ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Homies origins from a Rasquache background, or what Tomas Ybarra-Frausto has called a uniquely Chicano sensibility. Homies share a close affinity with Rasquachismo through their unconventional appearance while spoofing pretentious forms of art, thanks in part to the strategy of using funky, even tacky and banal characteristics to highlight a "good taste of bad taste". As Ybarra-Frausto suggests, "To be rasquache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness, to seek to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down". David Gonzales recognizes that Homies represent a wide spectrum of peoples and racial groups who have lived as victims of stereotyping, oftentimes scarred by mainstream society's projections of their best qualities as transgressively infamous. Gonzales objective entailed acknowledging representations of real people who have generally lived in the shadows of American society and who have not received their due, first, as regular people and, second, as cultural and folkloric artifacts.
