Daniel del Solar Interview: April 4, 2007

Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City

Article courtesy of Devon G. Peña Photo by John Fisch, San Antonio.

Roberto Bedoya for Creative Time Reports | Tucson, Arizona | September 16, 2014

Intervening in discussions about gentrification and placemaking, cultural activist Roberto Bedoya champions the creative resilience found in communities of color—and exemplified by the Chicano practice of Rasquachification—to suggest “placekeeping” as a strategy for advancing racial justice goals.

I grew up in a working-class barrio called Decoto, in San Francisco’s East Bay. My neighbors were the Trianas, who had painted their house hot pink. I loved it. The Trianas’ house was across the street from the grounds of the Catholic church. Many of the Anglos who lived in the new tract homes being built around my barrio parked their cars in front of the house on Sunday, and I recall how they would speak ill of it as they made their way to church. For them the house was too bright. But for me the brightness represented Rasquache—an aesthetic of intensity that confronted our invisibility, our treatment as less than.

In the mid-1960s the state of California—in order to build a freeway through what it considered blight—decided to condemn the small houses in our barrio. It could not see that each one was unique and full of character, with features like a nopal cactus fence, a porch decorated with papel picado or anarchic rose gardens that overtook the yards. The community organized itself to defend our barrio through public hearings and petitions and a lawsuit filed by the Raza Unida Party. We stopped the freeway.

When I think back on that time now, it is clearer to me that what we were confronting was the “white spatial imaginary,” an antiseptic ethos that effectively deemed being poor and of color as civic imperfections to be expunged. A spatial imaginary that is historically rooted in the development of public policies that created restrictive covenants excluding Jews, African-Americans and other communities of color from neighborhoods circumscribed as enclaves of whiteness. A spatial imaginary that persists today, in discriminatory policies and practices that disproportionately affect communities of color, such as New York City’s stop-and-frisk tactic, Florida’s stand-your-ground law or the reckless militarized policing in Ferguson, MO.

Rasquachification messes with the white spatial imaginary and offers up another symbolic culture—combinatory, used and reused.

This is what the white spatial imaginary means: if you’re a person of color standing on a corner, beware. You are perceived as a threat because your color challenges the white spatial imaginary of that street. Your whistler is a threat; your homeboy style is a threat; your hip-hop, mariachi or Chinese opera music is a threat. What’s more, the mosque is a threat; the abortion clinic is a threat; the queer community youth center is a threat; even the independent storefront business, with its hand-painted signage, is a threat. What Ferguson reveals is that walking down the street is grounds to harass colored boys like me cuz our gait, our skin, our style is a blemish on the white spatial imaginary that needs to be arrested or eradicated—one way or another erased.

Last year I found myself speaking at a conference in Baltimore where discussions about the changing nature of cities were dominated by the topic of gentrification. As I presented a talk on the politics of belonging and dis-belonging as they relate to practices of “creative placemaking,” I drifted away from my consideration of artists as placemakers to ask the audience who among them knew the term Rasquache. No hands were raised. I then pivoted and said that I was not interested in unpacking how gentrification operates; instead I wanted to talk about how places are made through Rasquachification. As the gentry moves the working class and poor out of cities, what unsanctioned means will the newly displaced residents use to style their next locale? How might this form of artistic expression, this form of speech, provide a counterframe to gentrification and the homogenizing aesthetic of the white spatial imaginary?

A flowerpot that you would never find at Home Depot

The scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes Rasquache as a Chicano aesthetic with an “attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.” Evoking rasquachismo from an artist’s perspective, Amalia Mesa-Bains calls it “the capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado.” When I think of rasquachismo, I think of repurposing a tire into a flowerpot that you would never find at Home Depot. Such an object signifies the imaginary structured by resourcefulness, and prompted by poverty, which is distinct from the imaginary imposed by the monetization of neighborhoods, a prevailing objective in urban development.

Rasquachification messes with the white spatial imaginary and offers up another symbolic culture—combinatory, used and reused. The Rasquache spatial imaginary is the culture of lowriders who embrace the street in a tempo parade of coolness; it’s the roaming dog that marks its territory; it’s the defiance signified by a bright, bright, bright house; it’s the fountain of the peeing boy in the front yard; it’s the DIY car mechanic, leather upholsterer or wedding-dress maker working out of his or her garage with the door open to the street; it’s the porch where the elders watch; and it’s the respected neighborhood watch program. Rasquachification challenges America’s deep racial divide through acts of ultravisibility undertaken by those rendered invisible by the dominant ideology of whiteness.

Rasquachification is also what the community activist Jenny Lee calls placekeeping—not just preserving the facade of the building but also keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, keeping the tree once planted in the memory of a loved one lost in a war and keeping the tenants who have raised their family in an apartment. It is a call to hold on to the stories told on the streets by the locals, and to keep the sounds ringing out in a neighborhood populated by musicians who perform at the corner bar or social hall.

At a moment when cities are rapidly being transformed, I worry that the people proposing and implementing policies are not thinking about spatial justice. That the speech of the poor and of communities of color is not heard in part because of a devaluation of an expressive aesthetic—the speech of life in all its Rasquache glory, which is saying I’m city and which does not jibe with the entitlement of the white spatial imaginary that dominates the understanding of the public sphere.

The Rasquache spatial imaginary is a composition, a resourceful admixture, a mash-up imagination that says, I’m here.

Policy and imagination condition each other, and a dialectical relationship between the two is necessary to preserve the vibrancy of our cities. Currently, urban policymaking is determined by the drive to accumulate as much capital as possible, and the effect is to destabilize our cities through the displacement of individuals, families and entire communities. But the people who shape communities from the ground up—the urban residents who practice the art of poiesis, or making in the sense of transforming the world—should have the real agency. Acts of imagination ultimately shape the public sphere, where we make meaning together, in shared space. Imagination produces a commons that is continually generated and mutated through our actions. Both the imagination that engendered the pink tire flowerpot and the policies behind zoning ordinances ultimately affect how a city speaks—the sounds of the city, the shape of its buildings, the unit of the block, the voices of the people who live there, their poetics. The poetics and praxis of a city bring into being livability.

Often when I participate in placemaking/placekeeping discussions, what pops into my mind are a few literary references related to cities. I hear the metaphorical laments of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (“it used to be”) or the conjurations of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (awe: the new city) in these passionate internal monologues. I think of Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, where imagination enriches the day-to-day; Macondo, with its local pulses of civic life, where the Rasquache spatial imaginary—the aesthetic of making something out of nothing, of the discarded, irreverent and spontaneous—is alive; Macondo, where out of realness emerges the magical.

The Rasquache spatial imaginary is a composition, a resourceful admixture, a mash-up imagination that through objects and places says, I’m here—whether that be New Orleans, East L.A., the Bronx or South Tucson—and I’m part of the many and I walk down these streets with a Rasquache passport that says I belong.

Evidence

Photo by Kaucyila Brooke, Rasquachification by Reuben Roqueñi.

Civility or Social Control

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

September 17, 2014

There has been a lot of talk as of late about “civility.” Indeed there are academicians who are doing a thriving business conducting workshops with the full support of administration and its cheerleaders who equate the lack of civility to school yard bullying, mixing the proverbial apples and oranges.

However, the meaning of civility is much deeper; it involves much more than politeness. The intent of the campaign is to silence dissent. The frivolous finger wagging distracts from the important role of power in bullying and trivializes its viciousness and seriousness.

Proponents rationalize that politeness is necessary for collegial communication and to lay down the ground rules for disagreeing in a civil matter. According to them, civility is essential to finding common ground. This sounds great but it assumes that both sides want to listen to each other as equals and that there is the possibility of common ground. The truth be told, the hierarchical nature of academe makes this sort of communication impossible.

After listening to the dialogue on civility at California State University Northridge, I have come to the conclusion that there is not very much analysis or thought on the topic and that the narrative is being spun by administrators and partisans who do not want to deal with criticism. A major issue at CSUN is a lack of racial diversity on the faculty.

It is a crude effort at social control – an attempt to regulate behavior and feed the ambitions of those at the top. At its most basic level culture controls us; in turn popular opinion defines what is right and wrong. The present campaign on civility is part of an effort to impose conformity and silence dissent.

In order for civility to exist it must begin from the bottom. If not the university becomes a caste system with students subservient to professors, professors to the dean and up the line to the president. At each step, power is controlled by those at the higher level with students and professors, according to their category, on the bottom.

From my perspective, an analysis of the term civility has to be examined in context. Like racism and sexism civility depends on power. Moreover, we are supposed to be scholars and the current debate ignores tons of literature on racism and sexism. Bandied around by pseudo scholars it diminishes the moral authority and meaning of the word civility.

Recently the issue surfaced at the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies’ call for papers. The conference theme was “Exploring Civility within the Chicana & Chicano Studies Discipline.” The pushback came as a surprise to many members since these conferences are usually innocuous.

Sandra K. Soto, an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona wrote an open letter to the leadership of NACCS in which she recounted her twenty-five year involvement and attacked the theme of “Exploring Civility” –saying the call made “clear that the theme is not only promoting civility, but that it is blaming human suffering, greed, union busting, and other forms of oppression on a general sense of incivility, rather than say…capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, genocide… or say—in this historical moment—that ‘disrespect for authority has decreased the ability of individuals to follow laws’ is to verge into the terrain of anti-Blackness.’”

Professor Soto went on to re-call the history of the lack of civility in NACCS and how the militant conduct of the Lesbian contingent forced changes and the formation of the Lesbian Caucus in the 1980s. If “we had been ‘well-behaved, cultured, refined, enlightened, polite, and developed’ (ser educado)—we probably wouldn’t even have had the audacity to be out lesbians much less angry Chicana dykes demanding of space. Thankfully we didn’t give into that ideology then. And I certainly don’t want to now.”

The tempest sent some members back to redrafting their papers to include the lack of civility of the U.S.’s quest for global domination and the privatization of public institutions here and in Latin America. More important critics criticized the call’s distortion of civility by defining it as “ser educado” “[that] in Spanish means being well-behaved, cultured, refined, enlightened, polite, and developed” – which has always been definition of gente de razón.

What concerned me was not the tempest, but that an organization that was founded on the burning ashes of the 1960s would resurrect this Porfirian notion. As scholars, members have the responsibility of putting definitions into context. Language underlies socialization and it is rooted in culture, and based on our learned experiences that form our social and cultural identity.

As Michel Foucault wrote, “Neither power nor knowledge nor any other reality is anything but a mere linguistic construct.” In order to define civility Chicana/o scholars must deconstruct the academy and its motives when using those words. Like the old colonial Mexican casta system civility fixes everyone in their place.

In academe everything is advisory to the president – who for all intents and purposes owns the plantation. The overseer is the provost; he and his/her staff run the plantation often using pan or palo, but more often through benevolence. On Mexican haciendas the overseer became compadre to the peones establishing a fictional relationship with them. In academe control is based on this pecking order of associates, deans and lackeys. The lowest rung is occupied by students who don’t have anyone to peck down on.

Like on the plantation the illusion exists that everyone is part of a family or team. Their limited power is based on how many they can peck down on. Students have few illusions whereas professors are called “doctor”. They can grieve but they lack the deep pockets of an institutional remedy.

Even if you want a simple audience with those above you, access is limited by the one on the top. Nevertheless, faculty is under the illusion that they are part of a governance process. Similarly student government is controlled by the administration; only about 5 percent of the students vote in student government elections. They routinely vote for university projects rubber stamping the administration’s wishes. The only hope of breaking this cycle is to be uncivil.

Wanting to maintain this control, administrators red-bait dissidents and shut them out. For over six months we have been trying to get our side of the UNAM argument in print only to be shut out of the student newspaper and faculty forums.

I have been in the Civil Rights Movement for some sixty years. The principle of civil disobedience is part of my vernacular. For me, it is the cornerstone of democracy. Many faculty members and students went to jail resisting civility and those controlling the institution. One of the lessons we learned was that the lack of communication produced frustration and forced dissidents to be uncivil. Our life experiences inform us that change cannot come about without vigorous dissent.

Like they say on the street “no justice no peace.” As long as there is injustice civil behavior will be impossible. Civility only occurs when those on top listen to those with less power. The hyperbole of the administration hides the fact that there is already a procedure in place to deal with abusive conduct. However, charging someone with unprofessional conduct would require the accusers to give the dissidents due process instead of slandering or red-baiting them. 

Photo by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza

2014 High-Spanics (Super Chicanos y Mas) by the Numbers

UT Austin Creates Mex-Am Studies Department

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz- Austin American-Statesman Staff

The University of Texas is stepping up its offerings in Mexican-American studies by establishing a full-fledged academic department devoted to the field.

The Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies — the somewhat tongue-twisting title acknowledges both genders — is offering bachelor’s and master’s degree programs this fall, and doctoral programs are scheduled to be part of the mix in 2016-17, pending approval by state higher education officials. In addition, a Borderlands Research Institute will be established to support community-based data collection projects.

“This new department will bring together some of the nation’s finest scholars from a variety of academic disciplines and further advance our college and university as a national leader in the study of Mexican American and Latino populations,” said Randy Diehl, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, of which the new department and the planned institute are part.

Mexican-American and Latin American studies are nothing new at UT. The Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, founded in 1940, offers programs leading to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. The Center for Mexican American Studies, established in 1970, is also well-regarded in the field, as is the Benson Latin American Collection, whose holdings include nearly 1 million books and publications, 19,000 maps, 100,000 photographs and a variety of audio and visual materials.

The new department is intended to expand UT’s teaching and research, and one of its signature elements will be a focus on the United States’ changing demographic landscape, said Domino Perez, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies, who noted that Latinos make up a third of the state’s population. Degree tracks will include cultural studies, policy, and language and cognition.

About 25 students at UT are currently majoring in Mexican-American studies. The new department expects to have 50 after a year and 100 after two years. The Long institute has a total of 116 undergraduate and graduate students, and its offerings will continue.

Ten Photographs: Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzáles, San José, California, 1974

In 1974, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzáles came to an arts opening at El Centro Cultural de la Gente in San José, California. This was an fantastic opportunity to meet the seminal Chicano poet and organizer. Many couldn't wait to discuss the issues of the day. The fiery leader from Denver, Colorado was definitely ready for debates. 

Here are ten photographs from that dynamic day. I scanned the original 35mm negatives to create these digital files. I haven't edited them (yet) in Photoshop to remove dust and scratch marks. These historic images are more than 40 years old. The original files are significantly larger.

Click photos to enlarge.

Copyright 2014 Jesús Manuel Mena Garza. All rights reserved.