Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)


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Guillermo Gómez-Peña: A "New Age Shaman" in a Bohemian Theme Park / Gretchen Coombs

Introduction

<1> The Marquis de Sade was declared, “the fist commandment of art is ‘never to bore,’” and perhaps no other artist of his generation has embodied this sentiment more than Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the Mexican-born performance artist and cultural theorist living in San Francisco. Since the early 1980s Gómez-Peña, along with his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, have been engaged in “reverse anthropology” staging “postcolonial” performances that foreground race and intervene in our cultural fears and desires by focusing on our obsession with the exotic. He deftly navigates the “post-multicultural” world – accelerated by globalization and nation branding – by using elaborate performative and interactive elements that expose (to the audience) their deeply embedded cultural stereotypes and desires for the other. These interactive pedagogical techniques implicate us in the larger context of identity politics, locating us at the crowded intersection of the politics of cultural difference. Such cultural identities have been shaped and defined by global processes that construct new, hybrid identities composed of new and old traditions and relocated through contemporary global art movements. Gómez-Peña’s has also extensively explored the concept of the "border" within the context of globalization and the process of mutual contagion between Mexico and the United States by developing new vocabulary to describe the reality created by the border phenomenon. It is a subject, like the others he addresses, that continues to demand his performative poetics.

The Work of a Postcolonial Artist

<2> An analysis of Gómez-Peña’s art work provides a context in which to relocate social and cultural anthropology into other sites of inquiry, and particularly for this essay, a critical arts discourse within a multicultural framework that finds activism at its core. A “bleed” between art and anthropology places anthropology as an engaged discipline by experiencing art as something other than a signifier of myth, tradition, or cultural otherness, thereby becoming socially relevant, emancipatory and possibly transformative.

<3> Gómez-Peña’s performances act as “theatricalizations of poststructuralist and postcolonial theorizations” [1] by addressing the multiple complexities of race, gender, hybridity, class; the presence of nationalism, globalization, immigration; and importantly, representation of subaltern identities. These discourses emerge not only within his performances, but also in the plethora of articles and books that confront these same issues with humor, irony, and self-reflexivity. Gómez-Peña’s cultural criticism and performance work produce a radical anthropology that shifts knowing to context and relevancy; his activist practices continually foreground ethics. Such interventions correspond to what George Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy constitute as “postcolonial art.” They suggest:

<4> The work of the postcolonial imagination subverts extant power relations, questions authority, and destabilizes received traditions of identity. It offers, in turn, new starting points for affiliation and community that draw on the well-spring of humanity. In an attempt to give some shape to the “postcolonial imagination,” we introduce key motifs of postcolonial art here-counter hegemonic representation; double or triple coding; and utopic and emancipatory visions [2].

<5> Gómez-Peña’s work has and continues to destabilize both the subject of anthropological inquiry – the other – and the desire that stems and motivates such inquiry, and the production of knowledge in relation to that cultural otherness. He confronts the current political landscape by performing within the spaces of constructed and hybrid identities that diffuse asymmetrical effects of power witnessed in knowledge production, especially a “multicultural knowledge” that distances, contains, and controls difference behind the veil of diversity [3]. Gómez-Peña’s work is “dramatizing the material embeddedness of language and knowledge, fracturing the gaze of mastery, and contesting the political cartographies that dichotomize the center and the margin, the knower and the known, can enact epistemic ruptures that forge a space for cultural difference to displace cultural diversity” [4]. Cultural theorist Homi Bhabha outlines this difference:

Cultural diversity is an epistemological object-culture as an object of empirical knowledge – whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as “knowledgeable” authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification [5].

<6> Gómez-Peña’s work also occupies a provisional site of activism; the line between what is actual in the world and what is performed in a space is not distinct for him as he believes that art can infiltrate the subconscious and create change by navigating the precious boundaries of art, spectacle and performance. When an interviewer asked him how art can be used to break open misconceptions and borders about cultural difference he replied, “artists make great border crossers….because the states are so low in our field, or perhaps because we love to take risks. Artists make great traffickers, great smugglers of ideas. We may be clumsy political organizers, but we are good cultural brokers. It’s just that society has lost its understanding of how to use artists” [6]. His creative resistance acts as a cultural practice that contests hegemonic social formations and threatens to unravel strategies of domination in the realm of representation. More recently, Gómez-Peña sees “the transgressive nature of my work was located in the finished artwork, in the actual performance or installation piece... the real political project is located in the border zone that exists somewhere between aesthetics, theory, pedagogy, community and activism” [7]. La Pocha hopes to bring collaborating artists and audience members into the creative process of the making of the piece. He describes how La Pocha Nostra currently works:

It is in this process of exchange, and because of the potential of the radical pedagogy of performance, we feel that change can actually take place. The utopian idea behind our new proposal is: if we can cross certain borders within the workshop, inside the rehearsal space, and during the actual performance, we might get inspired to cross them in the larger social sphere. The idea is for both participating artists and audience members to make aesthetic, ethical and even political decisions in situ, thus co-creating the piece with us. I am arguing for art as a kind of radical democracy that involves the active engagement of the artist with the local communities and the audience. But the challenge is to do this without compromising the aesthetics, without watering down our art [8].

Performing Identity

<7> In a culture that values image, style, and high production value, new challenges confront artists who make "radical" art for a society that feeds on radical culture. Moreover, much contemporary art has shifted its focus to the social as a medium; the excitement of superficial interactivity surely compounds Gómez-Peña’s challenge to avoid being reduced to spectacle. How does he make politically pertinent art when the mainstream culture fetishizes the margins and traditional forms of dissent are all too common?

<8> Not only does Gómez-Peña have relevant political content in his work, but he also insists that this political content reach into our personal realm and shake us down to our tenuous essential roots [9]. Performance art offers a very effective strategy for creating a reflexive space that allows audiences to get involved and re-think their relation to extremely sensitive issues. During his performances Gómez-Peña’s theatricality reaches Las Vegas levels reaching well past the satirical into our embedded psyches. Exaggerated costumes, plays on language, and variable props all combine to destabilize authenticity and reduce his performances to that of a Mexican or Mexican-American in favor of relational Mexican or Mexican/American subjectivities that act as conduits for historical memory and political critique. For audiences familiar with canned representations of Latino identity, these “new” identities cause dissonance and an inability to firmly locate the origin of the performer. Bhabha contends that work in visual culture is successful if insurgent acts of cultural translation deal with the past in the present by stating, “the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with the “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as a social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” [10]. This, for Bhabha, moves beyond a quest for origins to moments and processes that are produced when articulating cultural difference; performance of identity, then, becomes an iteration.

<9> The point of critique occurs when viewers/audience members are actively encouraged to draw on their own myths, cultural beliefs and stereotypes. Performances are not binary or self-righteous; it is neither the audience or the performer’s, but a provisional, multidimensional zone that allows the public to reflect upon self and other without feeling that they are being put on the spot, which opens up a space in which radical behavior and progressive thought can circulate. As Gómez-Peña states, this space is a “border zone, the distance between “us” and “them,” self and other, art and life, becomes blurry and unspecific,” reminding us of the contingencies present in such performances of postcoloniality [11].

<10> One of Gómez-Peña’s most provocative challenges to ethnography and anthropology came in 1992 with a performance project entitled, “Undiscovered Amerindians” in which he and partner Coco Fusco lived in a cage displayed as exotic others with elaborate “native” costumes, advanced technology, and partial nudity. For Fusco this asserted a “reverse ethnography . . . Our cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game” [12]. This performance acted as a mirror to reflect back the colonizing gaze, and toured worldwide and was met with mixed reception – outrage at this contemporary display of natives, and fascination with their sexuality, costumes, and the artifacts kept in their cage [13]. This performance launched Gómez-Peña straight into the heart of the art world; a world at the time grappling with issues of multiculturalism [14].

<11> More recently multiculturalism has come to represent gentrification and commercialization. In pop culture the Taco Bell Chihuahua has come to stand in for Mexican culture, Bellydance and terrorism for Middle Eastern culture, Shiva and Yoga for the culture of the Indian Subcontinent. In the art world artists face new challenges to this rapid co-optation of difference and spectacle. They are forced to be fluid and appropriate their ideas, for as quickly as the art world and society can consume them, artists must then re-appropriate and consume from the center. This interstitial dynamic takes on more urgency when work is presented in a gallery space: there’s movement across the thin line that separates spectacle and performance.

<12> How has the “death of multiculturalism” played out in the art world? Does it continue to perpetuate a binary system? Do Gómez-Peña’s tactics of humor, irony and subversion perpetuate the limitations of multiculturalism as he must bring to life the very thing he critiques by challenging notions of difference as an object to know while at the same time embodying that difference as a subject or site of inquiry? Such questions come to mind when he appears in popular contemporary arts institutions and emphasizes some of the challenges he faces in a progressive city like San Francisco.

Gómez-Peña’s Bohemian Theme Park

<13> The common perception of the Bay Area, partially due to the way the media has created an ahistorical “canned image” of free love and radical politics, produces a seductive myth; it also keeps many people from taking the political or social movements seriously and renders much of its potency ineffectual. Yet it remains a fertile ground to push the limits with art and politics – this city also has a reputation as a site for vanguard art practices and progressive politics that include activist politics, radical spirituality, performative sexuality, ecological justice and anti-globalization efforts, and which attracts people worldwide. And even though the Bay Area may be “progressive,” the arts community has a reputation for often being celebratory and uncritical; the emphasis is on building community and supporting one another in all endeavors, creative, professional and otherwise, which does not always invite such criticality.

<14> How can an artist work with this conundrum? San Francisco offers a laboratory to develop radical ideas and new cultural models. For Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra, it has been an open and friendly place to work (and live). Gómez-Peña finds some space in which to move:

We can attend the demonstration, but at the same time we must challenge the complacency of the dancing left. We must be both present and critical. Our pinche job is to ask the uncomfortable questions even if it means having awkward moments with our colleagues or adding tension to the San Francisco party. That’s part of my job as a performance artist [15].

Yet Gómez-Peña feels “that the most impactful work that La Pocha Nostra makes often happens in conservative cities in front of audiences that don’t necessarily agree with us; in places where they are not exposed to articulate Latinos who talk back and speak up. It is in the outposts of Chicanismo where we can really test the efficacy of our artistic practice” [16].

<15> Two of Gómez-Peña’s projects located in the Bay Area have highlighted some of the challenges he faces with his praxis of “artistic politics.” Viewing his work with in the context of San Francisco complicates, and possibly diffuses, his radical gestures. Audiences in San Francisco are sophisticated art-goers; the multicultural directive and desires for unity have been around for over a decade. Most residents don’t have a problem with nudity, sexuality, or shamanism – it is embraced personally and institutionally. Spectacle and expressions of radical individualism are not unusual. Gómez-Peña sees this potential lack of criticality as “a unique dilemma: “progressive” thought, ethnic and gender diversity and “transgressive” art practice are practically official policy. Discourses such as multiculturalism, feminism, Chicanismo, and gay culture are not exactly oppositional, but are rather a part of the City’s master discourse and mythology” [17].

Gómez-Peña’s (2010) take:

We all love it here. It’s like a bohemian theme park. And we all look the part. We all get some support and encouragement for doing what we do. But there is very little critical opposition to what we do. And as a result…we have very little impact because everyone seems to agree with us, at least on the surface. So the question here is, where do we locate ourselves when making politically and socially pertinent art? Where are the margins located when dissent becomes normalized and even encouraged? Do the margins become conservative? Are we just talking amongst ourselves, patting each other on the back for our transgressive actions, while the rest of the country is undergoing a process of Talibanization [18]?

<16> In the context of a city like San Francisco, Gómez-Peña’s work raises the question of whether criticality means taking the right position on issues or having the ability to ask questions. He feels it is exactly the job of artists, critical thinkers and theorists should be in opposition to the master discourse even when it is similar to theirs.

Ex-Centris

<17> Throughout the gallery at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hung black-lit velvet posters that depicted members of La Pocha Nostra frozen in exotic costume. At the same time these same artists circulated in the gallery as objects that represented our cross cultural desires. Five small stages were set up, occupied separately by a holy man in saffron robes, an Asian prostitute, an Aztec warrior (with a megaphone), and best yet, a shamanic drag queen who was half-naked. All deliberately acted out their cultural otherness.

<18> The gallery was packed. People milled about from stage to stage, mouths gaping - curious, appalled and often participatory. This representation of caricatured cultural others incited discussions about sexuality, racial, and national identity. The line between the artists and the audience was completely blurred; in fact my husband was approached to participate nude. Gómez-Peña’s provocative technique was engaging, and visitors were often seduced into participating in the show, but in reality they are implicated in the show. This tactic worked and activated precisely what Gómez-Peña critiques. His performance interventions are, “’happenings as a form of ‘participation performance’ in which both the audience and the stuff of everyday life-objects, activities, tasks, experience-were embraced as viable materials for art” [19]. For the audience/participant this work demands constant reflection on embedded assumptions we retain when performing our identity and engaging the other. You have to be brave to embody stereotypes. By not participating in his performances, we can avoid discomfort. One is implicated either way. Exposing and complicating stereotypes evokes the residual traces of political intent, and for Bhabha, this disturbance to the audience’s ‘voyeuristic look’ enacts the complexity and contradictions of the desire to see, to fix cultural ‘difference’ in a containable, visible object” [20].

<19> Gómez-Peña and his colleagues use their bodies to circulate in the contested spaces they produce in galleries, museums and on the streets. In the context of performances, there is a strategic attempt to decolonize the body, which attracts attention with elaborate costumes, gender-bending, fetish-wear, not to mention the over signified tropes of cultural otherness. Gómez-Peña suggests, “our system of thought tends to be both emotionally and corporeally based. The performance begins in our skin and muscles, projects itself onto the social sphere, and returns via our psyche, back to our body and into our blood stream; only to be refracted back into the social world via documentation. We distrust thoughts we can’t embody” [21]. He implicates his body into the political field of power. Michel Foucault identifies the political technology of the body as that power which is exercised over the body, which produces knowledge of the body, and which dictates a mastery of its forces [22]. These bodies use ritual to struggle against such normalizing power by displaying their [brown] bodies freely, perversely, and with full emotion that defies any gaze.

<20> Gómez-Peña and the curators at YBCA refuse to let issues of identity be buried and use these strategies to move through the contested space of post identity politics. Does employing extreme “behaviors” act as the most effective strategy to resurrect issues of identity? It appears possible as, “something else besides, in-between:”

What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out,’ remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference – be it class, gender or race. Such assignations of social differences – where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, an in-between – find their agency in form of the ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch the point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the part and the needs of the present [23].

<21> While the performance was powerful and intoxicating, it alerts us to the possibility that performing difference can’t escape its reception as spectacle. This work can be both frustrating and productive in relation to a multicultural artist in a city that values its openness to difference, and in an art venue that grapples with these issues in the art and performances they present. San Francisco culture hasn’t “moved beyond” these issues of identity, race and nationalism as they pertain to border issues, and cultural otherness is far from behind us, continuing to organize and inform our understanding of diversity, culture and race in San Francisco. Such issues get hidden by the imperative of politically correct language and behavior.

<22> In a culture that fetishizes subversion, especially in the Bay Area, it is becoming more difficult for Gómez-Peña to deploy subversive tactics to maintain the potency (and relevancy) of his work. At YBCA this work performs a spectacle of difference and supports YBCA’s larger mission to be progressive with issues of race. Ex-Centris reaffirms the Center’s interest in social and political art. The performance peddled the Center’s sense of urgency to display aspects of progressive politics and activism by foregrounding postcolonial themes. It’s Gómez-Peña’s (2010) belief that “the City and its auxiliary funders encourage art practices to be socially conscious and sensitive to race and racial gender,” and feels this “can have a negative impact on your art, cause you can become self-righteous and complacent, thinking that the whole world thinks or should think like you” [24]. Do we need a spectacle to critique the spectacle of multiculturalism? Perhaps, but not just by being critical, but by producing a different subject position for audience members who decide involved in the piece. These conditions of reception need to be evaluated for the risk they pose to efficacy of Gómez-Peña work.

<23> Furthermore, Gómez-Peña believes it is becoming more and more difficult in the post-911 political climate to make ruptures and interventions into consciousness on the level of representational politics. He believes that one brown body, that of the Middle Eastern, has slightly displaced that of the Latino brown body; they become interchangeable cultural others that engender fear in the national psyche, one through immigration, the other through terrorism.

El Corazon de la Mission

<24> Increasingly the counter-culture, which includes many in the arts community, demands more performative measures; entertainment or spectacle that can help make horrible issues more digestible. But it a distraction. Besides, there are possibilities in art to make social critiques, and to offer new ways of imagining and experiencing the world, which is why during performances like Ex-Centris or El Corazon de la Mission an audience can get insight into postcolonial issues like race, displacement, nationhood, and gender, etc. Issues that sit at the intersection of art and politics.

<25> The Mission Bus Tour, El Corazon de la Mission, offers an excellent example of politically and socially engaged art that I’ve seen in the Bay Area. Gómez-Peña was able to literally navigate a contested terrain. Audience/participants were implicated in relation to the Mission and the larger issues that are present there by being both voyeurs and performers. The performance embraced so many stereotypes, yet Gómez-Peña’s fierce insight revealed itself in the voice-over, the engagement he incited with his audience during the performative bus ride, with the people on the street, at the immigrant bar at the end (with Violeta Luna, a member of La Pocha Nostra). Participants moved through the Mission space and also inhabited multiple psyches, Latino’s, hipsters, and drunks. The neighborhood became the stage for a moving performance and the people in the street to become involuntary participants in the larger performance. This project didn’t make a distinction between the local and the global; those fictive boundaries were erased to reveal a microcosm of larger issues facing inner cities across the country, issues that reveal the historical and current reality of immigration, legal and illegal, as well as the complicated politics of “progressive” tourism.

<26> In some respects this project intervenes in some of the limitations of Bay Area progressive culture; it is at once self-reflexive about our (those who lived there) relationship to the City and how we all embody multiple identities that provisional and contextual. It was awash with irony; hipsters on the bus, and hipsters on the street, immigrants at the bar and on the street. Gómez-Peña’s original idea was “to parody this new phenomenon of extreme tourism by creating a bus tour of the Mission District, which has been labeled by pop magazines, ‘the hippest hood in the hippest city of the US’” [25]. He hoped wanted it to strike the right balance balance between artistic experimentation, activist politics and populist entertainment. He attempted to “reveal the historical and current reality of immigration (legal and illegal), as well as the complicated politics of ‘progressive’ tourism that turn vibrant neighborhoods and cities into shallow spectacles” [26]. He wanted to make “the Mission unfamiliar so that the audience could discover other phenomenon they might not normally see: the intercultural complexities within the Latino communities; the tensions and secret wars between so called hipsters and locals” [27]. It was a way to yank some of the locals away from their navel gazing to look instead beneath the surface, to see how the political in the lives and history of the Mission District.

<27> How artists like Gómez-Peña can be effective in this Bohemian Theme Park is a question that will remain and a challenge that will persist. It’s a delicate balance in the San Francisco – finding a voice of criticality in the midst of soaking up all the love the City has to offer.

Conclusion

<28> Gómez-Peña’s art is always in dialogue with other areas such as journalism, pedagogy, activism, cultural theory, anthropology, sociology, art and literary criticism: his art connects dots, constructs bridges and tunnels, and crosses interdisciplinary borders. For contemporary art to be meaningful – especially in a post 911 climate – to large and diverse audiences, it has to be connected to the larger debates of the times. For Gómez-Peña these include: “the problematic relationship between North and South; between the West and the Middle East; the impact of the war on terror both in our society and our psyches; privacy, censorship, cultural isolationism, paranoid nationalism; violence in all realms and territories.... Immigration is also crucial” [28]. In this Obama era, Gómez-Peña wants to role of the artist to be taken seriously. He feels that “artists are articulating these issues [mentioned above] in a very original way. The problem is that neither the ruling class nor the mainstream media are listening to us. The question here is, how to recapture our voices in a time when power doesn’t even know it has to listen to the critical voice of artists?” [29]. His performance texts demand a critical role for artists in society (and in the political landscape) and ruminate on the how this might look in a post-Bush era.

<29> Gómez-Peña’s performances open up cultural spaces into which new ideas, aesthetics, and activist methods, can move around and inhabit. It’s how that space is navigated, the imprint it makes and how it might engender social change (or see a critique). Artists like Gómez-Peña give us directions to these openings; they guide us through the space, mark it with new language, and color it with new hope and dreams. Gómez-Peña’s work remains energized with radical thoughts and actions, doesn’t succumb to the codification or temptation of the art world, or to the desires of the audience for extreme behavior.

1 Eduardo Mendieta and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “A Latino Philosopher Interviews a Chicano Performance Artist.” Napantla, Vol 2, Issue 3, 2001. 539-554.

2 George Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy. Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial: from Baldwin to Basquiat and Beyond, (Teacher’s College, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 10.

3 Performances such as “Temple of Confessions” and more recently “Mapo/Corpo” confront hidden cultural desires and the colonization of the brown body. I mention only a small selection of his work in this essay.

4 Stacy Alaimo. “Multiculturalism and Epistemic Rupture: The Vanishing Acts of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Alfredo Vea Jr.,” The Study for the Multi-Ethics Literature of the United States MELNUS, 2000), 2.

5 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York, 1994), 34.

6 Gabrielle Banks. “Cultural Trafficking for the 21st Century,” ColorLines, Summer, 2003.

7 In conversation with the author “The City as a Bohemian Theme Park.” In Conversations Across Borders. Forthcoming 2010, Seagull Press.

8 Ibid

9 Art critic Claire Bishop suggests Gomez- Pena’s work produces effects that she deems important in socially engaged art. She states, “such discomfort and frustration –– along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt, or sheer pleasure –– can, on the contrary, be crucial elements of a work’s aesthetic impact and are essential to gaining new perspectives on our condition. The examples of socially collaborative work give rise to these –– and many other –– effects, which must be read alongside more legible intentions, such as the recovery of a phantasmic social bond or the sacrifice of authorship in the name of ‘true’ and respectful collaboration.” Claire Bishop in “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents” in Artforum, February (2006): Page 181.

10 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. (Routledge, New York) page 7.

11 Guillermo Gómez-Peña expounds on the productive aspects of performance in “In Defense of Performance Art: a foremost practitioner explains his métier” in Art Papers, July/August 2003.

12 Coco Fusco in English is Broken Here, (New York:: The New Press, 1995), 47.

13 The subsequent video entitled “The Couple in the Cage” extended the artist’s critique by becoming a document of surveillance by focusing on the reactions of the audience further implicating their gaze, making the spectator the spectacle.

14 The 1993 Whitney Biennial, in which “Undiscovered Amerindians” was a part, became a poster child for an institution supporting and displayed politicized art that challenged conventional understanding of beauty, culture, and race, to name a few. The biennial came under great criticism for its attempts at implementing multiculturalism in an arts context and became a casualty of the “culture wars” of the 1990s.

15 ibid.

16 In conversation with the author “The City as a Bohemian Theme Park.” In Conversations Across Borders. Forthcoming 2010, Seagull Press.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Nina Felshin in But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism. (Washington: Bay Press, 1994), 18.

20 Stacy Alaimo quoting Homi Bhabha. Stacy Alaimo. “Multiculturalism and Epistemic Rupture: The Vanishing Acts of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Alfredo Vea Jr.”, The Study for the Multi-Ethics Literature of the United States MELNUS, 2000), 8. Original source: Homi Bhabha. “Interrogating Identity” The Real Me: Postmodernism and the Question of Identity, (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987) 5-11.

21 Guillermo Gómez-Peña. “In Defense of Performance Art: a foremost practitioner explains his métier” in Art Papers, July/August 2003, 26.

22 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1975]), 27.

23 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York, 1994), 219.

24 In conversation with the author “The City as a Bohemian Theme Park.” In Conversations Across Borders. Forthcoming 2010, Seagull Press.

25 In conversation with the author “The City as a Bohemian Theme Park.” In Conversations Across Borders. Forthcoming 2010, Seagull Press.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

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