Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art. His eight books include essays, experimental poetry and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish.

Contents

His Work

Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.), border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and the various Latino cultures: the U.S.-Mexico border itself, immigration, cross-cultural and hybrid identities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures, languages and races. His artwork and literature also explore the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, "extreme culture" and new technologies from a Latino perspective.[1]

Gómez-Peña is regarded as a pioneer in US Latino and Latin American performance art. Some of his performance art pieces include Border Brujo (1988–89), The Couple in the Cage (1992–93), The Cruci-fiction project (1994), The Temple of Confessions (1995–96), The Mexterminator Project (1997–99), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999–2002) and the Mapa/Corpo series (2004–2008) His performances often involve audience participation, elaborate costuming and environments, interactive technologies and other collaborators, including Roberto Sifuentes, James Luna, Violeta Luna, Coco Fusco,[2] Michelle Ceballos, Maria Estrada, Emma Tramposch, Antonio Turok, Demián Flores, Reverend Billy, and Tania Bruguera.

Through his unique organization, the San Francisco-based La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create transnational communities of rebel artists. La Pocha Nostra runs an extremely popular intensive performance workshop twice a year. Recent locations have included Tucson (Arizona, US), Évora (Portugal), Oaxaca (Mexico), and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Gómez-Peña is currently working with Canadian theorist Laura Levin in a book of "conversations across the border" (Seagull Press, 2011) and with Roberto Sifuentes in a book about their performance pedagogy (Routledge, 2011).

Performance Art

"The Couple in the Cage" documents the traveling performance of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, in which he exhibited two caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While Gómez-Peña's and Fusco's intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real "savages". The record of their interactions with audiences in four countries dramatizes the dilemma of cross-cultural misunderstanding we continue to live with today. Their experiences are interwoven with archival footage of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment. "The Couple in the Cage" displays a type of tactical media as described by Kaprow's happenings in which by showing a powerful blend of comic fiction and poignant reflection on the morality of treating human beings as exotic curiosities, Guillermo spread awareness about misunderstanding of human rights. His performance allows outside individuals to create their own interpretation of how they view the couple in the cage. The individual's behavior is studied and shown to have misunderstandings of people who are different than them.

Organizations

Education

Gómez-Peña received both his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1983) from California Institute of the Arts. He studied Linguistics and Latin American Literature at the UNAM (1974–1978, Mexico City).[3]

Honors and awards

Books and video Works

Books:

Videos:

Selected Performances and international events

Lectures

Notes

  1. ^ Fox, Claire F. The Fence and The River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
  2. ^ Allatson, Paul. "Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and 'American' Cannibal Reveries." In Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002, pp. 253-306
  3. ^ Allatson, Paul. "Guillermo Gómez-Peña." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2005. Vol. 2: pp. 858-59
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap "Guillermo Gómez-Peña". http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/bios.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-06. 

References

External links

Terms
Pre-Chicano Movement
Chicano Movement
Supreme Court cases
Culture
Lists
Category:Mexican Americans · Category:Mexican-American organizations