Essential Works

Border Walk

"Dear reader: This performance chronology is a conceptual artwork in permanent progress. It was originally conceived as “a poetic-activist intervention into the historical discourses of performance art.

You may consider it an invitation for historians and curators to incorporate our multiple parallel histories in the discourse of contemporary art; and for performance artists to engage in similar genealogical projects; to think of ourselves as artist/documentarians.

I fully acknowledge the role of my poetic subjectivity in the construction of this project. I also wish to thank Emma Tramposch and Balitronica for being my main accomplices. What follows is an excerpt of the total archives. " - GP

In early 1979, Gómez-Peña walked from Tijuana to CalArts in Los Angeles in two and a half days.

With his head covered in gauze, the artist wore his father’s suit and carried with him a briefcase containing his passport, talismans, and a diary.

The Loneliness of the Immigrant

The Loneliness of the Immigrant is an early solo performance piece in which Gómez-Peña transformed his body into a mysterious package, positioned on the floor in a public elevator. Wrapped in batik fabric, the artist lay on the floor for 24 hours.

On the wall of the elevator, a text read:

“Moving to another country hurts more than moving to another house, another face, another lover… In one way or another we all are or will be immigrants. Surely one day we will be able to crack this shell open, this unbearable loneliness, and develop a transcontinental identity.”

Over the course of the day, many passersby interacted with the cocooned person/object: talking, kicking, poking, confessing, and verbally threatening. A dog peed on him.

Eventually, the artist was evacuated by security guards and thrown into an industrial disposal bin. Gómez-Peña called this work, “a metaphor of painful birth into a new country, a new identity-- Chicano-- and a new language-- intercultural performance.”

This piece was the first performance by Gómez-Peña fully documented and made visible to the art world. One of the photographs is in the private collection of LACMA.

Poyesis Genética

Poyesis Genética was Gómez-Peña’s first interdisciplinary arts troupe, formed at CalArts and co-founded with NY choreographer Sara-Jo Berman.

The group was comprised of mainly politicized immigrants and foreign students. They created performances, installations, public interventions and video artworks that explored “fusing various cultural traditions utilizing performance as a syntactic thread,” and developed an interdisciplinary language that evoked indigenous rituals, blended with sexual and political imagery, personal pathos and iconography from pop culture.

Border Arts Workshop

The legendary San Diego/Tijuana-based Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) was founded in 1984 by a binational group of artists, activists, journalists and scholars. The founding members included Gómez-Peña, David Avalos, Sara-Jo Berman, Víctor Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Michael Schnorr, Emily Hicks and Jude Ederhart.

The group's projects were often carried out on both sides of the border, and at the borderline itself. From the beginning, the group established its interest in addressing "the social tensions the Mexican-American border creates, while asking us to imagine a world in which this international boundary has been erased...The Border is a spiral not a straight line."

BAW/TAF created the theoretical border-art paradigm that led to the institutionalization of border art and the utilization of border theory in Academia. With their late works, BAW/TAF became the first Chicano troupe to ever be accepted in the Venice, Sydney and Habana Biennials.

Ila Nicole Sheren states:

"Border Art didn't become a category until the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). Starting in 1984, and continuing in several iterations through the early twenty-first century, the binational collective transformed San Diego-Tijuana into a highly charged site for conceptual performance art ...The BAW/TAF artists were to link performance, site-specificity, and the U.S.-Mexico Border, as well as the first to export "border art" to other geographic locations and situations."

"Gómez-Peña and colleagues created a spatial and temporal utopia, demonstrating why he is one of our most important living artists." -Philip Stanier, Live Culture at Tate Modern

The Border Wedding

In 1988, Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks staged their "performance wedding" right on the Tijuana-San Diego borderline, with poets and musicians performing on both sides, and family and friends crossing into each other’s countries during the ceremony. The media labeled the event "a masterpiece of symbolic politics." Emily was 7 months pregnant. The artist reflects "It only cost me half of my MacArthur award & a family court case."

Border Brujo

Sitting at an altar decorated with a kitsch collection of cultural fetish items, and wearing a border patrolman’s jacket decorated with buttons, bananas, beads, and shells, Gómez-Peña delivers a sly and bitter indictment of U.S. colonial attitudes toward Mexican culture and history.

"Border Brujo" is “a ritual-linguistic journey across the U.S./Mexico border” in which Gómez Peña becomes a migrant touring the routes of jornaleros. This classic performance monologue also has a video component.

Whirling through various Mexican American stereotypes, Gómez-Peña emphasizes the collision of Mexican and American cultures, their mixture and misunderstanding of each other, each appearing as a dream/nightmare reflection of the “Other.”

The personas are symbolic of the borders between North and South, Anglo and Latino; myth and reality; legality and illegality; art and life. Border Brujo assaults and exorcises the demons of dominant cultures. He articulates fear, desire, trauma, sublimation, anger, and misplacement embodying ruptured and defiant communities with multilingual dexterity and humor.

Buy the video or watch a preview at vdb.org.

“Gómez-Peña is magnificent, melodramatic, robustly hilarious and precisely, exquisitely witty...I emerge from his performances somewhat dazed.” -Lucy Lippard

Couple in the Cage

Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West

In Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, Gómez-Peña and Fusco travel and appear before the public in four different countries as two "Guatinaui Indians," members of a fictional "newly discovered" tribe who had agreed to be displayed at malls and museums around the world, after the manner of human exhibition in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gómez-Peña, like his contemporaries (James Luna, Fred Wilson, Jimmy Durham, Barbara Kirschenblatt, Mike Taussig, et al) were interested in a radical, alternative framework of anthropology, and was playing with the format of a “living dioramas.”

Conceived as a "satirical comment on the past," the performances in The Guatinaui World Tour evoke various responses, including huge numbers of people who are convinced the personas are real and do not find the idea of "natives" locked in a cage objectionable. One concerned audience member at the Smithsonian even called the "humane society to liberate the specimens".

The work is considered seminal in Gómez-Peña’s career and in several threads in art history including institutional museum critique, post-colonial debate, problematic representations of cultural otherness, and para/fictional art.

To purchase the Couple in the Cage please contact Video Data Bank.

Preview of Couple in the Cage is available here.

NAFTAZTEC T.V.

...or, El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD

This project was Gómez-Peña's infamous pirate TV broadcast. A live military satellite transmission interrupts the nightly news in an act of "guerrilla television".

This classic piece of para/fictional art presented the artist as a "post-NAFTA Cyber-Aztec" pirate who commandeered a commercial TV signal from his underground "Vato bunker," where virtual reality meets border art in a collage of footage ranging from home movies, excerpts of earlier GP's performances, Mexican movies, political commentary, etc. Radical politics, autobiographical material, "reverse anthropology" and parodic traces of media broadcasts comprise the content of this legendary video art piece. Later distributed by Video Data Bank.

For a short preview and to purchase the video please visit VDB.

“A cross between Oscar Wilde and Lenny Bruce, witty and gritty and brilliant, Gómez-Peña stretches language to the breaking point, coining words and code shifting at will... Anyone interested in contemporary performance theory should read his books. For the rest of us, it is a cultural roller-coaster ride with decidedly satirical seat belts." -Publishers Weekly

The Cruci-Fiction Project

Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes staged the original “Cruci-Fiction Project” in 1994, attaching themselves to 12 by 8 foot crosses at Rodeo Beach, Marin Headlands Park in front of 300 invited guests and members of the international press. Images of The Cruci-Fiction Project appeared in Der Spiegel, La Jornada (Mexico City), and many other publications in multiple countries, inspiring similar actions worldwide.

The performance was a critique of the state-sponsored xenophobia branding people of color, specifically Latinos in California, as criminals, romantic entertainers and gang bangers. The only film documentation of this project is in the archives of the late René Yañez held at the Bancroft Library.

Temple of Confessions

This itinerant and interactive performance/installation is an early work credited to La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña’s transdisciplinary art organization.

Temple of Confessions presents two "end-of-the-century saints" from an "unknown border religion," in search of sanctuary across the United States while gathering confessions on intercultural fears and desires. Designed as a theater of mythos and cultural pathologies, the "Temple" proposes a ceremonial space for the reflection on ethnic, racial, and gender prejudices. It is divided in three main areas: the "Chapel of Desires," displaying "El Pre-Columbian Vato" or "holy gang member" (performed by Roberto Sifuentes); the "Chapel of Fears," displaying "San Pocho Aztlaneca" (a "hyper-exoticied curio shop shaman for spiritual tourists" performed by Guillermo Gómez-Peña); and an enigmatic funerary vignette composed by performance objects. Paintings of other "hybrid santos" hang from the walls, two "chola nuns" take care of the temple, and visitors can leave their "confessions"; the most revealing ones are incorporated into the installation soundtrack for future performances.

Through a series of performative interventions in everyday life, as well as in museums, La Pocha Nostra creates the means for provoking in the "Temple" prospective audience an aura of expectation, a bearing witness of a mythology of intercultural fears and desires.

“The North stereotypes the South. In turn, the South internalizes these stereotypes and either reflects them back, commodifies them to appeal to the consumer desire of the North, or turns them into ‘official culture’. Meanwhile, national identity gets lost in this display of reflections and refractions. It’s like being inside a House of Mirrors.”

-Gómez-Peña, from an interview with ‘Reforma,’ Mexico City

The Mexterminator Project

A 'political peepshow' of sorts, this interactive performance/installation functions as a living museum of techno-dioramas displaying a series of living 'multicultural Frankensteins' or 'ethno-cyborgs'.

The characters, created by La Pocha Nostra, are based on thousands of anonymous on-line responses by net users (www.mexterminator.com), re-interpreting their proposals for 'hybrid specimens' meant to embody Americans' expressed intercultural fears and desires toward Latinos, immigrants and people of color. The resulting dioramas involve physical interaction with the audience, encouraging visitors to engage in the reflection of their own psychological and cultural monsters.

The Mexterminator Project inspired the pop aesthetics of Robert Rodriguez films and the Hollywood craze for "Border Pulp" cinema.

Borderscape 2000

Described as a "high-tech Aztec Spanglish lounge operetta," this performance works through and with Chicano stereotypes -- featuring the Cyber Vato, the Mexterminator, the Transvestite Mariachi and other Pocha Nostra "cultural specimens" -- in order to address and examine border-crossing issues of race, gender, language, religion, politics, commodification and multiculturalism.

“The deadend of multiculturalism.” Rustom Bharucha

The History of “Western Art” in 15 Minutes

A crash course on queering and/or racializing art history. (1992-End of Empire)

A recurring theme in Gómez-Peña’s work has been an obsession with rewriting and restaging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black and indigenous bodies.

By 2010, in collaboration with Saul Garcia Lopez and Michele Ceballos Michot, the project evolved as a lecture-style performance presentation including a troubling “lecture/demo on race & gender power relations in the museum.” This satirical performance was presented by the artists in the form of “living and dying dioramas” both tracing and reinventing “the western canon” as taught by universities and art schools. They often incorporated to the taxonomies of the live images, local social phenomena and artwork from the collection of the hosting institution, wherever the piece was performed.

This ever-unfolding series is part of La Pocha Nostra’s current performance repertoire. What follows is a selection of these projects.

“For over 30 years Gómez-Peña has occupied a space somewhere between the terminus of Western Civilization and the underbelly of modernity, where Hi-tech Aztec, Cyber Pocho and Superbarrio contend for a White House bid. Their nation––Imagi-nation––inhabits a locus vacillating on the edge of censorship––más allá, on the other side of an imaginary line drawn in the sand, against an ever-vanishing horizon. “ --William Stark

"Latin American culture and Latin Americans (including chicanos) have always been on display for Europe and the U.S: from zoos and circuses, to concert halls and contemporary museums, from living dioramas to festivals. We have always performed the role of "exotic others" for a European bas-relief and for the European flaneur cum North American tourist...and museum visitor.” -GP in an interview with Kim Sawchuck, Parachute Magazine, Canada.

Below the photos are two classic Pocha Nostra videos dealing with politics of representation and the brown body within the museum.

The Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities

The Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities is a project of La Pocha Nostra. Part nightclub, part theatre, part church, part peepshow, the work is a hyperactive, participatory kaleidoscopic experience of identities, perceptions and realities. It was conceived of as 'experimental curiosity cabinet', a sort of living museum where participants exhibit constructed 'hybrid personas' based on their own complex identities and personal sense of race and gender. These 'cultural especimens' compose a diorama of fetishized identities, addressing issues of appropriation of hybridity by corporate multiculturalism.

It is considered a groundbreaking work combining performance, installation and extreme audience participation.

"I believe in the power of decorating and aestheticizing the brown body in order to exaggerate, challenge and problematize mythical notions of the Mexican Other. In the American imagination, Mexicans are allowed to occupy two different but strangely complementary spaces: We are either unnecessarily violent, hypersexual, treacherous, cannibalistic and highly infectious; or innocent, ‘natural,’ ritualistic and shamanic. It’s the barbarian vs. the noble savage narrative replayed over and over again. Both stereotypes are equally problematic and colonizing.”-From Gómez-Peña’s performance diaries.

The Great Mojado Invasion

This video has been newly re-mastered in light of the current Trumpocalypse!

In The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US - Mexico War), writer/performer GP and filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of U.S./Mexican relations. Both artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, the politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance. Like a ghost from the future, Gómez-Peña (also known as the Border Brujo and El Webback) narrates this "mock-umentary," which envisions a queue of mojados ("wetbacks") who reconquer lost Mexican territory to establish the new "U.S. of Aztlan." This pseudo-documentary presents a fictionalized account of the history of the current state of affairs, from pre-Columbian times to the immediate future.

The video begins at the inception of a second U.S./Mexico war. This time, contrary to history, Mexico is victorious. The nation-state as we currently know it has collapsed. The ex-U.S. of A. has been fragmented into a myriad of micro-republics loosely controlled by a multi-racial junta and governed by a Chicano prime minister appointed as El Gran Vato. "Spanglish" is the official language, treating the monolingual viewer as a "nomadic minority." Panicked by the "New Borders," Anglo militias desperately try to recapture the "Old Order." The "New Aztlan Regime" propagandizes itself by satirically depicting Anglos with the same stereotypes currently utilized against Latinos: a portrayal of dumb, lazy, violent, drug-taking lunatics who are demonized as "alien" invaders from outer space.

As the video moves through time, the artists reveal found-footage from Mexican B-movies and U.S.-made films depicting Latinos (e.g., The Three Amigos, Under the Volcano, Altered States, Disney animation, etc.). The outcome is a "whirlwind tour of Latino stereotypes in film.

Film trailer below. To purchase the full video please visit Video Data Bank.

"As in most of his work, Gómez-Peña toys with an underlying meta-theme: the fear and/or embracing of a psycho-sexual-political-racial borderland identity. Through the juxtaposition of clips from campy Mexican genre films (sci-fi, wrestler, soft porn, historigraphical, and other exoticized kitsch) against stereotypes long popular in Hollywood, Gómez-Peña, along with his accomplice Vazquez, fabricates a videographic hall of mirrors. The result is a multifaceted reflection shifting between fiction and the realities that expose the depth of internalized racism in this country. Gómez-Peña and Vasquez attack hard reality with large doses of irony and black humor." VDB

The Mapa/Corpo Series

With "Mapa/Corpo", La Pocha Nostra members Gómez-Peña, Violeta Luna and Sifuentes (and later on Maria Alejandra Estrada and other performance artists throughout the Americas) create a performance setting that is both live jam session and reflective ritual zone. The full environment experience ultimately allows the audience to co-direct the fate of the performance by incorporating symbolically charged actions and imagery with those of the artists.

In this “interactive ritual for the new millenium” Luna lies on a surgical table covered by the flag of the UN. Behind the body, an acupuncturist dressed in a lab coat prepares for surgery, laying out 40 needles. A small flag is attached to the tip of each needle, each representing a nation of the "coalition forces.” A doctor methodically inserts the needles into her body/map, leaving the audience to ponder the after-image of a "colonized" female body/world. The audience was then asked to "de-colonize the Mapa/Corpo" by carefully removing the flags with the assistance of the acupuncturist/doctor.

Gómez-Peña has said about this project: “As live artists, our task is to create living metaphors that articulate a new aesthetic, culture, spirituality and a sexuality that emerge out of the ruins of our Western civilization.”

Using the human body as a site for political reinvention and poetic prophesying, La Pocha explores both the legacy of fear of the Other -- the criminalization of the brown body inherited by the Bush administration, and the emerging culture of hope, imagination and faith that has developed in response to the former world order. The resulting performances tackle this historic moment of dramatic reinvention by looking into the immediate past and attempting to manifest a possible future without resorting to quick fixes and false hopes.

A brief history of the Mapa/Corpo series:

In this series, La Pocha re-examines the human body as a site for radical spirituality, memory, penance, activism, stylized anger and corporeal reinvention. The first in the series (Mapa/Corpo) toured internationally from 2003-2010 offering a poetic, interactive ritual that explored neo-colonization/de-colonization through political acupuncture and the reenactment of the post-9/11 "body politic."

The second part of the series (Divino Corpo) was a performative temple where the sacred and the profane intertwined with racy contemporary issues. In this project the artists posed as living saints and Madonnas of unpopular causes (border crossers, undocumented migrants, prisoners, the infirmed and displaced invisible others) in an attempt to articulate a radical spirituality located in the body that emerged out of the debris of war.

The latest performance in this series offered a reinactment/performative languaging of the criminalization of the brown body titled Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society 6.9. The project premiered in early 2010 at the La Habana Biennale (Cuba) and at the Trouble Festival in Brussels (Belgium). Other versions were performed at PRISMA in Oaxaca (Mexico), the Three Rivers Art festival in Pittsburgh (US) and El Arte es Acción in Madrid (Spain).

The Mexorcist

In this performance, Gómez-Peña assaults the demonized construction of the US/Mexican border - a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minutemen, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities. To this effect, the “border artist extraordinaire” uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and activist theory as subversive strategies. In this journey to the geographical and psychological outposts of Chicanismo, Gómez-Peña also reflects on identity, race, sexuality, pop culture, politics and the impact of new technologies in the post-9/11 era. The Mexorcist, one of Gómez-Peña’s first truly solo works, was performed in multiple iterations, and under multiple subtitles, for a period of over 5 years. These performances sparked him to begin exploring a body of spoken word performance solos that he continues to develop and perform to this day.

La Nostalgia Remix Series

Since the early 1990s, conceptual artist James Luna and Gómez-Peña worked on an ongoing project titled “The Shame-man meets El Mexican't,” in which the duo challenged assumptions and lazy thinking about ethnicity and culture in our society infused with a strong dose of melancholic humour and sharp-edged conceptualism.

"La Nostalgia Remix" was the last project in “The Shame-man…”. It was launched in 2006 and used nostalgia as style, a form of resistance and community reinvention. Using performance, writing, photography, video and interventions in seedy bars, La Nostalgia Remix involved a series of live performances that explored the cultural, symbolic and iconographic dimensions of nostalgia both on the Native American "rez" and in the Chicano "barrio."

"La Nostalgia Remix: Solid Gold" was a culminating performance anthology of the artists’ past collaborations in the form of a live art record album and a series of performances inspired by a chance game of routlette. In this final project, the artists challenged the audience to move, groove and experience the performance actions from multiple perspectives and “git down” to participate in the celebration of the end of western civilization.

El Corazón de la Misión

In 2007, in response to rampant gentrification & evictions, Gómez-Peña and Violeta Luna premiered a 3-year project entitled El Corazón de la Misión, a performance bus tour guiding the audience through a poetic/performative “vernacular anthropology” in the heart of San Francisco’s iconic Mission District.

The passengers of this politicized tour on the “Mexican bus” were invited to participate in a procession as if they, too, were characters on a parade float. They witnessed “the creative neighborhood” and the city as a “bohemian theme park”, using the windows of an immigrant bus as a vantage point to watch the streets while simultaneously eavesdropping on the artist’s mind. People on the street became involuntary performers on the stage of Gomez-Peña’s neighborhood and living metaphors of a transient border zone.

“This poetic journey across the social realities and erased histories of a mythical Mission District invoked a pantheon of collective gods and goddesses buried by globalization and urban hipsterism - passion, civility, compassion, boldness, fantasy & political imagination. Presenting the city in this light was reminiscent of how tourism frames other bohemian destinations such as Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Oaxaca and pre-Katrina New Orleans.” -Nola Mariano (writer/producer)

Performance Conversations

For Gómez-Peña, artistic collaboration across borders, genres and generations has always been an expression of radical citizenship. In 2010, he formally began a series of collaborative ‘duets’ with international fellow artists under the working title of “Conversations Across Borders."

In the original press release he stated:

"What propels us is the fight against cultural and political isolationism; the search for a new democratic art practice and a new spirituality centered in the human body, one that emerges out of the debris of war & the collapse of the global project. I am particularly interested in collaborating with artists whose practice is slightly or dramatically different from mine but with whom I am connected by a long-term friendship and mutual admiration. Our goal is to use the museum, gallery or a historically charged space as the site to take a pulse of the times and compare notes and performance strategies.”

Throughout the years Gomez-Peña has collaborated with activist preacher Reverend Billy, Cuban conceptual artist Tania Brugera, Lebanese-American photographer RJ Muna, Chicano comedian Richard Montoya, Mexican electronic composer Guillermo Galindog, the rock band The Size Queens, The Native Collective Postcommodity, VestAndPage (Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke), performance curator Francesca Carol Rolla, Brazilian choreographer Marcela Levi, Spanish artist Marceli Antunez and Mexican performance diva Maria Eugenia Chellet.

(Please refer to “Conversations Across Borders” on the Publications page for a literary version of this concept)

As another example of these performative conversations, below is an excerpt from Gómez-Peña’s collaboration with radical activist preacher Reverend Billy: “In a radical move to form the biggest, wildest mega-church of the 21st century, the congregations of the Church of Stop Shopping and the apostles of the Mexiconspiracy of Borderasure, we have decided to merge in an interfaith wrestling match to consecrate our hopes and exorcise the demons of art, activism and political despair.”

Short video of this collaboration below.

Posnacional Series

Beginning in February of 2013, Gómez-Peña began a series of performance workshops and “jams” between “national” and “post-national” artists from Mexico and the U.S. Curated and directed by the artist, as part of his Posnacional project, these multiple collaborations between artists from both sides of the border and three generations take the form of live performances, workshops, theoretical dialogues, poetry slam festivals and photo-performance sessions. The “re-encounters” take place in multiple sites across Mexico, in cities undergoing crime cartel violence and extreme forced migration to the US.

These Reencuentros are meant to reconnect La Pocha Nostra and the Chicano artists that they bring with several generations of performance artists in high migration areas, to increase involvement in the radical pedagogy of performance in the "other" Mexico. These residencies also contribute to the development and professionalization of performance art in Mexico.

In the second phase of this project (2017-2020) Gómez-Peña explores recurring themes from the initial series including: violence, racism, identity crisis in both countries, forced migration to the "other side", the intergenerational abyss in the performance art community, and the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump Administration.

The portfolios in the Posnacional/Reencuentros series aim to debunk the traditional binary of photographer/model, instead giving equal creative agency to each individual collaborator. At the same time, they present wholly integrated, synergetic works with all elements engaging in dialogue. By framing the images as a truly collective, democratic work, La Pocha Nostra hopes to encourage viewers to unpack complicated issues of authorship, ownership, credit and criticism.

(The original 8-year old visual memory of this project was erased overnight by Tumblr under their new "community friendly clause".)

The remaining portfolios from the series can be accessed here.

“The North stereotypes the South. In turn, the South internalizes these stereotypes and either reflects them back, commodifies them to appeal to the consumer desire of the North, or turns them into ‘official culture’. Meanwhile, national identity gets lost in this display of reflections and refractions. It’s like being inside a House of Mirrors.”

-Gómez-Peña, from an interview with ‘Reforma,’ Mexico City

The Phantom Mariachi

In early 2015 - as the “post-gentrification” era became harder and harder to ignore and more virulent than ever before - La Pocha Nostra performance troupe began to think of ways to address complex issues facing our immediate Bay Area community (San Francisco, Oakland & Berkeley) in performative, playful and highly visible ways.

The Phantom Mariachi made her public debut in the 2015 San Francisco Pride Parade as part of the leading entourage of “the Ecosexuals” (Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Gómez-Peña & crew).

The persona of the “Phantom Mariachi” features a black spandex Sentai-suited “anonymous” woman (we are not disclosing her identity) wearing a mariachi hat, high heels and bearing a bar-code that directs onlookers to political statements viewable online. Other times she holds placards with statements like: “Against the erasure of complex identities and eviction.” or “Trump no existe.”

This bold persona appears as a walking censorship bar. She silently speaks of the devastating erasure of complex identities. She is a symbolic inhabitant of past, present and future of all “creative cities”-gone wrong.

The goal of this real-life Super-Heroine is to inspire people in San Francisco and other cities undergoing similar processes of extreme gentrification to respond with creative and critical commentary to their own local issues.

During public appearances, the Phantom Mariachi delivers poetry, takes selfies with audience members, engages in more staged photo opportunities, stages tableaux vivants with people in the streets, crashes politically questionable events, takes public transportation and ad libs with audience members and the unsuspecting/perplexed passer by.

This self-styled “Madonna of the Bohemian Others” has a more serious side bringing to light the seeming erasure and displacement of communities in the Mission district and other similar neighborhoods; in particular the many Latino families, artist, bohemian, queer communities and working class people, currently being evicted or deported.

Adam and Eve in Times of War

"Adam and Eve In Times of War" is a performance ritual created by Gómez-Peña and La Saula. It includes a poetic/spoken word "mass" by Gómez-Peña and a participative live art ritual by Garcia-Lopez and Balitronica Gómez.

The performance articulates the contradictions of the ongoing colonial culture of violence in both countries and specifically parts of the Mexico-USA border controlled by crime cartel violence with the complicity of US mercenaries and gangs.

During the ritual component, La Saula & Balitronica engage in a performance ritual action inside the carcass of a large cow or pig corpse borrowed from the local slaugherhouse.

The artists invite audience members to reflect on the culture of violence against the "other" including migrants, indigenous peoples and, on the US side, Mexicans and refugees.

“Like codices, Gómez-Peña's group performances are palimpsests through which layers of history and critique speak in (de)effaced languages whose grammar we are in the process of (re)constructing.“ -Eduardo Mendieta, Nepantla Magazine

The Most (un)Documented Mexican

The Most (un) Documented Mexican is a solo performance monologue work that draws from Gómez-Peña’s 30 year old living archive and combines new and classic performance material to present a unique perspective on the immediate future of the Americas. His-self styled “imaginary activism” invokes  performance art as a form of radical democracy and citizenship.

Combining spoken word poetry, activist theory, radical storytelling and language experimentation, Gómez-Peña offers critical and humorous commentary about the art world, academia, new technologies, the culture of war and violence in the US, organized crime in Mexico, gender and race politics, and the latest wave of complications surrounding gentrification in the “creative city”. This spoken word performance includes cameos by La Pocha Nostra troupe members Balitrónica and Saula.

Uroborus vs. Trump’s Wall Audio Anthology

An Audio Art Anthology

Uroborus vs. Trump’s Wall is Gómez-Peña’s anthology of recordings from 1978-2018, including audio-art, performance, border poetry & weird songs performed against Trump’s imaginary border wall.

As part of Guillermo Gómez-Peña's ongoing "Posnacional 2” Project in Mexico, this is the artist’s second "Audio Anthology," a remasterized selection of his classic collaborative sound poems and audio art (with Guillermo Galindog, Greg Landau, Rupa Marya, the Size Queens and DJ Ricardiaco) as well as brand new recordings.

The Radical Elders Project

The Radical Elders Project

Since its inception, La Pocha Nostra has been committed to the inclusion of artists from multiple generations and specifically those considered “elders”. This intention is particularly relevant in the United State -a cultural setting obsessed with youth and one that too often pushes older artists to oblivion.

In 2020, we formalized that language by turning it into an ongoing project and series of longstanding collaborations - some of which now span more than three decades of artistic relationships.

In the last 20 years we have collaborated actively with Rene Yanez (rest in power), Miguel Algarín (rest in power), Felipe Ehrenberg (rest in power)Juana Cata (Oaxaca), Sara Shelton Mann (San Francisco) and Maria Eugenia Chellet & Lothar Mueller (Mexico City), to name a few.

The following photos document a few of these projects.

We Are All Aliens

Since the 1990’s, La Pocha Nostra has utilized the charged imagery of the green alien as a metaphor to illustrate America's inability to deal with cultural otherness. The Alien appears as a recurring persona in our live performances, photo shoots and experimental films. The project is a philosophical and artistic response to the ongoing crisis in the lives of percieved cultural “others”, refugees and immigrants (legal as well as “illegal”) during a time of generalized xenophobia. In LPN's work the human body is a metaphor for the socio-political body. In this view, performance art is clumsy but efficient form of radical democracy and citizenship.

Excerpt from Gómez-Peña’s personal diary:

I write definitions of the ALIEN word:

“Being or thing foreign to the environment in which it now exists”

meaning…in some other place…say an alien planet;

O sea, not a citizen, not a word in nahuatl or Navajo, meaning,

A racially ambiguous “cultural outsider”

with delicate antennas popping out of my scalp…

2020-21 The Pandemia Chronicles

Since lockdown began in March 2020, Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra have adopted a ¨hybrid lifestyle¨ where virtuality, media & film provide ways to continue creating work and reaching trans-national “live” audiences from different locations. As a collective, LPN never stopped creating and presenting performances, continually pushing the boundaries of how to adapt live art to virtual formats and the creative challenges posed by confinement.

Here is a selection of work that emerged from the heart of the multiple pandemics:

LIVE ART IN THE VIRTUAL REALM:

Starting 2020, La Pocha Nostra presented a series of Zoom Broadcasts and bi-monthly virtual events including spoken word solos, poetry slams, intellectual salons, classroom visits, international performance workshops & festivals  - involving all Pocha Members of that time plus special guests from around the world.

A pedagogical milestone was hosting La Pocha Nostra’s first ever virtual international workshop. This experiment spanned over five weekly sessions beginning in early August 2020 and involved 36 artists from 10 different countries. The final event culminated in a wild performance art + film marathon free and open to the virtual public.

¨THE MEX FILES¨ WEEKLY RADIO PODCASTS:

In mid 2020, Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra created a ¨Media Barrio Station to outlive confinement.¨ They began to record and present a weekly podcast titled “Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border” in collaboration with Lumpen Radio and Public Media Institute (Chicago), and Radio Nopal (Mexico City). The series presents re-mixes of Gómez-Peña’s previous audio artwork (1980–2015) as well as newly created and recorded material about our times.

Now in its 4th year, this ongoing weekly podcast offers multilingual live radio and archival audio programs that address “the multiple pandemics of racism, sexism, xenophobia and neo-colonialism on steroids in the Trump Era and beyond.”

The Mex Files shows available online here

The Mex Files virtual keynote: An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future

On February 3, 2021, Gómez-Peña presented a performance keynote and call to action titled: An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future. As an insider/outsider artist, he has had an obsession with rewriting and re-staging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of women and BIPOC. This performance keynote challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring(s) from within. The artist invites the public to continue sharing their own open letters of such nature.

Video of keynote available here.

PERFORMANCE FILM:

Over the course of the pandemic, La Pocha Nostra got to work developing a collaborative filmmaking format, drawing directly from our own performance methodology and responding to the immediate artistic constraints posed by the multiple pandemias and prevailing culture of fear. The complete process of making the performance films is decentered, experimental, and collaborative, defying traditional filmmaking practice. Moviemaking against all odds but by any means necessary.

A selection of films from this period:

The San Francisco Living Archives - An anthology of experimental films by Gómez Peña and three generations of La Pocha Nostra members from the last 30 years. Here

Malinche in Times of Pandemia - A performance film by Gómez Peña & Jessica Fertonani Cooke exploring and retelling history of colonialism from the conceptual lens of the myth of the ultra complex character, La Malinche, and her multiple mythologies along with the fall of Tenochtitlan.

How to Survive the Pandemics? - A poetic and performative exchange between Gómez Peña & the European performance duo VestandPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes). Sponsored by LADA (London), this poetic film is a chronicle of the first lockdown. Here

San Francisco Apocalypse - A film about the fall of empire and the creative city, with chicano filmmakers Gustavo Vázquez and Lalo Obregón featuring some of the wildest local musicians and performance artists residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here's a

Gomez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive

2021 and beyond

Responding to the times artists have had to reimagine their concept of “home” and “studio”. Since early 2020 La Pocha Nostra has been reconceptualizing their two headquarters - one in California and one in Mexico - as utopian spaces for spiritual survival, artistic reinvention and community meetings (virtually and in-person when possible).

The Casa Museo project consists of two homes that connect Gómez Peña’s life, family and peers with his art. These experimental art spaces provide an open invitation to progressive historians, curators and artists wishing to engage critically with diverse histories and feature them more prominently and radically in the discourse of contemporary art.

These sites are the home of The Living Archives Project - a diverse archival collection representing 50+ years of border work and conceptual mapping of a unique interdisciplinary art legacy.

The San Francisco Casa Museo: This loft in the Mission, Califas, connects the life of the artist with the larger Chicano experience and the international performance art world including “performabilia” from three decades of performance art practice and cultural exchange.

The Mexico City Casa Museo: In the southern home, the family’s objects and revolving art collection tell stories that go back to the roots of what the country is today. This includes diverse objects and materials from different times and stages of Mexico’s history including moving testimonials related to migration. The site may be considered the origin story of La Pocha Nostra.

Both homes regularly host artists and researchers for specific projects inspired by the living archives. The Casa Museos are also performance zones regularly hosting artistic salons and live-art activations.

Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra have a longstanding practice of exhibiting the living archives and have created site specific installations in a range of institutions including Centro Atlantico (Canary Islands), San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City) and the Jane Addams Hull House Museum (Chicago).

“Every corner in the neighborhood is a utopian/dystopian space. Every space in the building is a potential performance space.” - Gómez Peña

THE MEX FILES: A Divination Ritual & Duet

Now Booking for 2025

THE MEX FILES: A Divination Ritual

A new spoken-word duet & “live-action juke-box”

by Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Balitrónica

Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Balitrónica's current duet features excerpts from their most recent performance manuscripts and bank of ritual actions. Utilizing a casino roulette and several tarot decks, Balitronica utilizes various forms of oracular magic to select spoken word texts and props for Gómez-Peña’s live performance. The fate of the script and the performance are determined by methods of divination, chance, and direct contact with the spirits that be.

In this live performance project, the artists are unplugged, thinking out loud and articulating the challenges and possibilities of reinvention in the midst of multiple pandemics & the spiritual world crises. The performance includes new texts written during the past two years combined with “classics” from Gómez-Peña’s own living archives.

Artist Statement by Gómez-Peña:

“My new performance represents the fruit of my life’s work in all its iterations: live performance, lecturing, archiving, literary work, mentoring, community activism, all coming together to address the dangers of the times we live in with its disregard for human life and insidious undermining of democracy.

At this time in my life I am thinking as much about legacy as I am trying to continually produce socially conscious experimental artwork that is simultaneously plugged into the national debates. I have learned from decades of touring performance material to locations beyond the Border that a call to action - in the form of a work of art - has the power to elicit compassion and inculcate a desire for social justice.

For me performance art is a form of radical democracy and citizenship which depends on the presence of the audience/community to succeed. I view my approach to creating this hybrid piece as "performing the archives" for multiple contexts: The art world, academia, community and the media. I am particularly interested in connecting with a new generation of audience members who may not have been exposed to the history of my generation, performance art and the Chicano movement.”  - Guillermo Gómez-Peña

*Technical rider, artist bios and more photos available upon request. pocha@pochanostra.com

The Chicanx AI LAB

The Chicanx AI LAB

Gómez-Peña has a longstanding commitment to and fascination with "new technologies". Throughout the decades, La Pocha Nostra has been experimenting with early web design, interactive CD roms and participatory media. In the last two years, Gómez-Peña has teamed with techno-savvy artists interested in exploring the possibilites of AI to generate a new iconography and performance mythology.

What follows are selected images developed by Gómez-Peña in collaboration with Francisco Orrego, Feral Kitten (Indigo June and Meghan July) and Taylor Louis.