Towards a Rasquache Resistance: Conceptualizing Chicanx Youth Subjectivities

Whiteness and White Supremacy Permeating Everyday Institutions

White supremacy is/are the power structures that maintain white racial superiority over other groups, including superiority that is not only tied to being white, but also being lighter skinned or passing for white (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). Furthermore, whiteness refers to the various expressions of white supremacy that ultimately serve the interests of whites, but also the interests of capital, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy.

Whiteness in Schools

We understand schools as operating under the notion of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). School funding formulas for example, are inherently unequal and are nearly impossible to change in a way that would materially benefit low-income communities (Alemán, 2009). In addition to school funding formulas, whiteness as property in schools can manifest across a number of areas including Eurocentric curriculum (Cammarota & Romero, 2014; Sandoval, Ratcliff, Buenavista, & Marin, 2016; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017), teachers who are not attuned to the diverse array of students in their classrooms (Ladson-Billings, 1995; 2014), and historical legacies of educational neglect (Ladson-Billings, 2006), all of which are designed to benefit the educational success of whites at the expense of all others.

Aligned with other critical scholars who write about the resiliency and cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) found within marginalized communities, we recognize how youth of color resist whiteness and white supremacy within various spaces, including schools. In understanding how schools continue to function through lenses of colonialism and assimilation (Calderón, 2009), we acknowledge that “…resistance to educational injustice is about demanding more from institutions than they were ever designed to do” (Tuck & Yang, 2014a, p. 2). Drawing from critical race theory in education scholars (Alemán, Delgado Bernal, & Mendoza, 2013; Calderón, 2009; Delgado Bernal, 2002; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) we recognize schools as purposefully functioning in these ways to submit youth, and especially working class youth of color, to a curriculum and schooling policies and practices steeped in whiteness that discourage critical thinking, questioning authority, self-expression, and activism. Instead, schools largely promote assimilation to whiteness, standardized thinking through rote memorization, and surveillance and discipline as a way to control youth (Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010; Tuck & Yang, 2014a).

For this reason, we explore the implications of youth opting out of assimilating to whiteness in schools, and the importance of educators recognizing this choice as radical and potentially transformative. We see this as an intervention into the field of urban education, which explicitly centers the experiences of low income, Black and Brown youth in public schools. Through Critical Race Theory and Chicanx cultural studies we aim to contribute to the field of urban education by considering the ways in which schools are designed to oppress Black, Indigenous and students of color, and acknowledging the transformational possibilities of youth resistance to this oppression. In the next section, we examine literature that has theorized “deviant” identities and how this helps us to contextualize rasquache resistance.

“Deviant” Identities

Identity remains an important discussion within the field of Chicanx cultural studies. Scholars have examined the various identities that exist within Chicanx communities, such as: cholas/cholos; pachucas (Ramirez, 2012); zoot suiters (Alvarez, 2008); punk rockers, or rockeras/os (Habell-Pallán, 2005); homegirls (Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Miranda, 2003); and jotería identity and consciousness (Revilla & Santillana, 2014). Within this literature, researchers center the forms of expression of Chicanx communities, acknowledging these identities and representations as sites of intellectual and cultural production (Pizarro, 1998).

In the case of Zoot Suiters, Chicanx youth displayed pride in their bicultural identities through elaborate suits modeled after Black fashion. These outfits became an excuse for some white servicemembers to single out and violently attack Zoot Suiters for refusing to conform to whitestream standards of “appropriate” dress at the time. Zoot suiters’ decisions to dress in a style defined by themselves as dignified and cool is a lesson then in not only Chicanx and Black fashion but also Latinx cultural citizenship, or what Flores and Benmayor (1998) define as the use of cultural expression to claim political rights in the larger culture while maintaining a vibrant local identity.

Rasquache resistance helps us to reconceptualize these “deviant” identities within an educational context. How do educators support and affirm students who identify as chola/o/x or pachuca/o/x for example, in schools without asking them to conform to more palatable identities as a means to achieving traditional standards of success? Do educators make space in our classrooms for homegirls and other rasquache identities?

Chicanx cultural studies scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (1989) identifies how Chicanx communities have a history of creativity and cultural production that resists white supremacy, contributing to a Chicanx aesthetic that he refers to as rasquachismo. The next section elaborates on rasquachismo and its usefulness in understanding the forms of expression and resistance of Chicanx youth.

Rasquachismo in Educational Contexts

Other scholars have applied rasquachismo within an educational context. Emma Pérez (1993) offers, “[t]o be Chicana/o on one's own terms within the educational system is to be rasquache with respect to it” and contends educators “must creatively continue to exploit unexpected sources in the construction of identities and politics that challenge the norms of thinking and practices within the educational system,” (p. 277). Mendoza Aviña (2016) explored the use of rasquachismo in informing praxis in the classroom with Latinx elementary-aged youth, identifying a Chicana feminist rasquache pedagogy that emerges from the theories in the flesh of Latinx students, and provides approaches for teaching and learning that validates the radical sensibilities of youth, rather than reprimanding them for their creative forms of self-expression. Mejia and Lopez Pulido (2018) apply the concept of rasquachismo to Latinx college-aged engineering students to address what “Latinx students offer to the construction of knowledge in engineering,” (p. 2).

In our engagement with youth, we thought of this history of rasquachismo whenever the students self-identified or labeled each other as ratchet ⁴ (Mendoza Aviña & Morales, 2018). By bringing in ratchet and naming themselves in this way, the students made clear that 1) they were aware of their material realities and how they are marked by society as working class Chicanx youth; and 2) they were uninterested in assimilationist/white supremacist forms of expression that cut them off from their everyday lives.

Bridging Rasquachismo with Gloria Anzaldúa

As Chicana feminist race scholars, we utilized the work of Anzaldúa to understand what Chicanx education looks like with youth in an after school classroom space somewhat untethered from white supremacist expectations (e.g., standardized testing, punitive disciplinary charts, etc.). The answer, we found, was rasquache. Situating Chicanx education through an Anzaldúan lens looks and feels like rasquachismo and creates a space for students to feel comfortable showing up and expressing themselves in ways that most adults and educators would discourage. Since our approach to our curriculum and praxis was rooted in Anzaldúan thought, our classroom functioned like an ethnic studies space rather than a traditional K-12 class, meaning the students were encouraged to think critically, ask questions, share family stories, choose their own seats, listen to music and so on; essentially, some constraints typically associated with traditional classroom learning were lifted.

Like Solorzano and Delgado Bernal's quadrant of transformational resistance that contextualizes the oppositional behaviors of Chicanx college students as dynamic, complex, situational, and worthy of analysis, we recognize the rasquache resistance of our students as equally worthy of interrogation and possessing the potential for transformation. Not all of the forms of rasquache resistance the students engaged in were radical and aligned with social justice. Rather, the potential for transformational resistance can present itself when educators co-create a space with youth that: does not promote assimilation into whiteness as a means towards academic achievement; affirms students’ complex subjectivities and forms of expression across a spectrum (meaning students can be paisa and smart, or necia and creative, etc.); recognizes all students embody the capacity to learn, and can do so even if they engage in behaviors that are considered “bad” according to school rules and norms.

In the same way the quadrant of transformational resistance helps educators understand the different approaches, contexts, and outcomes of oppositional behaviors that students can engage in, the quadrant helps us to contextualize and make space for the rasquache resistance that youth engage in without punishing them or denying them their ways of being. There is potential for transformational resistance in classrooms that cultivate teaching and learning without compromising youth subjectivities. In this way, rasquache resistance can be transformational resistance. When Chicanx youth choose to express themselves in ways that resist whiteness and center their culture(s), thus creating connections with others and contributing to community building, and educators affirm these ways of being as creative and valuable, we recognize this as transformational resistance.

We situate our interpretation of youth resistance within a context that recognizes how youth are complex and multi-dimensional beings operating in ways that challenge and reinscribe deficit discourses about themselves, their families, and their communities (Cruz, 2014; Mendoza Aviña & Morales, 2018; Tuck, 2009; Tuck & Yang, 2014b). Acknowledging the realities of our lives as intersectional (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989), we understand that youth, like adults, are navigating spaces where they are both oppressor/oppressed and therefore inherently embody contradiction (Covarrubias & Tijerina Revilla, 2003). We often asked ourselves—what does resistance really look like or mean for elementary-aged youth of color? We are used to recognizing adults as having agency in their decisions to resist, but youth are oftentimes relegated to a space of defying authority just because—that is, lacking conscious decision making.

Thinking through Chicanx youth resistance within the context of rasquachismo allows us to situate their ways of being as opposing, reifying, and moving in between the myriad forms of colonialism that they (and we) live in. Rasquache resistance creates space for ways that Chicanx youth can exist that may not be specifically tied to particular desirable end goals (i.e., attending college). Part of what we posit in this manuscript is considering: what are educators to do with the multiple ways that youth of color show up and express themselves even when those forms of expression do not fit our (adult) conceptions of what that should look like?

Theories of Youth Resistance

Our thinking was informed by Tuck and Yang's (2011) scholarship on theorizing what resistance can mean for youth of color. Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies, Tuck and Yang (2011) argue that youth theories of resistance should not be linear, or teleological. “Non-teleological resistance theories do not fetishize progress but understand that change happens in ways that make new, old-but-returned, and previously unseen possibilities available at each juncture,” (Tuck & Yang, 2011, p. 522). In this way, resistance does not have a specific end point and in fact, it may have an end that is not desired within the field of education such as the lack of matriculation into college ⁵ . Tuck and Yang argue that resistance is a complex and contradictory issue and that youth resistance is tied to resisting structures and institutions, particularly those dictated by white supremacy and whiteness. Resistance is also tied to a way of being, that is, resisting by choosing to be and existing in a way that challenges white supremacist ideologies of what marginalized peoples are supposed to be.

We should be clear that we are not advocating that youth of color engage in dangerous or harmful behaviors or that they should actively not attend college or complete their education. Rather, we are thinking through the work of Tuck and Yang that asks educators to focus their energies on the much more difficult and taxing task of confronting and transforming colonial schooling institutions and policies while affirming the forms of expression of youth, even those considered problematic. In the next section, we discuss the role that Chicanx and Black feminist epistemologies had in our own approaches to this research and our conceptions of resistance.

Thinking Through the Implications of Ratchet

When we first began thinking about our work with youth, we did not fully grasp what were going to be the different ways that they engage(d) in resistance. In a previous article published in the Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies (Mendoza Aviña & Morales, 2018), we explored how the students we worked with in Salt Lake City engaged in what they referred to as “ratchet” behaviors as a form of resistance, in particular to racist practices in school. The non-Black Chicana/o ¹¹ students repeatedly engaged the term ratchet and even self-identified as such frequently enough that the identifier became a finding in our research. In reviewing the literature on ratchet, we found Black feminist scholars who examine and subvert ratchet for Black communities, and Black women specifically, as a form of resistance to a history of respectability politics and the surveillance and control of Black communities. We made connections between the works of scholars such as Brittany Cooper (Cooper, Morris, & Boylorn, 2017), Treva Lindsey (2012), Nadia E. Brown and Lisa Young (2015), and Bettina Love (2017) with what we learned from our community engaged praxis with working class, mixed status, non-Black Chicana/o youth.

Since the publication of that article, we have reflected on our use of ratchet as non-Black Chicana scholars and recognize that ratchet works subversively when taken up by those whom the term is applied to. We decided that part of our struggle was the fact that it was difficult to find a term tied to the youth's experiences that was not specifically rooted in misogynoir ¹² and/or was appropriative. We decided to move away altogether from the use of “ratchet” despite the fact that the young people we worked with readily described themselves as such.

Radical Black feminist thinkers have historically urged white and non-Black communities of color to examine anti-Blackness in their communities, which includes appropriation of Black culture, fashion, and languaging. Going through this process of analysis and reflection on the term ratchet and particularly engaging with Black feminist conceptualizations of ratchet was meaningful as it challenges us to reflect on anti-Blackness and cultural appropriation in non-Black Chicanx/Latinx communities, as well as the tensions, complexities and responsibilities of engaging in comparative research using Black and Chicanx feminisms. The scholarship that we read on ratchet and how it can be subverted in opposition to respectability politics and white supremacy informed our understanding of what Chicanx youth resistance can look like within the scope of an imaginary.

Stallings (2013) writes about the connection between hip hop and the Black ratchet imagination. Arguing that hip hop can function to “…unmake the imperialist project of Western modernity” (p. 135), Stallings identifies and centers the queerness ¹³ of hip hop as integral to the project of subversion, particularly as it relates to being ratchet. Stallings notes that what is important to understand about ratchet as a subversive term is that it is a performance that challenges respectability politics for Black communities.

McEachern (2017) provides another example of how the ratchet as a performance can work to subvert white supremacist ideologies. In describing her feelings about spaces where she can express herself and be fully dimensional as a Black queer woman, she notes that “[u]nquestionably, those places were spaces that resisted respectability politics and embraced ratchetness” (McEachern, 2017, p. 79). In a way similar to the analysis offered by Stallings (2013), McEachern (2017) goes on to further argue that “[r]atchet is the embodiment of Black femme ¹⁴ liberatory consciousness” (p. 79). McEachern uses ratchet as a term that is not only rooted in the everyday forms of resistance enacted by Black queer folks, but furthermore argues that embracing the ratchet challenges white supremacist notions regarding gender binaries, body shapes and sizes, and promotes a freedom of expression for Black girls and Black femmes to exist as they are.

Black feminist, and queer Black feminist scholars specifically offer important considerations around the politics of respectability in their scholarship, acknowledging that obtaining wealth, or aligning with white supremacist standards of behavior and dress will not save Black communities from anti-Black racism, misogynoir, and homophobia. Acknowledging this centers intersectional and non-assimilatory identities and voices in discussions of liberation, which was part of Cathy Cohen's (1997) argument in her essay, Punks, Bulldykes, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics and remains a significant discussion within Black and Chicanx/Latinx feminisms.

Our readings of Black feminist thinkers in relationship to their theorizations of ratchet helped us think about how the non-Black Chicanx youth we worked with actively resist white supremacy, while also participating in the appropriation of Black culture. Ratchet for these youth, signified a term that they could connect with because it meant for them another way of representing their material realities as racialized, working class youth of color. However, given the history of anti-Blackness and its material impact on Black communities and students, we needed to think through the ways that ratchet is a term to be subverted by those impacted. The literature on respectability politics offered by Black feminist scholars does push us to consider the ways educators may push respectability politics on to their students (and potentially even grade them for it) and makes us wonder how engaging in respectability politics as non-Black people of color might also perpetuate anti-Black racism, especially in schooling institutions.

How we fit into Rasquachismo

It is important that we discuss how our own identities and subjectivities have been shaped by context and place, as well as how our understanding of ourselves factors into our decision to name a rasquache resistance. Sylvia identifies as a fourth-generation Chicana from San Antonio, Texas, who came of age in the 80s and 90s immersed in Tex-Mex Spanglish - a regional dialect of Spanish informed by San Antonio's rasquache roots. Socorro identifies as a queer, second-generation immigrant from Fontana, California, who grew up in a working class household with parents who were both born in Mexico and primarily speak Spanish. Though we each identify as Chicana, how we come to understand that identity and ourselves has been shaped by place and context.

Our cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) has also played a large role in our pedagogy and our research with young people. During our time working together with the Adelante Partnership, we reflected on how it was not until college that we were introduced to curriculum and literature that represented our identities, families, cultures, and histories. We remembered how liberatory it was to enroll in ethnic studies courses in college and wondered what it would have been like to have learned our histories sooner. Our experiences then, seeking a space in school that recognized our existence, have significantly impacted how we interpret, make sense of, and identify a rasquache resistance. Situating the subjectivities and behaviors of Chicanx youth in ways that both challenge education and ourselves helped us be open to making sense of what it means to be a young Chicanx person in a contemporary context, living in a white supremacist society. In the next section, we highlight with relevant examples from the Chicanx youth what a rasquache resistance is and can look like.

Paisa

In this section, we examine how the students embodied subjectivities that we recognized as connected to the term paisa. We introduce David and Manuel, two sixth grade boys that identified as Mexican, who were close friends and participated in pláticas with us. Given our experiences, we identify a paisa as someone who is often thought of as speaking primarily or predominantly Spanish but is also stigmatized as someone who may have an accent when speaking English. Further, the word paisa is almost exclusively (though not always) referring to someone who is working class. Because being a paisa is associated with speaking primarily Spanish and/or speaking English with an accent, this term is typically ascribed to someone who is first or 1.5 generation immigrant. ¹⁶

Within our contexts, paisa has predominantly been used in a derogatory fashion. At the same time, paisa can be used to subvert notions of whiteness in that a paisa actively speaks Spanish. Though arguably being bi and multilingual within the U.S. is a desirable trait if you are white and middle income, low-income paisas who speak Spanish and English are still considered inferior, despite their bilingualism.

As complex beings that navigate multiple forms of oppression and privilege, we acknowledge that paisas can still embody machismo (Hurtado & Sinha, 2016). The excerpt below comes from a plática we had with David and Manuel inside the nearby Mexican supermarket that was walking distance from the school. Manuel is sharing about his stepdad who was deported for the second time before the plática that we are having took place. The first time, Manuel notes, his mom helped send money to his stepdad so that he can come back. This second time, his mom does not plan on helping him financially.

Manuel: He wants to come back. He's trying to make up the money. But in Mexico it's really difficult to make money. And he has a bad record so they don’t accept him in most of the jobs. And yeah, he wants to come back. But like the first time my mom helped him. And that didn’t last very long and my mom was like you know I’m not gonna help you this time. Try to make money, try to come back. I really can’t and I’m sorry. He still loves my mom.

Though David and Manuel are both bilingual, we noticed that David more frequently spoke Spanish. This was true not only of the plática that we had on this day, but it was also generally true of David in school. He was frequently the person that people referred to knowing a great deal about “Mexican things.” In this example, David is making fun of Manuel for the story he is sharing about his deported stepdad. He says, “no llores…por que quieres llorar” which translates to “don’t cry, why do you want to cry?” Even though Manuel was not actually visibly crying, he was still speaking in a serious tone about the reality of family separation that he has endured on at least two occasions. David reinforces stereotypes tied to masculinity that render men as devoid of emotion and socialize them to not show it, particularly either in public or in the company of other men. Manuel quickly rejects David's comment and says “yo no estoy llorando” which is true, but then furthermore laughs off whatever emotions he was feeling to diffuse any tension.

It is important to note that in this moment, David is performing and reproducing masculinity by pretending to shame or make light of a young man showing emotions, specifically crying. However, within this performance of toxic masculinity, ¹⁷ this exchange is also a reflection of how David and Manuel embody “paisaness” and build their friendship through their sharing of intimate details of their lives with each other in Spanish. David draws from paisa forms of expression to both uphold and also reinterpret masculinity as he listens to his close friend.

David recognizes how his connection to “Mexican things” allows him to relate with other students at school, even though he only started attending it about a year prior to when we met him in 2013. In this sense, we identify David's explicit connection to “Mexican things” as being tied to a paisa subjectivity. In the excerpt below from the plática with David and Manuel, David discusses his choice in music and how his mom does not approve. The plática starts with them first discussing some of the friendships that David and Manuel have with other students at their school.

David:…ooo me and the girls we’re like, we’re like best friends like homeboys and homegirls.

Sylvia: yeah, talk about that, how come y’all are so close?

Manuel: well, we have been together since kindergarten most of us, we’re like brothers and sisters except this…

Sylvia: but some people have been together since then and they don’t get along, right?

David: hey I met her since last year, we’re best friends since then.

Sylvia: who?

David: like me, Gloria, Cherrie….

Socorro: when did you start going to Jackson?

David: last year…

Socorro:…yeah last year, right?

Sylvia: And now you’re close with everybody? What makes y’all so close?

David: I don’t know, Mexican things.

Sylvia: Mexican things, como what?

David: like songs…

Manuel:..we’re so related like…

David: …that was included

Sylvia: (laughs), no tell us, that's why we ask.

Through this excerpt, one can see the different variances in Chicanx and specifically Mexican identity that are present within this plática. David mentions that he is close to certain students at Jackson (their elementary school) because he is able to connect with them on “Mexican things” and in particular he highlights music as one area of that connection. As a reminder, all of the students that David is referencing in this excerpt identify as Mexican and Mexican American. Even though Manuel and David both speak Spanish, David more readily embraces a paisa subjectivity through talking about listening to corridos like Gloria and Cherrie, who are also referenced in the plática. Though Manuel is close to these girls as well, he does not necessarily say that he listens to “Mexican songs,” and he makes a distinction in David's way of being compared to his own, even though he notes that they are all close. What this particular excerpt highlights is that there can be large differences in ways of being for Chicanx youth, even when there are a number of similarities. David more readily embraces paisa ways of being even though as noted previously, paisa is often designated as a derogatory term.

Traviesa/o/x and necia/o/x

Another form of rasquache resistance we observed were the ways the youth engaged in traviesa/o/x or necia/o/x subjectivities as a means to get or do what they want at school and at home, where they are expected to follow rules. For us, traviesas/os/x and necias/os/x share the following characteristics: they refuse to follow the rules or decide when to follow them; resist compliance, unapologetically so; and thus, can be annoying to older youth and adults responsible for them. Again, in highlighting the rasquache resistance of youth, we are neither encouraging nor condoning young people to engage in harmful behaviors and/or choices. Instead, we challenge ourselves as educators to imagine and co-create educative spaces with Chicanx youth that allows for their complex subjectivities without dehumanizing, punishing, policing and/or labeling them in deficit ways, or asking them to acculturate to whitestream ¹⁸ social standards. This allows for a shift from attempting to control/adjust the behaviors and forms of resistance of youth, to instead identifying and challenging white supremacist policies and practices in place in schools that explicitly aim to control Black and Brown students that have little to do with their actual learning (Brown & Young, 2017; Morris, 2016).

For example, the students frequently complained about the unrealistic expectations school policies placed on them, such as not being able to talk during class and having to keep their “butts in seats” unless given permission for entire eight hour days. Further, the students resented being labeled as “bad” and receiving punishment for engaging in necessary and human day-to-day tasks, like speaking, having to use the restroom, or wanting to stretch their legs or socialize. Given that their schedules during the day were so rigid and that all of their behaviors were monitored and even “graded,” the students engaged in rasquache resistance through traviesa/o/x and necia/o/x subjectivities that provided them with the opportunity to be themselves. They shared how they used bathroom passes as a way to get out of the classroom and walk around. They shared how they would give each other glances across the room when they felt a teacher was mistreating them, and how they would organize collectively, agreeing to be on their best behavior to see if this would provide them with a chance to get more recess time (for more info see Mendoza Aviña & Morales, 2018).

We experienced a number of blurred lines in our work with youth. Many times, their engagement in our after school class was not only about being a part of the class itself, but also about using the class strategically to their benefit to socialize and hang out with friends outside of class time and out of earshot of their family members. In this way, the youth engaged in necia/o/x behaviors and strategies that could get them what they wanted without having to explicitly lie to their families or beg for permission to spend time with their friends.

Cherrie, a sixth grader, consistently engaged in necia comportamientos to get what she wanted, to include requesting to be interviewed multiple times as a way to get out of having to attend the after school program ¹⁹ her family enrolled her into because she, and many of the students felt that it was boring. They had also communicated to us on several occasions that some of the after school staff did not treat them with respect, another reason why they sought to avoid it if they could. In the following field note, Sylvia reflects on when she discovered that Cherrie had developed this strategy. Further, the field note serves as an example of the traviesa/o/x subjectivities the youth took up in their play with each other.

March 8, 2014 Field Note

This field note observation highlights Cherrie's necianess, as well as the traviesa/o/x behaviors the youth engaged in as a form of play and socialization. Cherrie, not a fan of the after school program but also not wanting to have to explicitly lie to them or her parents, used our class as a way to get what she wanted: to hang out with her friends after school. One time, she even requested her plática take place at a local fast food restaurant so that she could get a burger and fries out of it.

Cherrie regularly engaged in necia comportamientos at school to be able to get what she wanted because her actions were so limited by the rules of the school. She would oftentimes bring back up clothes in her backpack to change into once school ended (as the school enforced a strict dress code) and would change into more youthful and revealing attire as soon as the bell rang. She regularly defended herself and “talked back” when confronted by adults and even her friends regarding her behaviors. In the above field note, when the after school program coordinator enters the room to confront Cherrie and her friends, Cherrie immediately and confidently responds, stating that she is in fact supposed to be there because of the college class, and then quickly moves outside to avoid being reprimanded. Cherrie was not afraid to ask for things from people, or to be necia, to get access to what she wanted that would allow for her to be and express herself.

The field note above also provides an example of the students engaging in traviesa/o/x comportamientos on the playground after school. Specifically, Gael engages a travieso/necio way of being by teasing his close friend Gloria, fabricating a lie about having told his cousin to come and shoot her. While the other girls recognize Gael's comment as travieso/necio and therefore, meaningless, Gloria takes great offense. She “lashes out” by coming for Gael, and later her girlfriends, by attacking them with rocks, which quickly snowballs into a playful, albeit rasquache game of chase.

The students, in their socializing, engage necia/o/x and traviesa/o/x subjectivities they are not allowed to engage in at home or at school: being grosero by saying disrespectful things, like “someone is going to shoot you;” throwing things; running; cussing; making fun of each other; and occupying spaces unsupervised by adults. Though Gloria is hurt by her friends laughing at her, including Gael who teased her and told her she was “going to get shot,” it is important to note that all of the students in this field note were good friends at the time. They frequently made fun of each other, called each other names, and called each other out in ways that on the surface would appear that they did not get along, but in actuality, reflected their comfort level with each other given the ease in which they could be necia/o with each other.

We recognized their various subjectivities as a form of rasquache resistance in that they developed their own codes for ways to act and be with one another. For these Chicana/o youth, someone getting shot was not something out of the realm of possibility—some of them had experienced that in their communities. Thus, Gloria's response to Gael was merited. At the same time, being able to understand these material realities with one another and find ways to cope with it through joking and teasing are not only rasquache ways of being but also creates a space that exists only for “them.” In the next section, we discuss the implications of what rasquache resistance means for educators working with Chicanx youth.