In 1985, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined the term rasquache, reclaiming and reimagining a word once associated with poor taste, low quality, or chafa. Through this reframing, it became a way to describe the creative problem-solving of working-class communities.
While the term is rooted in the Mexican-American experience, similar practices exist globally in ways of making, repairing, and improvising with whatever resources are available.
The work of artists Rubén Luna, originally from South San Antonio, and Gil Rocha from Laredo, speaks directly to this aesthetic. During the opening of Yonke EncontraDOS at the Laredo Center for the Arts on the First Friday in June, I witnessed audiences recognizing something deeply familiar, the visual language of their own family yards, garages, and everyday environments.
To recognize everyday life as a form of art is a shift in perception that allows us to read survival, maintenance, and improvisation as creative acts rather than absence of refinement.
After leaving a fulltime job as an educator in 2023 to commit fully to his artistic practice, Rocha had participated in residencies across Mexico and the U.S. His work has since been exhibited alongside Luna’s at institutions such as the Cheech Center in Riverside, California, as part of Soy de Tejas, which was curated by Rigoberto Luna, Ruben’s brother.
In January 2026, Luna and Rocha presented Yonke EncontraDOS at the Presa House Gallery, which is located in a 1940s bungalow in the Lavaca District of San Antonio.
During the closing reception at Presa House, the artists and the curator had the blessing of Ybarra-Frausto on the first piece that both worked on together. That piece, evocative of an altar, is now in the center of the Main Gallery at the Center for the Arts.
While the piece is made primarily of found objects of wood and iron manipulated by tools to give it structure, it also includes plants and a wand of copal incense.
Many of the works in the exhibition are assemblies of found wood, metal, and salvaged fragments. Other elements that appear repeatedly throughout the installation are plants, books, family photographs, recordings, and incense.
These details are evocative of Domesticana, a concept developed by artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains in the 1990s to describe a Chicana aesthetic rooted in domestic space, memory, spirituality, and everyday acts of care.
Domesticana proposes that ordinary spaces can become sites of meaning through intention: a medicine cabinet storing remedies for limpias, a collection of family photographs, or a display of wedding keepsakes carefully preserved over time.
In this sense, the work of both Rocha and Luna contain traces of Domesticana.
Rocha’s installations include the sonic landscape of the borderlands through cassette tapes, CDs, and other remnants of popular culture, as well as books, objects, and references through which he has internalized and intellectualized his practice. The resulting compositions function as personal altars that map the cultural influences that have shaped his worldview.
A similar sensibility emerges in Luna’s work. One of the exhibition’s most memorable pieces resembles a niche constructed from tools and materials that could be gathered from a father’s workshop. At its center, a video shows his father offering the blessing: “En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo.” During the opening reception at the Center for the Arts, I witnessed a particularly moving moment as Rocha’s father stood quietly before the work, watching the video. The scene felt like a blessing within a blessing.
While both artists draw from traditions associated with Domesticana and rasquachismo, their work also indicates the evolution of these concepts. After the artist talk, writer and cultural worker Vincent Solis posed an important question:” What are the conditions that have made discarded materials such a natural part of our visual culture?” Rather than simply celebrating the ingenuity of reuse, the question asks us to consider the economic, social, and geographic realities that made these materials available in the first place.
Yonke EncontraDOS suggests that rasquache is no longer only a strategy of survival. It has become a language through which artists reflect on inheritance, labor, memory, and belonging. In the hands of Rocha and Luna, discarded objects do more than tell stories about scarcity. They become tools for understanding the cultural landscape of South Texas and the border itself.
Yonke EncontraDOS remains on exhibit through August 7.
