We often get together on days that I’m not teaching or when he doesn’t need to be in the office, and we bring cameras or sketch pads and go out and seek to sample the beauty of El Paso.
You can click on any of these images to get a better look.
What is beautiful about Chuco is often times is a bit rasquache.
Rasquache as an esthetic has long interested me, and I can see why so many artists and writers come out of El Paso.
Raquchismo is everywhere.
I am drawn to things rasquache.
I remember when my mom was still alive, my father bought us kids a big bag of cheap Cookies, and we were trying to open the bag, but it wouldn’t give.
Finally, my mom stood up like a woman with power, grabbed a kitchen knife, and held it up for us kids to see.
“I’ll do it the Mexican way,” she said.
And she slashed off the top, and all the cookies poured into our hands and onto the table.
As I stuffed my mouth, I remember feeling so proud of my mother for being a Mexican.
What she said wasn’t suppose to be disparaging, it wasn’t playing to the stereotype of Mexicans carrying knifes or being violent, it was as if to say that Mexicans do what they have to do, with what they got, to get what they want.
Moses and I ate downtown at an independent restaurant, burrito after burrito. This is what they had on the wall.
To me Rasquachismo is related to that idea of my mother's, and the beauty of El Paso, my home on the border, are in the colors and shapes and the affordable art that makes what we have an expression of ourselves.
And the people are beautiful.
