Case of Mistaken Identity Highlights Border Tensions : Race relations: Mexican cultural commentator is erroneously suspected of kidnaping his blond son.

In a city set on edge by the recent slayings of two boys, police wasted no time last week in responding aggressively to a report of a kidnaping of a blond preschool boy by a man at a cafe.

Officers quickly tracked a taxi to suburban Coronado on Thursday, entered an empty house with guns drawn and, finding no one there, combed the streets where they finally found the suspect walking with the boy.

It was no kidnaping, however. The “suspect” turned out to be Mexican performance artist and cultural commentator Guillermo Gomez-Pena, whose award-winning work ironically centers on the politics of race relations and multicultural, cross-border misperceptions.

The boy was his 4-year-old son, Guillermo, who was spending the weekend with his father.

The mix-up began when Gomez-Pena, after finishing a lunch with his ex-wife, climbed into a taxi with his son and headed for a friend’s house in Coronado. Two women who were dining at the cafe called 911 and reported overhearing a couple “bribe” a little boy with promises of toys and a fun weekend, police said.

The callers told police the child did not look like he “belonged” to the couple--Gomez-Pena’s ex-wife is dark-haired but not Latina--and claimed that the man appeared to have abducted the boy, police said.

A respected artist and recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship “genius” award, Gomez-Pena said he is aghast at the racial undertones of the incident.

“It is one more case of a cultural misunderstanding in which speaking Spanish is a sign of danger,” Gomez-Pena said. “It is one more sad memory of being a Mexican walking in San Diego, which is in itself a suspicious act. And being the father of a boy who looks Anglo-Saxon becomes doubly suspicious.”

San Diego police have received several false reports of child abductions since the sexual assault and slayings of two boys near the U.S.-Mexico border last month caused widespread alarm and a flood of telephone tips, said police spokesman Bill Robinson.

“This is occurring during a period that this entire city has sensitivity and awareness of this type of crime,” Robinson said. “People are reporting anything that even resembles a child abduction . . . And the officers will respond.”

After getting the call on Gomez-Pena, officers acted quickly in dispatching a helicopter and alerting units citywide, Robinson said. He said ethnic bias played no role in the officers’ response.

Gomez-Pena described the San Diego and Coronado officers who questioned him as “nice guys” and said he understands their reaction--to a point. He criticized police for entering and searching the empty house of his friend, filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, while Gomez-Pena was out strolling with his son.

And he fears that the incident could have turned violent if he did not speak English or if officers, believing they were hunting a dangerous criminal, had confronted him inside the house.

“What if I had been in the house and I hadn’t heard them?” he asked. “What would have happened if I hadn’t come to the house until late at night?”

Led to the residence by the taxi driver, officers surrounded and entered the house because they feared that a child’s life was in danger, they told Gomez-Pena.

Their actions “would not be unusual if it’s believed to be an ongoing felony,” Robinson said.

The episode served as a weird comment on Gomez-Pena’s irreverent, swashbuckling, high-voltage brand of performance art. It was a slice of real-life street theater, this time with the artist as unwilling protagonist.

To calm his son’s fears about being detained by police, Gomez-Pena said that, at one point, he turned to little Guillermo and told him: “Don’t worry, it’s just like a movie.”

The Mexican-born Gomez-Pena, who is moving to Los Angeles after several years in New York, built an international reputation during the past decade with his writings and theatrical explorations of Mexican and Chicano cultural identity. In the mid-1980s, he founded the Border Arts Workshop in San Diego.

In his prize-winning “Border Brujo” video, directed by Artenstein, he portrayed an array of characters inspired by the hybrid world of the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 1991, he was awarded a $230,000 MacArthur Fellowship, a highly coveted prize doled out by a private foundation to artists, thinkers, scientists and others to free them of financial burdens so they can focus on their work.

Gomez-Pena’s recent work focuses on the politics of multiculturalism, and levels an all-out satirical assault on Christopher Columbus and the traditional celebrations of last year’s quincentennial.

“My work for 12 years has been centering on race relations,” he said. “This is the central anxiety in contemporary America--race.”

And he and his ex-wife, Emily Hicks, a comparative literature professor at San Diego State University, believe that racial stereotypes were behind last week’s misunderstanding.

At the cafe, the trio had enjoyed a cheerful lunch and the boy was content, they said. Nothing about their demeanor should have caused an outsider to perceive that Guillermo, who is bilingual, was being held against his will, Hicks said.

“It was so homey, it was like a little Hallmark lunch,” she said. “This is a little kid who loves his father. . . . He was sitting there very happy, drawing with his crayons.”

Nonetheless, police told Gomez-Pena that two women grew so suspicious they followed the family into the street and called authorities.

“And this happened in the neighborhood that claims to be the most tolerant in San Diego,” Gomez-Pena said of the fashionable Hillcrest district.

It was not the first time Gomez-Pena was faced with such a confrontation. Airport immigration officials detained and questioned him recently when he returned from a trip to Mexico with his son.

“I become a racial stereotype because of the color of my skin,” he said wearily. “I become a bandit: the poetic smuggler.”