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Art Department Gallery - University of Santa Clara - February 2001

Review by Jo Farb Hernández

An exhibition of some forty baseball caps, slickly machine-embroidered with characteristic low-rider themes, was installed in the Art Department Gallery at Santa Clara University for a brief display during February, 2001. Students in Sam Hernández' studio seminar Art #196 curated the exhibition, designed the installation, wrote the wall labels and educational panels, and taught their professors, colleagues and other viewers about the cool concept of "de aquellitas.

Tying the chosen format for the exposition of these now-classic themes to the concept of rasquachismo in Chicano art, [ii] the students-representing a variety of ethnic backgrounds-explored links to traditional and contemporary aesthetics, standards, mores, and iconographies. Cognizant that understanding the references to the world revealed in this embroidery is shared by only a few, they nevertheless confirmed this as [at least one] reality for "Latino youths living on either side of the border, specifically those residing within Aztlán (southwestern United States.)" This reality, which seeks "validation of the margins and the 'other,'" [iii] ties directly into the qualities of rasquachismo while serving as pointed visual cultural and socio-economic commentary.

Empowered with pride in religion and culture [the students wrote], this art communally rejects the domineering, aesthetic doctrines of conventional society. Here is a visual representation of the many issues embedded in the community, expressing pride in women, Catholicism, cars, the barrio, and pre-Columbian cultures.

Fiercely Catholic religious imagery juxtaposed with references to pre-Columbian times brings to life themes of irony and bi-culturalism. In these images you will see references to gender politics that appear to glorify yet exploit women. Pride in one's neighborhood is coupled with the realities of barrio life. These contradictions speak to the duality of border culture, the nature of two worlds struggling for co-existence. [iv]

The images are manifested in the caps in a style that has come to be familiar to viewers of art from Aztlán, yet are often graphically more complex and with more surreal juxtapositions. The women have flawless skin, long, flowing tresses, bulging breasts, heavy makeup, hoop earrings, and skimpy clothes. They stand by their men, dressed in pachuco-style long coats, wide pants pegged at the ankle, suspenders, broad ties, and broad brimmed hats, defined in embroidered captions as exemplifying "Brown Pride," "Mexican Pride," "Pura Raza," or "Pachuco Life." Many of the images reveal the strange coincidences and juxtapositions of the barrio on both sides of the border-outdoor public telephone booths as centers for communication, towering skyscrapers, billiard halls, piled up trash cans, and expensive tricked-out cars. Others are enigmatically dreamlike or otherworldly: one cap shows a pachuco spreading the sides of his coat out as if they were a bat's wings, floating over his lowered automobile and up through the sun-drenched mountains and palm trees of southern California. Although certain caps display solely Mexican cultural imagery, most mirror a hybridized heritage that reflects cross-pollination, migration, and a border mentality that signals both bi-cultural inclusiveness and fierce exclusivity. Fusing contemporary images of popular culture with more traditional iconographies, the caps aggressively provide a means of cultural self-definition.

This self-definition is rooted in duality, a duality not only linked to the mixed blood heritage of this border culture, but to an approach to life that enables these community members to function within two worlds, developing a pluralistic experiential and pragmatic response to a state of consciousness that is often in conceptual-if not physical-opposition. Former San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art Curator Madeleine Grnysztejn has written about the "synthesis and contradictions of two or more cultures" that are revealed in artworks such as these. Such works, she writes, "carry within themselves both the challenges of and variable answers to a multicultural heritage in a transcultural world." [v] She has continued,

…[these artworks] are compelling for being grounded in genuine experiences that represent a conscious resistance and alternative to the dominant mainstream. The works speak vividly in a language that is regional but not homogeneous, local but not provincial, pivotal to the creation of a sense of culture but in no way Eurocentric.

…many of the pieces…exhibit a conscious and purposeful fragmentation, in which the imagery is splintered by sharp interruptions of the accidental, the anomalous, the unexpected. [vi]

Such jarring juxtapositions include liturgical-style candles shining over sidewalks and garbage cans; early fifties pickup trucks and lowered coupes lined up in front of soaring urban skyscrapers that are clearly not of "el barrio;" contemporary lovers intertwined with Mayan-style portraits in elaborate headdresses. The old cars prominently featured in the embroideries are graphically intertwined with Catholic images, although occasionally tempered with a newly-emergent born-again Christianity, as well, such as that seen in the lowered late-1940s Chevrolet with the Virgin of Guadalupe emblazoned as if painted on the trunk, oversize icy blue praying hands clasping a rosary blessing the car, whose license plate reads Holy RlR (Holy Roller). Other caps show the Virgin rising up from between parked trucks or cars, as if blessing the mode of transportation and manner of life.

The difficulties of life in the barrio are illustrated by several caps bearing the theatre masks representing tragedy and comedy, images referential of another cultural sphere which have been appropriated and are now emblematic of this artistic genre. "It's a thin line between Love and Hate," one cap reads (the license plate on this early '60s Chevy: LVNH8); another reads "Make your last wish." A third (actually not included in the display), shows a piñata out of which is falling a marijuana leaf, a razor blade with cocaine lines, and a hypodermic needle.

Graphically the caps are spectacular; the images are foreshortened so that they read correctly only when properly worn backwards on the head, and as if from above. Relative dimensions are ignored, superseded by the conceptual importance of the imagery; nevertheless, details are carefully included when warranted, including the tattoo on an arm, the license plate on a car, the pleats on a pachuco's pants.

Mimicking the sense of turmoil, unbalance, and impermanence on the street-- the live fast, die young strategy--the caps reveal a strict attention to detail, the nuances that can mean the difference between cool and not, or between life and death. Appropriating personalized yet iconic images of the street, these caps honor real-life experiences, and are grounded in a proud, conscious understanding of the complexities of this kind of life. Nevertheless, the students astutely noted that wearing these caps, proclaiming one's adherence to these ways of living (and dying), is optional, and can be more easily removed than a tattoo:

Much like the low rider itself, which is an unrestricted, constant expression of migratory art that roams freely throughout the streets of the community, the hat has migratory power. It is a mobile expression that stops only when the wearer takes it off and chooses to stop the communication of the message.

Broken down into the thematic categories of Religious Subjects, Pride in your Barrio, Pride in your Car, and Cultural Pride, the caps were installed at "head height" in a spare but elegant display. Original painted entrance signage, with the Virgin of Guadalupe superimposed on the Mexican flag and flanked by two "lowered" automobiles, introduced both the theme of the exhibition and the transitory nature of its manifestations.

© Jo Farb Hernández, 2001

[i] Unpublished commentary by Santa Clara University student Aldo Maspóns. Other students in this senior seminar were Rita Alcantara, Kara Duncan, Michael Frank, Jamie Harrison, Jessica Hurd, Francisca "Kika" Jonsson, Yumi Koh, Jeong Lee, Jana Milbank, Christina Newell, Vanessa Orquiza, Indu Rai, and Wei Weng.
[ii] In his essay "Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility," in the exhibition catalogue CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), pp. 155-162, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto posits that there is a trend in Chicano art that glorifies the outsider, the one who "turns paradigms upside down," who "debunks convention and spoofs protocol." It is "a sort of good taste of bad taste," a visual and verbal vernacular that, although privately held, may be publicly displayed, as it is "a visceral response to lived reality, not an intellectual cognition." Ybarra-Frausto, pp. 155-6.
[iii] Patricio Chavez, "Multi-Correct Politically Cultural," in Patricio Chavez and Madeleine Grynsztejn's La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993.
[iv] Jessica Hurd, Kika Jonsson, Aldo Maspóns. "De Aquellitas" exhibition panel. Department of Art and Art History, Santa Clara University, February, 2001.
[v] Madeleine Grynstzejn, "La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience," in La Frontera op cit., p. 22.
[vi] Ibid.

 

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