Abstract

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Chicano performance artist, writer and activist known for multidimensional performances where he taunts, tempts, thrills, embraces and excludes his audience His goal is to blur pre-established borders whether they be linguistic, ethnic, cultural,gender-based, geographic or artistic in nature, in order to create cross-racial, multicontextual societies while underscoring the realities of the marginalized community. In this presentation we show how Gómez-Peña communicates his visions by utilizing hybrid languages, complex costumes and personae, and culturally symbolic props intended to demonstrate the complex, fluid, and liberating nature of a borderless society. Sounds, symbols, languages, and musical genres are mixed in new combinations to create color and texture in an otherwise static monolingual monochromatic world. Through his performances, Gómez-Peña forces his audience to confront their fears and biases and obscures the line between art and life, object and subject, participant and observer. He dares us to hear, see and feel a hybrid, multi-centric way of life that absorbs change and differences rather than marginalizing it.