Select books are listed in reverse chronological order
(To read any of Gómez-Peña's books, the reader can start anywhere and read the texts in any order, including in reverse. Borders, after all, are there for us to cross.)
TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS (ROUTLEDGE, 2020)
2020
Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism
Gómez-Peña Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a figure who stands alone as unique and groundbreaking in the history of performance art, and as the Artistic Director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.
Throughout this collection, Gómez-Peña tackles literature, theory, pedagogy, activism and live art in an eclectic mix that demonstrates how the process of writing is simultaneously a performative exercise in embodied language. The writing stands as a call for action utilizing what Gómez-Peña terms ‘imaginary activism’ and ‘radical citizenship’; it invites the reader to embrace a borderless, polygendered, cross generational and race literate ethos. This timely anthology comes straight from the heart of a troubled Trump-era United States and a crime cartel ridden Mexico. Artists and writers are prompted to engage in radical performance pedagogy within the civic realm and to think of themselves as public intellectuals and ‘artivists’ participating in the great debates of our times.
By encouraging emerging artists and writers to wildly imagine their practice beyond the normative art world and academia, this book is a fundamental read for scholars and students of performance art, political theatre, cultural studies, literature, poetry, activism and race and gender politics.
Gómez-Peña Unplugged is being published in dialog withLa Pocha Nostra: A handbook for the rebel artist in a post-democratic society (Written by Gómez-Peña and Saul Garcia-Lopez & edited by Paloma Martinez-Cruz). The brand new manual offers a reworked outline of La Pocha Nostra’s interdisciplinary pedagogical practices developed over the past ten years & combined with this Anthology offers the reader deep insight into the literary, pedagogical and artistic practices of Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra.
La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post- Democratic Society
La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post- Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and transdisciplinary border crossers of all stripes.
Featuring a newly reworked outline of La Pocha Nostra’s overall pedagogy, and how it has evolved in the time of Trump, cartel violence, and the politics of social media, this new handbook presents deeper explanations of the interdisciplinary pedagogical practices developed by the group that has been labelled “the most influential Latino/ a performance troupe of the past ten years.”
Co-written by Guillermo Gómez- Peña in collaboration with La Pocha Nostra’s co- director Saúl García-López and edited by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, this highly anticipated follow- up volume raises crucial questions in the new neo- nationalist era. Drawing on field experience from ten years of touring, the authors blend original methods with updated and revised exercises, providing new material for teachers, universities, radical artists, curators, producers, and students.
Informed by a border perspective that intersects with the politics of embodiment and intersectional identities, exercises are designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance. The authors use a series of practical exercises, honed in workshops offered worldwide, to help create challenging art & artivist interventions that transcend the boundaries of nation, generation, language, gender, racial identity, and traditional hierarchies of instruction.
This volume also includes contributions from influential artists, producers, poets, and activists in the field, including Reverend Billy & Savitri D., Dragonfly, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Micha Espinosa, Francesca Carol Rolla, VestAndPage, Praba Pilar, L. M. Bogad, Balitrónica, Juan Ibarra, Michèle Ceballos Michot, and Emma Tramposch, exemplifying the emerging innovations of company members, collaborators, and workshop participants engaging with Pocha Nostra techniques. The book is complemented by the new book Gómez- Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008– 2020) .
Posnacional 2 Glosolalia: Border Poetics Against the Wall (USA / México, 2020)
2020
LPN is thrilled to announce the virtual publishing of a new bi-national anthology of experimental literature. For this book, we chose a DIY model of transnational publishing, therefore, avoiding the red tape of formal publishing houses & related politics! Digital Book available HERE
La publicación del libro Posnacional 2; Glosolalia: Border Poetics Against the Wall (USA / México, 2020), Gómez-Peña y La Pocha Nostra en tiempos de pandemia, es una nueva antología binacional de poesía experimental.
Para la publicación de este libro, elegimos un modelo de distribución radical, independiente y transnacional que rompe con las barreras burocráticas de las casas editoriales formales y las políticas nacionales de distribución. Lo ponemos a disposición de todos ustedes a un precio mínimo de 13 dólares. (Le pedimos también a cada autor en el libro que cree su propio sistema de distribución y ventas virtuales para sus propias comunidades y claro, el dinero resultante será para ellos). Por lo pronto el libro ya está a la venta ya en la siguiente liga!
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Mexican (in) Documentado
2017
Award-winning Exhibition Catalog from Gómez-Peña's 2017/2018 Retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City) including photographs, essays, manifestos, interviews and archival materials.
Out of print. Only 10 copies left in the artist's collection. Please contact ballitron[@]gmail.com for inquires.
“Gomez-Peña's work is among the most powerful examples of intercultural performance.” -Richard Shechner, American Theatre Magazine
Documentado/Undocumented
Ars Shamánica Performática
2017
Gómez-Peña and book artist Felicia Rice create a multi-media, border-crossing hybrid: the book as performance art.
Doc/Undoc presents a multi-media, multi-disciplinary collaboration in book form, documenting a unique and wildly ambitious adventure into the experimental realms of modern book arts. Included are a lush, photographic recreation of the installation, a reproduction of the codex, an essay by art historian Jennifer A. González who situates the project in the context of bookmaking, performance art, and cabinets of curiosities. The book is packaged with a USB drive containing the installation version's original sound art by Zachary James Watkins and video art by Gustavo Vazquez.
Exhibition Publication in Spanish from Gómez-Peña's first major retrospective at CAAM, Canary Islands, Spain 2012. Including photographs, essays, manifestos, interviews and archival materials.
Available online.
“He's one of the handful of great performance artists in America today.”
-Peter Sellars
Conversations Across Borders
2011
Publisher: Seagull Books, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Gabriela Salgado, Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Brito Jinorio, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating conversations spanning 15 years and revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.
This book is Gómez-Peña's favorite book. Please also refer to the "Conversations" section of Essential Works for live performance versions.
“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.” - VillageVoice Literary Supplement
In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’.
Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.
Exercises for Rebel Artists is the best-selling and most popular book on contemporary performance pedagogy published by Routledge.
Expect in early 2021 a brand new pedagogical Anthology for the "post-democratic" era!
"One of the most active and creative Chicano writer-performers, explores the techno-Chicano/border aesthetic and searches for a new dialogue between Latin Americans who left their homelands following the American dream and those who stayed behind."
The book begins in Spanish, journeys into Spanglish, Gringoñol, English and Robo-Esperanto. This publication, is in a sense, a literary melting-pot where a new language is being forged. The reader can start anywhere and read them [the parts] in any order. Borders, after all, are there for us to go across.
In the Trump/Obrador Era there is currently a very intense debate at the publishing house to reprint this in paperback - let's hope they do it!
"Antropologia Inversa De Un Performancero Postmexicano" First Spanish-language anthology of Gómez-Peña's favorite texts. Selected by Mexico's top performance theorist, Joséfina Alcazar and translated into Spanish by the artist. There are currently 30 first-edition collector copies remaining.
"Guillermo Gómez-Peña created a spatial and temporal utopia, demonstrating why he is one of our most important living artists." -Philip Stanier, Live Culture at Tate Modern
“...a peacemaker in the world's culture clash." -Vanity Fair
Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism; his theatricalizations of postcolonial theory. In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'.
“In everything he does, he remains an indomitably playful phrasemaker; a fertile rethinker of cultural contradictions, clichés, and conundrums; and an inspiring recruiter for a playground army of cultural pluralists.” -The Village Voice Buy here.
Codex Espangliensis
From Columbus to the Border Patrol
2000
Publisher: City Lights, San Francisco, CA
The book is a collaboration between Gómez-Peña, Chicano master visual artist Enrique Chagoya and book artist Felicia Rice. Originally created as a limited-edition of 50 this project was inspired by the pre-Hispanic codices that escaped immolation during colonial invasions, the artists' book opens out in accordion folds expanding to a length of over 21 feet. Rice has created a series of beautiful and jarring montages in which the mixture of languages, slang, poetry, and prose of Gómez-Peña's performance texts are woven through and around Chagoya's collages filled with pre-Hispanic drawings, colonial-era representations of New World natives, and comic book superheroes. Irreverent to the last, Gómez-Peña and Chagoya employ iconic figures and persistent stereotypes to overturn the fantasies of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and historical amnesia that cloud international relations. Rice's masterful typographic compositions orchestrate the text's many voices and views, offering a history of the Americas which must be read forward and backward, in fragments and in recurring episodes―in short, as history itself tends to unfold.
This paperback Codex was inspired by an original artist book with the same title printed on amate paper for collectors. The original Codex is held in private collections including The Getty and MACBA.
This classic anthology of Gómez-Peña's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this provocateur. It spans the decade, from 1990-2000, and explores the wild performance adventures of the original Pocha Nostra Troupe. This is one of Gómez-Peña's favorite books.
“Gómez-Peña is a linguist...As he shifts from one character, one accent, one language to another, I re-experience the vertigo of the border.” -Cindi Carr, The Village Voice
This rare, award-winning art book documents the seminal performance art installation piece Temple of Confessions which appeared in museums across the country including the Corcoran Gallery.
Temple of Confessions features artists Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes and their collaborators acting in such personae as Tex-Mex shamans, holy gang members and pregnant nuns. Within an environment of humorous and provocative objects that serve “to open a Pandora box and let loose the colonial demons,” visitors are invited to confess their secret desires either by kneeling and recording into a microphone, writing a postcard, or calling a phone number.
The confessions are often emotional and reveal racism, tenderness, solidarity, or sexuality as visitors react to the Latino “other.” This is art as serious social exploration and should prove a challenging addition to public, academic, or special collections. The book documents the exhibit in text and photographs, along with a selection of visitors’ confessions and essays by commentators. It comes with a CD containing confessions, performance art, and commentary in the NAFTA languages.
Interdisciplinary artist and writer Gómez-Peña collaborates with Chicano visual artist Enrique Chagoya in the multilingual, performative "Latino cyberpunk" exploration of post-colonialism in the internet age.
"Gómez-Peña celebrates hybridity, borderless frontiers, interdisciplinary art forms, linguistic amalgams, cultural collisions--virtually everything that partakes of "betweenness," especially the image of the Chicano cyborg, half human-half machine. So it shouldn't surprise that the author's books confound definition, fusing performance theory with performance diaries, conversations, essays, scripts, commentaries for NPR, travelogues, anecdotes and photographs of ‘living dioramas.”-Publishers WeeklyBuy here.
The New World Border
Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the World
1996
Publisher: City Lights, San Francisco, CA
ISBN-10: 0872863131
The New World Border is a carnivalesque inversion of ethnic and geo-political ideology, a disorienting free-fall into the space between cultures and a head-on collision with the real and imagined borders that separate North and South.
Hero of a thousand syncretic faces—intercultural interpreter, reverse anthropologist, experimental linguist and political artist of the first order—Guillermo Gómez-Peña has won international acclaim for his efforts to create a hybrid culture and to articulate a borderless ethos. This book received the American Book award in 1996.
“Extremely articulate, Gómez-Peña rivets attention through deliberate gesture and a commanding, versatile voice...his role reversing strategy allows the non-bilingual audience/reader to experience first hand the outsider's perspective.” -Victoria Martin, Artweek
This book, Gómez-Peña's first English-language publication, is considered his best known and most widely used in Academia. It covers his "border art" period from 1978-1993.
“At the heart of the performative is an activation of consciousness, triggered by multicultural puns and transcultural associations. Mexican by birth, Mexican-American by choice, this linguistic trickster does not appear to be insecure about who he is, but he knows many who are trapped in stereotypes and in the dangerous dynamics of disempowerment that characterize the lives of the underclasses in American society.” -Carol Becker
There are 12 limited edition book art pieces by Gómez-Peña held in private collections. Contact La Pocha Nostra directly to inquire about these rare publications.
