Rediscovering America in 1991 : Join Guillermo Gomez-Pena--performance artist, multicultural theorist and ‘genius’ grant recipient--on his quest for identity

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

--Donna J. Haraway, “Symians, Cyborgs, and Women”

The sun is setting in fierce Mt. Pinatubo reds outside Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon, a “trans-cultural” Scottish pub in 20th-Century America’s Babel-on-the-Hudson. Approaching the millennial end of the century, and 499 years into the far-flung spiritual diaspora of the New World, Guillermo Gomez-Pena--performance artist, undercover “Border Brujo,” errant warrior for “Gringostroika”--orders chorizo, black beans and rice, and reminisces about his life before achieving total Mac-Arthurtude.

In June, Gomez-Pena was among 31 recipients of the 1991 MacArthur Fellowships, those mythically tinctured “genius awards” that sponsor the work of innovators in myriad fields-- from scholarship and social activism to jazz drumming, and now, even the previously fringe world of performance art. Additionally, the foundation announcement listed Gomez-Pena as performer and theorist, referring to his extensive written work over the last decade, which deals with the art and politics of multiculturalism.

The award means Gomez-Pena will receive $230,000 over the next five years--with no strings attached--as well as health insurance, which is a scarce but often useful commodity in the sometimes daredevil world of performance artists.

After growing up in Mexico City, then spending 11 years in California--most of those in San Diego--Gomez-Pena recently moved to New York City, where he just premiered a new one-man performance work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival. (The show, “1991,” will be performed at Highways in Santa Monica on Nov. 1-2.)

The artist’s idee fixe these days is the 1992 Quinto Centenario, or quincentenary, the upcoming anniversary of Columbus’ arrival on the shores of the “New World.” By his own admission, Gomez-Pena is on a spiritual quest to “rediscover” the Americas, to map the new vortices of identity that reflect the complex history of the New World, from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Island.

Much of his work explores the question of who present-day Latinos are, as inheritors of the New World legacy of conquest, miscegenation and migration. “I have become a sort of performance pilgrim,” he says. “I’m always joking that I am looking for the ‘other Mexico,’ that I’m a post-Mexican and that my journey is one that goes from the beginning of the South to the end of the North. Of course, it’s the mythical North. I will never get there, but the fact I’m embarked is what’s important.”

In performance, with a booming, resonant voice, he detonates a battery of characters in a delirious, rapid-fire array that can look a little like Ricardo Montalban trance-channeling Pancho Villa on acid. In Gomez-Pena’s hands, ethnicity is not identified with nationalism. The breakthrough in his work may lie in its push toward a self-created, cybernetic ethnicity, stripped of any romantic ideals of the self, and as rooted in contemporary consumer and media culture as in any one historical national culture.

As he puts it, he is “developing fictions and mythologies that are pertinent to the present time.”

Later this night Gomez-Pena will attend the crossover “Tune In, Turn On, Burn Out” concert at Radio City Music Hall, featuring righteous rappers Public Enemy and the punk-gothic Sisters of Mercy. But right now, sitting at a table in mid-town Manhattan, he is back in Mexico City--his birthplace and “spiritual womb.” He is remembering the rich street culture of his old neighborhood, Santa Maria La Rivera: the loud and colorful vendors, the street performers called mericolos , the endless motley pageant of Mexican humanity.

When he speaks, the rapid patter has a Salvador Dali-like accent, as it shifts transparently between Spanish, English and Spanglish, like an electrical current coursing through a complicated circuit. “My father would take me to the cafes and bars where en esos dias , the writers and intellectuals mixed with singers and performers and sportsmen, and that mix of people had a great influence on me.” His current performance style makes use of many such elements from his past, from the vocal pyrotechnics of street hawkers to the fantasy worlds of comic books and professional wrestling.

Born into the transnational epoch of rock ‘n’ roll in 1955, Gomez-Pena had an upbringing that was nonetheless consummately “capitalino.” His family had been in Mexico City already for several generations. His grandmother was a poet and a popular radio personality. One uncle had emigrated to East Los Angeles, where he had become a tailor, designing zoot suits for the young Mexican-American pachucos .

Gomez-Pena recalls, grinning: “When he came to visit, everyone in Mexico City thought his clothes looked strange, with the big shoulders and the long coats!”

But the young Guillermo must have appreciated his emigre uncle’s sartorial style. In “1991,” one of the central characters is El Caballero Tigre, an Aztec tiger warrior who wears a zoot suit and fake tiger skins.

The character, he explains, “understands the language of TV and could be invited on ‘Sabado Gigante’ with Don Francisco, or he could sell videos for bilingual Spanglish lessons. He’s a border hipster.” It is this sort of juxtaposition of ancient past and contemporary irony that has become the Gomez-Pena signature stroke.

Almost by way of explanation, the artist recalls his early education at the Colegio de Jesus in Mexico City, where he was first introduced to classical art and literature. At the same time, he was weaned on the volatile formula of rock ‘n’ roll and mass media, from American television to the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues.

“Some friends and I had a band, and we played at fiestas and such, but it was mainly to impress the chavalillas , the young girls,” Gomez-Pena recalls. He still exudes an aura somewhere between that of a rock star and the classical cinematic good looks of soulful Mexican film stars like Vicente Fernandez or Pedro Armendariz.

Of his days as an undergraduate at the national university, studying philosophy and linguistics, Gomez-Pena recalls most of the new cultural influences coming via Europe. “We were not conscious of the Chicano movement as it was happening. That came slowly, in pieces, with news of things that were happening in San Diego, San Francisco and L.A. ,” he says, gesturing and pronouncing the last with dramatic emphasis as if speaking the name of a holy oracle.

After a recent spate of conferences and exhibitions in Mexico, Chicano culture may now be exerting a greater influence on the estranged siblings to the South. But Gomez-Pena believes there is still a wide communication gap, rooted in a longstanding prejudice many Mexicans hold first toward Nortenos, people of the Mexican borderlands, and Mexican-Americans, the “shipwrecked orphans” of the 19th-Century Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which separated the American Southwest from its mother nation.

From his earliest days as an artist, Gomez-Pena was already in a long line of intellectuals obsessed with the perpetual riddle of national identity, “Who is a Mexican?” As a nation composed largely of mestizos with mixed European and indigenous heritage, modern Mexicans perpetually set out to discover themselves as terra ignota , or unknown territory.

But Gomez-Pena is now as connected to culture on this side of the border and is one of the few Mexicans to also concern himself with the question, “Who is a Chicano?” Neither question is really meant to be answered. They are more like home-grown Zen koans, to be perpetually pondered over and conjured around in a quest for identity. Here, he is building on the work of earlier Chicano poets and performers, like the poet Alurista and the actor-director-writer Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino.

Much of Gomez-Pena’s youth was spent in a search for roots. “We were all making the usual pilgrimages, through (Carlos) Castaneda, with the Indios , and off to Spain, to search for the crazy grandmother,” by whom Gomez-Pena means Queen Isabella, royal sponsor for Christopher Columbus’ fateful 1492 voyage.

In another early adventure, the artist went to Catemaco, a mountain village in the state of Veracruz, to participate in an annual gathering of brujos , the traditional spiritual healers, whose beliefs and practices are derived from pre-Columbian cultures.

One of his earliest performance pieces, in the streets of Mexico City, put Gomez-Pena and a female collaborator in Bunuelian disguise; she as a pregnant nun, he as a priest. In this fashion, they rode the Metro, walked the avenidas and even entered an old downtown church, doling out blessings as they went. “Our idea,” as he recalls it now, “was to jar sensibilities, by using the traditional images people were most familiar with.”

The Mexico City community of artists and performers--such as those associated with the “Neografica” and “Mail Art” movements of the early ‘70s--began to discover kinships with other, largely European, politicized art genres, like the Fluxus movement associated with the German conceptual and performance artist Joseph Beuys, one of Gomez-Pena’s spiritual padrinos. One of his Mexico City mentors, Felipe Ehrenberg, spent a number of years editing the influential bilingual Fluxus journal La Cuerna Emplumada (The Plumed Horn).

But frustrated by the lack of venues in Mexico City where he could find an audience for his artistic and performance ideas (he still has yet to mount a full performance in his “hometown”), Gomez-Pena decided in late 1978 to relocate north, as so many Mexicans have done and continue to do.

He attended CalArts, and after founding an experimental theater collective, Poyesis Genetica, in Los Angeles, he spent time in Europe. In the mid-’80s, he co-founded the Border Arts Workshop in San Diego--an influential cadre of artists committed to exploring the political and aesthetic issues raised by la frontera .

“The beginning of the workshop was a return to activism,” Gomez-Pena says. “It was towards a border aesthetic, border consciousness, to provide a sense of self. To be there in full body, to be binational commuters, to utilize our art to shape the new topography of the border.”

In a steamy cab to Radio City Music Hall, Gomez-Pena talks with collaborator and companera Coco Fusco--an art critic and film curator, as well as performer--about one of the costumes for the Brooklyn Academy performance. Gomez-Pena explains that Fusco will play the role of “St. Queen Isabella, the dipsomaniac” in the upcoming show, and the costume includes a wig festooned with replicas of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.

Insomuch as Gomez-Pena’s work is attempting nothing less than a “redefinition of the political topography of the Americas,” the Radio City concert seems the right place to be: to observe a rare alignment of the hip-hop nation, with the more nihilistic underworlds of heavy metal and punk. It has the promise of multiculturalism with a beat.

After being initially awe-struck by the gilded Temple of Deco excess of the Radio City lobby, Gomez-Pena notices a pair of teen-age Latino biker punks walk by. He smiles benignly, his eyes shining, as if acknowledging that soldiers of the legion of “Gringostroika” (“ Perestroika for the Americas”) have already infiltrated here too. Soon he is talking about new Latino rappers, who he refers to as “Latifahs de Aztlan,” and the music’s rising popularity in Mexico City, noting how impressed his young cousins will be when they hear he has seen Flavor Flav, one of the rappers with Public Enemy.

In fact, far from being the United Nations of counterculture pop, most of the audience tonight has come only to hear Public Enemy. After a 20-minute set, the rappers leave the stage and most of the audience leaves the hall, abandoning the headliners, Sisters of Mercy. Tonight, it seems, multiculturalism is a marketing ploy, and little else.

For Gomez-Pena, it is familiar terrain. He has been in the trenches of the “multiculti” wars since the mid-’80s, publishing extensively in newspapers and magazines in Mexico, as well as frequent appearances in such U.S. art world publications such as High Performance.

With titles like “A New Artistic Continent” and “The Multicultural Paradigm,” his articles read like manifestoes, declaraciones and artistic calls to arms. The tracts bristle with neologisms that reflect the numerous parallel realities within the Gomez-Pena world view: Arte-America, Chicanost, Art-mageddon, Punkarachi, Tecno-Rasquache.

In a new piece, “From Art-mageddon to Gringostroika,” Gomez-Pena lashes out at those who have recently used the “P.C.” scourge to pillory multiculturalism. He writes: “Many Anglo-Americans who have been unable to find a place at the multicultural dinner table are becoming increasingly more vocal against racial, sexual and political difference. The far right is lumping all politicized matters of ‘otherness’ under the label of ‘political correctness’ and branding it ‘the new intellectual tyranny.’ ”

Some days later, we are in the Brooklyn apartment Gomez-Pena and Fusco share. The walls are hung with Cuban and Mexican art, as well as a large black velvet painting of Gomez-Pena as the “Border Brujo,” one of his performance incarnations. He proudly announces it was painted by the “Caravaggio of tourist art” in Tijuana.

Early Tex-Mex songs by Tin Tan and Piporro are playing on the boom box, followed by a punk version of “Mexico Lindo.” After a day of rehearsal, Gomez-Pena is making Cuban-style cafe con leche and talking further about his aesthetic master plan.

Referring to the recent battles over censorship, funding for the arts and the perceived challenge of multiculturalism, he sips at his coffee and comments glumly: “It is extremely sad what is happening because this means that monocultural Anglo-European America is still threatened by the ‘other’ just as it was when the first pilgrims arrived to the New World. Both the pilgrims and the conquistadores always read signs of ‘otherness’ as signs of danger. And we are beginning to experience the same.”

This philosophical leap from the ways of past to the ways of the present is the essence of Gomez-Pena’s read on the upcoming quincentenary. “Many of the modes of relating that existed between the Old and New World are still present and keep being re-enacted in multiple stages across the continent. The way the Spanish related to the Nahuatl is not different from the way the Border Patrol relates to the migrant worker, or the way the police relate to Latino and African-American youth in the barrio and the ghetto. The Chicano is being discovered constantly.

“We have to destroy this nation of discovery and replace it with a model of symmetrical dialogue.”

On a sunny afternoon in his office-studio at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Gomez-Pena is feverishly reading aloud through some of his texts against the recorded music tracks that have been mixed for his new performance piece. With the characteristic gleam in his eye, he rewinds the tape to the point when ritual Aztecan conchero music melds seamlessly into a propulsive hip-hop beat.

This particular track will introduce the character of the Aztec High-Tech, who is listed in the script for the show as wearing “ Conchero outfit/feathered headdress/electric dark glasses/leopard underwear.”

For someone so committed to the powers of reinvention, Gomez-Pena still harbors some regard for authenticity, insisting that the new show should be developed by an all-Mexican staff, including the set designer, the music engineer and the video artist. In performance, the staging of the show will even ask the audience members to identify themselves. Program notes in the script state: “At the entrance of the theatre, there are 2 digital bars directing the audience: to the left, those who speak “Spanish, Spanglish, Nahuatl and tongues”; to the right, the “English Only” crowd.

As he readied his Brooklyn debut, Gomez-Pena pondered the new tightrope element of his act--performance artist and MacArthur genius. In the charged magnetic fields of Latino art, he has already taken some hits. After the announcement of his award in June, one Tijuana artist told the San Diego Union: “Guillermo’s work is very good and important, but I don’t think his work is any more important than that of other artists following a similar path.”

Adding to potential divisiveness, at the same time, Gomez-Pena had just published an article decrying the making of border art into a commodity, writing: “A movement that began as an attempt to dismantle Anglo-Saxon patriarchal authority ends up being appropriated, controlled, promoted and presented by Anglo-Saxon patriarchs.” After the so-called “Latino Boom” of the ‘80s--surveying a transformed landscape scattered with blue corn chips, Frida Kahlo T-shirts, MTV “Border Rock” and Taco Bell place mats based on the work of border artists--Gomez-Pena concluded: “The border as metaphor has become hollow.”

And might not his own MacArthur award be seen as a symptom of this creeping “gentrification” and co-opting of radical border artists?

“I don’t just want to be the new aborigine, discovered by Christopher Columbus and taken to the Spanish court for display,” he says. “I want to be regarded as a serious intellectual.”

Though he says the dispute over border art is painful and should be left in the past, he says the award has given him a greater sense of responsibility about his words and actions, separating what he calls the “culture of hype” from the “culture of dialogue.”

“There is a difference between having fame and having a public voice. As an intellectual, one aspires to have a national voice, to participate in the debates that define the national self. Debates about education, politics and culture. Fame doesn’t necessarily give you that access. . . . There is a difference between intellectual debate and the cult of personality. I want to establish this difference very clearly.”

But everywhere you turn these days, multiculturalism is on the defensive. In the New York Times, national cultural correspondent Richard Bernstein regularly launches salvos against what he calls “the new tribalism in the arts” as well as the perceived cult of “political correctness.” Diane Ravitch, one of the most outspoken academic voices taking issue with multiculturalism in the schools, was recently given Senate approval to become assistant secretary of education.

What does this mean for the fate of the Americas? With the recent Free Trade Agreement struck between the United States and Canada, and another rapidly being drafted with Mexico, business and state seem to be exploring their own brand of Pan-Americanism. “I believe first and above all in a Free Art Agreement as a basis for negotiation,” Gomez-Pena offers, recalling how many influential modern Mexican writers also held high official posts, from Jose Vasconcelos, who was minister of culture, to Carlos Fuentes, who was a diplomat.

“We need an American Common Market in which Washington will be one of many partners and not the one who dictates the rules of the game all of the time.”

For now, Gomez-Pena has his work cut out for him. As he moved to complete preparations for his new show, race riots scarred the New York night; another series of regional elections was stolen by the ruling party in Mexico; the militarization of the border continued apace, and a squad of drunken, geriatric Stalinists fumbled their bid to scuttle perestroika . News even came down that the Public Enemy and Sisters of Mercy tour was canceled because of poor ticket sales.

In the meantime, somewhere in Brooklyn, surrounded by his dramaturgical and alchemical props, the Warrior for Gringostroika struggles on.