Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the USA in 1978. His performance work and ten books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US–Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over 800 venues across the USA, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the USA, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

For nearly thirty years, Gómez-Peña has contributed to the cultural debates of our times staging legendary performance art pieces such as, “Border Brujo” (1988), “The Couple in the Cage” (1992) and the “Mapa/Corpo” series (2004-2009). Continually developing multicentric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed “Chicano cyber-punk performances,” and “ethno-techno art.” In his work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members and readers in the position of “foreigners” or “minorities.” He mixes experimental aesthetics, activist politics, Spanglish humor and audience participation to create a “total experience” for the audience member/reader/viewer.

Through his organization, La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists. La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. Every year, La Pocha conducts a summer and a winter performance art school. The site for this pedagogical adventures changes every year.

http://interculturalpoltergeist.tumblr.com/

http://lapochanostralivearchive.tumblr.com/

Image: Artists Logan Phillips and Saúl López Velarde posing as ‘post-apocalyptic locas.’ Oaxaca, 2010. Photo: Berenice Guraieb. Courtesy of La Perrera

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