Ratchet-Rasquache Activism: Aesthetic and discursive frames within Chicago-based women of color activism

• In Event: 3561 - Frontline Communities and Struggles for Racial, Environmental, and Economic Justice

Abstract

Much of the scholarly literature often situates women of color activism as extensions of the domestic sphere, with a focus on women’s roles as caregivers and mothers. More recent scholarship has focused on women of color activists as strategists and collaborators. Extending the rich literature of women of color activism, this paper analyzes how Chicago-based Black women and Chicana activists maintain, build, and expand low-income residents’ access and ownership of the city. To accomplish this, I draw on 30-months of community-engaged, ethnographic fieldwork within high-poverty, Mexican- and African-American neighborhoods of Chicago, and interviews with 23 women of color activists across the city. Combining cultural signifiers such as “ratchet” and “rasquache”, I highlight how these activists strategically use discursive and aesthetic frames to disrupt negative narratives of their often-vilified communities and women’s activism. “Ratchet” often connotes unruliness, low-class, or no-class, behavior, and is often negatively used to describe, and denigrate, Black women. “Rasquache”, while similarly connoting low-class, negative behavior within Mexican communities, also centers on making the most with the tools one has at hand. Both concepts focus on disrupting narratives of racial uplift and reject whiteness as the standard, in both activism and community development. With a focus on the positive aspects of ratchet and rasquache, Chicago-based women of color activists operate as neighborhood strategists who use nonhierarchical community-organizing tactics. They accomplish this by embracing an asset-based, ratchet and rasquatche approach that acknowledges the various knowledges and strengths existent within marginalized, impoverished communities and strives to build something from something.

Author

• Teresa Irene Gonzales, University of Massachusetts, Lowell