Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the artivist (activist-artist) David Zamora Casas with his signature Dali mustache, fiery red lipstick, and waxed spiked hair above a long jet-black braid-uses altares/ofrendas and certain images from popular culture to convey a queer resistant and transgressive message.

Paper long abstract:

The San Antonio performance artivist (activist-artist) David Zamora Casas performs his queer aesthetics using folk and traditional elements, what I call a Chicanx Performative Rasquachismo after Tomas Ybarra Frausto's notion of the rasquache aesthetics in Chicanx art. This paper explores the use of traditional elements like altares/ofrendas and certain images from popular culture to convey a larger queer message of resistance and transgression. With his signature Dali-esque moustache, fiery red lipstick, and waxed spiked hair above a long jet-black braid, Zamora Casas embodies a gender-bending Chicanx rasquache aesthetic. His altares or ofrendas, the traditional Day of the Dead installations, based on traditional ritual become transgressive and offer a space for resistance to unjust social justice realities in the community. Zamora Casas’s body-specific signifiers (i.e. body hair, tattoos, clothes, etc.) function as contestations of gendered assumptions. In his installations, Zamora Casas critiques, highlights and spoofs local artists, politicians, even as he honors family, friends, and luminaries, all the while honoring a tradition. Using a qualitative approach, a blend of autobioethnography and semiotics, I approach Zamora Casas’s autohistoria, as Anzaldúa called the self-referential telling of one’s story, through a Chicana feminist lens focusing on Zamora Casas’s altars for Day of the Dead and his art exhibitions. I will show numerous images and a video clip to illustrate the points I make in my analysis.