 4) space/place. In short, we use specific examples in these four areas to show how rasquachismx might live daily, even serving as a focal point in the social studies classroom. For a rasquache informed social studies forwards a “praxis of resistance to hegemonic standards of teaching, learning, and schooling [that uses] what we have available to create a classroom space that is relational, healing, [and] fuses together messy, complicated, yet beautiful subjectivities” (Morales et al., 2016, p. 72).

Scholarly Significance of the Work
This paper is significant because it continues the theorization of rasquache/rasquachismx in education (Aviña, 2016, Kyriacopoulos & Sánchez, 2017, Morales et al., 2016), expands its reach into social studies literature (which is relatively bereft of Chicanx/Latinx theorization, see Aponte-Safe et al., 2022, Tirado et al., under review), and builds toward critical, culturally and linguistically relevant social studies.

Authors

• Timothy Monreal, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Jesus Tirado, Auburn University

• Saul Barrera, University of Texas at Austin