Viva La Vida: Guillermo Gomez Peña

Mexican-born performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a well known performer, writer, and cultural critic whose artistic work pushes boundaries. Born in 1955, Gómez Peña was raised in Mexico City and studied linguistics and literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 1978, he moved to the United States and studied post-studio art at the California Institute of Arts. Guillermo's work mixes English and Spanish, fact and fiction, social reality and pop culture, Chicano humor and activist politics to create a "total experience" for the viewer, reader, audience member. These strategies can be found in his live performance work, his radio chronicles, his award-winning video art pieces, and his five published books. Through his organization La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has focused very intensely in the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generation.

In 1988, Guillermo created Border Brujo, a solo live performance that combined autobiographical monologue with a series of rapidly shifting characters representing diverse border identities and positions, including mariachis, Border Patrol agents, gang members, priests, and a few white american's seeking excitement and jovial obedience from their Mexican neighbors. It was performed in various combinations of Spanish, English, and what Gómez-Peña claimed is Nahuatl (an Aztec language), Border Brujo was a performance that challenged the notion of “authentic” identity and fixed borders, humorously commenting on the ways representations circulate in relationship to politics, economics, and self-perception. In 1990, director and producer Isaac Artenstein created a video version of Border Brujo, that was also written and performed by Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Guillermo's most famous live performance piece is called "The Couple in the Cage" in this traveling performance that included Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, two caged Amerindians from an imaginary island were exhibited in a cage. 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. 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.

In 1993, Guillermo, Roberto Sifuentes, and Nola Mariano founded La Pocha Nostra in Los Angeles, California. In 1995, La Pocha Nostra moved to San Francisco's Mission District, where it has been based for the last twelve years. It was created to allow different artists to collaborate with each other. The created projects range from performance solos and duets to large-scale performance installations using video, photography, audio, and cyber-art.