Latino Activist Jubilant Over $230,000 Grant

Most artists would jump for joy upon hearing that they’ve just been awarded $230,000, but Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a San Diego-based performance artist, received the news that he is one of the 31 fellows announced Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation with a sober sense of responsibility.

Mexico City-born Gomez-Pena, 35, has long centered his writings and performances around issues of the Mexico-U.S. border. In bilingual performances that often taunt audiences to consider the cross-cultural nature of 20th-Century America and the increasing Latino presence in the U.S., Gomez-Pena has made a name for himself as an artist-activist.

“Certainly there’s an incredible sense of jubilation,” he said of the $230,000 grant, which will be parcelled out in increasing amounts over the next five years. Speaking on the phone from New York, where he is working on a project to be presented next fall in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the normally extroverted Gomez-Pena sounded circumspect: “There are also the beginnings of a serious process of consideration. (The responsibility is) to keep my cultural commitment to the changes that this country is undergoing.

“In a sense, it’s a kind of position of leadership. I want to be very responsible and careful.”

Like many Chicano artists, Gomez-Pena has written and performed solo some of the time, but more often, he has worked in collaboration with other artist groups, among them, until last year, the San Diego-Tijuana-based Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, which he helped found in 1984.

“Border Brujo,” a performance/video collaboration with San Diego filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, recently won first prize in the 1991 National Latino Film and Video Festival in New York, and, in 1989, Gomez-Pena won a New York Performance Award, or “Bessie,” for his theatrical performances.

He is anxious not to take all the credit for himself, acknowledging the collaborative nature of his work.

“I think the ideas that are being recognized are a product of a collective effort,” Gomez-Pena said. “The gesture of recognition of that collective effort, of Latinos/Chicanos in the making of contemporary culture in this country, it’s an important gesture.

“I believe, like many Chicanos do, that artists must lead the way to the 21st Century. That we have to obtain a central voice in the national debates of this country. This is a heritage from the Mexican and the Chicano community, that we must speak from the new center, not the old margins.”

Gomez-Pena will be in Los Angeles today to appear on a panel at a meeting of the International Society of Performing Arts Administrators. He is developing a trilogy of performances, the first portion of which was presented in the 1990 Los Angeles Festival. The second part will premiere in Brooklyn, and the third will be completed in 1992 and will be shown first at the Walker Art Center.

“I’m working with alternative efforts to define the so-called discovery of America,” he said. “Trying to contribute to this important debate, to help develop a model that is more enlightened.”