Producing Some Border Witchcraft

Two men--one Mexican, the other Jewish--are swapping stories in a restaurant that has a French name and a Continental menu. As he dines on Italian food, the Mexican talks about a recent visit to New York City, where he found chiles poblanos in Brooklyn and a churro stand at a subway station.

The Jewish man, who has spent most of his life in the Southern California border region, alternates between Spanish and English as he tells a story about discovering a relative in Syracuse, N.Y. The Mexican counters with a tale about a compatriot who discovered a relative in Omaha, Neb.

There’s no punch line to this series of unlikely scenarios, but there is a message: the world is becoming one big culture clash.

The restaurant patrons were writer-performer Guillermo Gomez-Pena and film maker Isaac Artenstein. The artists were preparing for the world premiere of their collaboration, a multimedia performance piece entitled “Border Brujo II.” A brujo is a warlock or shaman. The premiere is being held, appropriately, in San Diego, where culture clashes are bred daily.

Gomez-Pena illustrates these clashes by violently and repeatedly smashing his fists together. The sudden action energizes the room and sparks a transformation in the self-proclaimed “Border Brujo.”

“ Brujos can practice lycanthropy,” says Gomez-Pena with a gleam in his eyes. “That’s what the border does. It makes you be other things.”

The border has made Gomez-Pena an award-winning performer. The original version of “Border Brujo” won him prizes at last year’s International Theatre Festival of the Americas in Montreal and in the New York Dance and Performance Awards. He has performed the piece throughout the United States and Europe.

Last week at Sushi Performance Gallery, Gomez-Pena performed the new version, a work-in-progress that incorporates a film produced and directed by Artenstein. The two artists were founding members of the Border Arts Workshop and the film is a result of their six-year collaboration. Eventually, the film will be distributed as a feature--a creative documentation of Gomez-Pena’s tour de force performance as a shaman who is the product of “the broken line,” “the infected wound,” “the umbilical cord”: Gomez-Pena’s descriptions of the border, where, as Artenstein says, “the first and the third worlds come together.”

Gomez-Pena’s work revolves around language. He is a prolific writer, and his performances, whether on stage or across a cafe table, are verbal vortexes. In “Border Brujo,” he speaks Spanish, English, “Spanglish,” “Inglenol,” and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. It is an attempt, he says, “to create three simultaneous discourses of communication.” He is especially intrigued by the audience’s reaction.

“When I speak English, there is a sense of confrontation,” he said. “When I speak Spanish, there is a sense of tenderness. And, when the text is bilingual, there is a sense of complicity.”

Gomez-Pena is an accomplice, and a willing one at that. The role of the brujo, he says, is “to guide other people through the border.” It’s seldom a peaceful journey. Sometimes, his performance has drawn responses that are “distrustful and aggressive . . . from people who are threatened by the presence of Latinos in the United States.

“I’m very interested in polarizing these issues because I think I can create a dialogue. Especially because the wounds are still fresh and open.”

He also speaks of reaching the people “who have escaped monolinguality and monoculturalism. Most of the inhabitants of this region are like that. Every time I come back, I am struck by the complexity of their lives--the spiral journeys.”

Gomez-Pena’s own journey started in his native Mexico City. “We thought of the border as all the stereotypes imaginable,” he said. “We were victimized by misconceptions about the border.”

Gomez-Pena moved to Los Angeles in 1978. He worked as a journalist for Spanish-language newspapers and attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He moved to San Diego, and soon began collaborating with a group of artists who were inspired by the presence of the border.

“It was a grass-roots, cross-cultural, utopian effort,” Gomez-Pena says of the Border Arts Workshop’s origins in the early to mid-’80s. “No one was claiming the border as a laboratory of cultural experimentation. We created a monster.”

Indeed. The workshop has garnered much critical acclaim and was recently the subject of an “Art in America” cover story. The genesis of “Border Brujo” came from the workshop’s 1988 “Border Realities” exhibit at the Centro Cultural de la Raza.