I. Background: B. Wanderings of a post-mexican

Post-Mexicans, 2003.                                        

                                 
Guillermo Gómez Peña was born and raised in México City. He completed his studies in Latinamerican Literature at the National University (FFyL-UNAM) in 1974. He describes himself as part of a generation "too young to be a hippie, and to old to be a punk", born to a México where the issues of identity were 'settled' under the flag of 'revolutionary nationalism' and it's allegiance to a mestizaje that would had given birth to a "bronce race". He, being a young artist, found a dificult landscape dominated by Octavio Paz's so-called 'union of culture' that claimed to itself the righteous representation of the artistic community. Under this panorama he decided to emigrate to Califonrnia in order to undertake an MA on Post-Studio Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in the late seventies (1978-1982).

Performance Karaoke, 2008.                                                      

                                                  

From that point on, he engaged in a very fruitful carreer. One that has taken him to do pioneering work in a manifold of fields, such as "performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, 'extreme culture' and new technologies"(http://www.pochanostra.com/who/ accessed on September 6th, 2009). Besides being very prolific as a practitioner (showing his work in several countries and festivals around the world), he has also done some theoretical writing and teaching in several universities all over the globe. This mix of praxis and theorization, has turned him into an international leading figure in the field.
Gómez Peña's work constantly and consciously looks for the borders. The idea is to perform on the border. For that, he has developed a strategy called "reverse anthropology":

Anthropology uses the power and knowledge of the dominant culture to investigate marginalized others. In reverse anthropology, said Gómez Peña, "we assume a fictional center, push the dominant culture to the margins, and treat it as exotic and unfamiliar"(Belgrad, 253)

With such a strategy, the 'normal' is shown as 'exotic' (a form of 'retro-orientalism' of sorts, if you wish). This unleashes a very powerful reflection not only about identities and nationalities, but also about the 'self' and the 'other'. Reflection stretches even to question what 'human nature' might be. All that can be achieved, by forcing to step into the position of the other: a switch of positionalities within the system:

Chicanos taught me a different way of thinking about myself as an artist and as a citizen. Through them, I discovered that my art could be developed as a means to explore and reinvent my multiple and ever-shifting identities (something that had been unthinkable in Mexico). Thanks to this epiphany, I began to see myself as part of a larger U.S. Chicano/Latino culture in a permanent process of reinvention. I was no longer a nostalgic immigrant yearning to return to a mythical homeland. I learned the basic lesson of El movimiento: I began to live “here” and “now,” to fully embrace my brand-new contradictions and my incipient process of politicization as a much-touted “minority,” — to “re-territorialize” myself, as theorists would say. (Guillermo Gómez Peña. "On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror. A border artist reflects on the new “post-national Mexicans,” their bittersweet relationship with "homeland,"and their role in the forming of a virtual nation inside the U.S. called “Latinoamerica del Norte.”http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/otherside.htm accessed on September 6th, 2009.)

 
In 1993, along with Robert Sifuentes and Nola Mariano he founded "La Pocha Nuestra" in Los Ángeles (later, in 1995 it moved to San Francisco; since 2001 it became a registered non-profit organization). "La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artist in various disciplines, generations, and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between arts and politics, art practice and theory, artists and spectators" (http://www.pochanostra.com/who/ accessed on September 6th, 2009).
An example of their work:


A news cut from their presentation in Finalnd. Interesting because it interviews the audience after the show:

 

About being a post-mexican
It is very interesting that Gómez Peña doesn't consider himself a chicano. He performs in the middle of a chicano setting, many of his cattegories and personas are derived from that symbollic world, and he even speaks and writes as a real pocho: in "Spanglish", that is. However, he cannot call himself a chicano. Nor is he a mexican anymore. He reflects on this in his essay "On the other side of the mexican mirror":

Those who dared to migrate al otro lado—to the other side—became instant traitors, inauthentic and bastardized Mexicans destined to join the ranks of the infamous Pochos who were the other forgotten orphans of the Mexican nation-state. And so, when I crossed the border, I unwittingly started my irreversible process of Pocho-ization or de-Mexicanization.
(...) I found that once you cross the border you could never really go back. Whenever I tried, I always ended up “on the other side,” as if walking on a moebious strip. My ex-paisanos on the Mexican side of the line made a point of reminding me that I was no longer “a true Mexican,” that something, a tiny and mysterious crystal, had broken inside of me forever. After five years of “returning,” in their minds I had forgotten the script of my identity. Even worse, I had “shipwrecked” on the other side (Octavio Paz used this loaded metaphor in a controversial essay that once angered the Chicano intelligentsia). (http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/otherside.htm accessed on September 6th, 2009.)

On the other hand, even though the chicanos took him in as one of their own, they were always on top of him asking for demonstrations of his chicano-ness. "For a decade I was asked by Chicano nationalists and hardliners to pay expensive dues, and submit myself to thorough identity searches and blood tests" (Ibid). That made him experience an existential journey that made him deeply question the issue of identity. What am I? Always something in between: somewhat of a mexican, somewhat of a chicano:

Today, after 24 years of crossing that bloody border back and forth by foot, by car and by airplane, as I write this text I wonder, does it even matter anymore when it happened? As I write this text, I realize that the space between my remote Mexican past and my Chicano future, is immense and my identity can zig-zag across it freely. (Ibid)

That is probably the point where he started to call himself a "post-mexican". Around 2003 he edited a book with the title "El Mexterminator: antropología inversa de un performero postmexicano", and participated on a photo-performance called "Post-Mexicans". There he is explicitly toying with the idea of him being a post-mexican. But what does that mean?

What is a postmexican?
On his book "Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition" (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) Roger Bartra -a famous mexican sociologist- coined the term post-mexican to talk about the emergence of a "post-mexican condition". On an interview to the Mexican Journal "Reforma" he briefly explains what he means by it:

Bartra vincula pasado y presente en sus investigaciones. Utiliza el término "postmexicano" para avisar del surgimiento de una nueva generación de ciudadanos a partir de los cambios democráticos y culturales ocurridos en el país. "Ya estamos en una condición postmexicana en el sentido que ese México bronco, tradicional, revolucionario y nacionalista está muy debilitado, está retrocediendo".

(Bartra links the past and the present in his research. He utilises the term 'postmexican' to point out the emergence of a new generation of citizens based on the democratic and cultural places occurred in México. "We are in a postmexican condition in the sense that the rough, traditional, revolutionary and nationalist México is very much weakened; it's withdrawing." -the translation is mine-)
["La cultura priista se reproduce en los espacios de la izquierda" Entrevista de Mario Gutiérrez Vega a Roger Bartra. México: Reforma, 16 de julio de 2006. http://citius64.blogspot.com/2006/07/roger-bartra-la-cultura-priista-se.html , accessed on September 6th, 2009.]

The notion is an offspring from the idea of Habermas regarding the possibility of a 'postnationalism' (itself closely related to 'cosmopolitism'):

Postnationalism suggests building an identity that could emerge beyond specific traditions determined by a particular national history. It is closely linked to the notion of 'constitutional patriotism'. The main upholder of this theory, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, is deeply influenced by the German historical context. In order to prevent the resurgence of any ethnic identification, especially after the reunification of his country, he proposes to launch a kind of political identity centred on values of democracy and fundamental human rights.

[Muriel Rambour. "References and Uses of Postnationalism in French and British Debates on Europe." Workshop: National Identity and Euroscepticism: A Comparison Between France and the United Kingdom, Friday 13 May 2005. (Oxford: Department of Politics and International Relations, 2005) http://oxpo.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/national_identity/Rambour_Paper.pdf , accessed on September 6th, 2009].

Even though Bartra borrows the idea from Habermas there is a slight twist. He doesn't share the latter's optimism regarding the future of Modernity and the enlighted spirit. He is somewhat of a postmodern:

He believes that nationalism and modernity are “mortally wounded” and that we have no other recourse than to engage “the postmodernity of a fragmented western world to which we belong.” For Bartra, the task implies the construction of a postnational identity based in the pluricultural and democratic forms of civic life.

[Michael Paul Abeyta. "Postnationalism, Globalization and the “Post-Mexican Condition” in Roger Bartra". The Forum on Public Policy. (Oxford: The Forum on Public Policiy, 2006. http://www.forumonpublicpolicy.com/archivespring07/abeyta.pdf , accessed on September 6th, 2009)].

Is Gómez Peña aware of this debate? I cannot tell. But I don't think it really matters. However, it is helpful for us to fully comprehend the political dimension of his work. A work that plays with the fluidity of identities pushing the margins to the centre and the centre to the margins. That is, de-territorializing the space in order for ot to be open to the excercise of freedom. Deterritorializing using personas with trasvesti-characters; pushing the borders every time a bit further. Deterritorializing to re-territorialize in a better way (or so we hope...).

A little game of identites GGP's style: "The Chica-Iranian Project. Orientalism gone wrong in Aztlán"