Festival ’90 : BORDER CLASH : Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena: A man between two worlds--Mexico and the U.S.

Some folks have tougher commutes than others. Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, for instance, doesn’t just trek across town or down the freeway--he makes his way across the busiest international border in the hemisphere, where the Third World meets the first at Tijuana-San Ysidro.

“I’m just replicating the migratory patterns of my people,” the inveterate wise-guy quips. “I have assumed my role as a migrant performance artist, condemned to travel back and forth on a conceptual highway.”

A native of Mexico City who trained at CalArts, Gomez-Pena began creating performances as part of the Grupos movement in Mexico in the early ‘70s. Also strongly influenced by the Chicano movement, he went on to become one of the founding members of the Border Arts Workshop during the mid-’80s.

His award-winning solos, most famously the “Border Brujo,” combine languages--Spanish, English, “Spanglish,” “Inglenol,” Nahuatl, wild theatrics and guerrilla satire to convey a new internationalism, a borderless ethos.

“1990,” the first part of a trilogy, focuses on the antics of a constantly transfiguring persona, this time “El Charro Tantrico, alias Charrollerro or Charromantico” rather than the Brujo. In this new work, Gomez-Pena equates his personal biography as an artist-activist with a history of Mexico.

As with the “Border Brujo,” “1990” draws on traditions as varied as those of radical Mexican comedians Tin-Tan and Resortes, Carpa theater and Western conceptual art. As much the son of Joseph Bueys as of Cantinflas, Gomez-Pena tries out his new performance personas on the unwitting test audience of the INS.

“I wear the suit and the makeup and I confront the Border Patrol in costume,” he says. “If they let me into the country, the character is going to have a long life. If not, I have to look for a new character.”

In addition to Gomez-Pena’s live performances Sept. 12-16 at MOCA, a related radio broadcast produced by Elisabeth Perez-Luna of Toucan Productions in Miami will air in up to 25 major U.S. cities prior to the performance dates.

Back from a working trip to Miami, Gomez-Pena traveled from his south-of-the-border home, to meet with the reporter in his studio--”The Ministry of Border Counter-Culture”--at Sushi, a performance space and gallery in downtown San Diego.

Q. With topics as serious as racism, human rights and social inequality, how does so much humor work its way into your performances?

Answer: I have to use the strengths of my culture because I’m always in the position of disadvantage, of the cultural “Other.” Some of our strengths are our negotiating skills, as citizen diplomats, and also using humor as a political weapon--a very important idiosyncratic part of Mexican art. It is an effective way of deconstructing the seriousness of ideas. Humor allows me to penetrate the psyche of my audience, allowing me into their cultural space.

I’m also interested in the element of surprise. That comes from having to be constantly misread, as a Mexican, and having to be perceived as an expected stereotype or mythology. It’s important to constantly destroy these expectations and humor is extremely useful for that. In the middle of an extremely serious political phrase, I break character and become someone else. Pure confrontation no longer works. We have to replace that model with a more enlightened one. I’m looking for new models: of dialogue, of seduction, of exchange, of intimacy.

Q: How does this new work, “1990,” relate to your other performances?

A: Most of the work I’ve done since I left Mexico is about coming to terms with my duality and the duality of my people--living between two worlds, two artistic traditions, two languages, two spiritual world views and realizing these contradictions are at the core of our contemporary experience. I have combined political activism and experimental techniques to intervene directly in the city life, using the public space as a stage and taking passerbys by surprise, confronting the inhabitants of the city with otherness.

Q: Is this way of making work indicative of the art of your generation?

A: The experimental Mexican artists that left the country in the late ‘70s and came to California haven’t fully arrived and cannot fully go back. The ‘70s in Mexico were a decade of crisis and diaspora, especially for those of us who couldn’t find a place in the map of official, national culture, which was protectionist and traditional. People with radical sensibilities were forced out of the country: some went to the countryside, some to Europe, and some came North.

We are a lost generation. Ten years later, many people are trying to make sense of the journey from South to North, from pre-Columbian to high tech. The work I do is about tracing the footprints of this journey. It’s an important generation in that it’s a transitional one: half Mexican and half Chicano, and because of that we can be good interpreters of one side of the border to the other.

Q: How have international events of the past year changed things for artists?

A: I recently came back from the Soviet Union, where I went as part of bi-national mission of artists and activists, to exchange information about the state of consciousness and culture in two parts of the world that have traditionally conceived of each other as enemies. Artists in the ‘90s can be very good border crossers, ambassadors who can exercise their skills toward diplomacy. Artists can replace government agents in instances where our governments aren’t willing to dialogue.

In 1989, the whole world went crazy. We started to experience fundamental changes in global relations and world cartography. What happened to artists and intellectuals was, first, a moment of perplexity, wondering what our position in this new society was going to be. We underwent a serious process of reflexivity, asking who are we in the ‘90s and what is our role? Now we are beginning to come out of that moment, those reflections, and trying out new models.

Q: What about those “barbarians” and the NEA imbroglio? How, for instance, did the decision of NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer to deny grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller effect other performance artists?

A: We see in the way the four performance artists who have been blacklisted by those morons are articulating themselves in the national media that we are facing a new kind of artist: an artist-politico, an artist-diplomat, an artist-interventionist. Artists are going to be forced to become radicalized, because the situation isn’t going to get better. The moral weight of our actions and our sense of historical responsibility are increasing. Our activities are becoming dangerous for the first time in a long time.*