Rasquache Care as a Pedagogy of Resistance in Texas Higher Education

Resumen

This manuscript examines how educational support is reorganized under authoritarian retrenchment in U.S. public higher education. Drawing on ethnographic research with two first-generation student support programs at a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in South Texas, I argue that carework persists through rasquache practices of support under political, institutional, and material constraints. Even as anti-DEI legislation and administrative scrutiny narrowed what could be publicly said and formally sanctioned, staff and students sustained care through improvised instruction and mentoring, less visible relational support, and creative uses of limited resources. I describe these practices as rasquache care: forms of educational care rooted in Chicane and Mexican American traditions of making life possible with limited means while preserving dignity, trust, and collective possibility. Rasquache care shows that support is not simply and wholly suppressed by authoritarian conditions; it is reorganized through practices that are deeply ethical, material, and political. By theorizing educational care through rasquachismo and pedagogies of resistance, I contribute to scholarship on responses to authoritarianism in education, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and the political economy of public higher education.