What is the 'frontera,' the border that separates the United States and Mexico? Is it simply a line drawn in the sand, a potential avenue for illegal immigrants or drugs? Does the line hold hard and fast, the fences, ditches, water and walls a clean break between what is ours and what is the other?
The answer for performance artist, writer and experimental filmmaker Guillermo Gómez Peña
-- and to just about anyone familiar with 'frontera' culture -- is most certainly no. The 'frontera' is significantly both a melting pot of cultures and a pressure cooker of misunderstandings and anxiety.
This weekend, Gómez Peña, through performance, two films and a talk, will refract our post-9/11 world through his multicultural prism and beam it back down in Spanish, English, Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) and all the permutations in between.
Gómez Peña's art has always been about the dialogue between what seem to be oppositional categories: between indigenous and European culture; between Mexican and U.S. culture; between native and foreign. Suffice it to say that, as a performance artist, mestizo (mixed Indian and Spanish heritage) and a citizen of both the United States and Mexico, Gómez Peña knows better than to characterize these relations as either/or.
His art is also conscious of the newly insidious connotation that immigration has had in the post-9/11 world. Once only profiled for "looking" like a Mexican, Gómez Peña now finds he has become the embodiment of the new, threatening brown person, the "Arab terrorist." He's been stopped and searched at several random checkpoints and has had many pieces of his performance repertoire confiscated, including ethno-techno art objects meant to embody the violence many see as the potentiality of 'the other.' Gómez Peña has characterized himself on occasion as a cultural coyote or smuggler, bringing the multicultural gospel, guerilla style, all over the world. The authorities, it would seem, are cracking down.
In an era when crossing borders has become synonymous with terroristic threat, the art of Guillermo Gómez Peña has taken on another layer of significance.
"The Bush administration is telling citizens to not look outside themselves, to close borders, to not travel," laments Gómez Peña.
While a new "inevitable dialogue and cultural exchange" is taking place between the literati and artists of the Mexican and the American community -- with the emergence and positive reception of new Mexican film and modern art -- among the population at large, the post-9/11 order has had the effect of breeding a "dangerous new nativism." That which is not American is now subject to "a type of prohibition in the general population." This, believes Gómez Peña, can only be to our detriment. Still, he believes that "the majority of the U.S. is more open to Mexico than they were 15 years ago."
Conversely, on a global scale, racialized images of multiculturalism have made their way into the mass media, in advertisements for clothing and sporting goods, and in popular music and T.V.
"Corporate culture is completely fascinated with otherness right now," says Gómez Peña.
He adds that it is due to our global culture, which shares this fascination. "Society has shifted its relation with subculture."
Gómez Peña says that what was once oppositional is now being pulled closer to the mainstream. He sees this in the reception of his performance art, which often uses extreme allegorical images to depict cultural stereotypes. "We used to be really shocking, marginal
Now we are looking for a new position."
American society's relation to immigrant populations (which are necessarily subcultures) informs much of the work to be performed, shown and read at this weekend's Virginia Film Festival. In the Lynn Hershman Leeson documentary "Borderline Fractures," Gómez Peña's witty political message and creative process are on display. The film includes footage of the artist performing and practicing spoken word pieces and describing his experience as an unwanted immigrant (and now official double citizen of the U.S. and Mexico).
Though you can get a taste for his performance pieces from the film, it would be best to see it in person.Gómez Peña brings his piece "Mexterminator II" to the Frank Ix building on Saturday at 8 p.m. The piece is an examination of stereotypes and fantasies about Latin "exoticness" which ranges from the bizarre to the sexual to the political to the terrifying. The piece utilizes costume, music, dance and video projection to eerie effect.
The biggest draw, at least for this reviewer, will be the short experimental art film "The Great Mojado (Wetback) Invasion," narrated and directed by the artist. The film uses found footage of Mexican and American B-movies and pornography to appropriate the stereotypes of Mexicans and "gringos" propagated by these films.
When the artist was a kid, he was exposed to these representations of Latinos in movies "that wouldn't even come out in the U.S." He was dismayed, then, to learn that "all the bad guys looked like me and my family
It was hard for me to establish an ethical relationship to these characters."
In the film, Gómez Peña turns these images around to make a psycho Mexican biker gang or a group of "marauding" Indians into a band of revolutionaries, re-imagining history (and the future) to critique the current state of Mexican/U.S. political and cultural relations. The film switches willingly between Spanish, English and the slang of both tongues to provide a wacked-out vision for a new world order, with Mexicans on top and gringos in the subcultural stance.
He calls his process "reverse anthropology," whereby he theorizes "the dominant culture at the margins" and gives history a new "fictionalized center." Gómez Peña sees in film the inherent possibility "to rewrite history." In some ways, he believes, "Hollywood has replaced history in the American context."
Anyone tempted to relegate Gómez Peña's art to the never-never land of the 'frontera' -- the "wild west" -- would do well to look around them at the way Charlottesville is changing right now. Truth be told, the frontier of cultural interaction and mixing is no piece of land or border town. The frontier is all around us, varying only in degrees of intensity and immediacy. Guillermo Gómez Peña comes to town this weekend to crank the dial a few notches.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
