Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Also Known As: not available
Biography: Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. His ten books include essays, experimental poetry, performance scripts and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Mexico City, Mexico
Adult: No
Birthday: September 23, 1955
Age: 69 years old
Gender: Male
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Known For:
Son of Border Crisis
Overview: In these seven short video performances directed by Isaac Artenstein, Gómez-Peña confronts Mexican-American culture clashes, stereotypes, and the Fourth World (immigrants). Speaking through a bullhorn or on the airwaves of mock-station Radio Latino FM, he broadcasts a message that will not be silenced. He delivers such comic comparisons as between “tacos without salsa” and “art without ideas” and such pointed statements as “thanks to marketing and not to civil rights, we are the new generation.” The taped monologues include Son of Border Crisis, El Post-Mojado, The Mexican Fly, Dear Californian, Employer Sanctions, The Year of the Yellow Spider, and The Year of the Hispanic.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1992-01-01
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Border Brujo
Overview: Border Brujo is a ritual-linguistic journey across the U.S./Mexico border written and performed by artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In the guise of a cross-cultural shaman, Gómez Peña shifts into 15 different personas, each speaking a different language. The personas are symbolic of the borders between North and South, Anglo and Latino; myth and reality; legality and illegality; art and life. Border Brujo assaults and exorcises the demons of dominant cultures. He articulates fear, desire, trauma sublimation, anger and misplacement embodying ruptured and defiant communities with multilingual dexterity and humor.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1990-04-15
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Frontierland
Overview: This DVD examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the United States and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara Fiestas and South Carolina's kitschy "South of the Border" tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, this film reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, this film weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art, and music video, producing a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing and hilarious. Includes appearances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Aztlán Underground, among others.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: es
Release Date: 1995-09-16
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Seeing Is Believing
Overview: Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1992-01-01
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The Great Mojado Invasion, Part 2
Overview: Like a ghost from the future, "El Mad Mex’" narrates this hybrid-genre video, which envisions a queue of mojados who re-conquer lost Mexican territory to establish the new U.S. of Aztlan.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-01-01
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The Couple in the Cage
Overview: A witty satire about cultural stereotyping. In a series of 1992 performances, Coco Fusco and performance co-creator Guillermo Gómez-Peña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as "undiscovered AmerIndians" locked in a golden cage - an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives. Presented eight times in four different countries, these simple performances evoked various responses, the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didn't find the idea of "natives" locked in a cage objectionable. This provocative video, directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, suggests that the "primitive" is nothing more than a construction of the West, and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies.
Genres: Documentary Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-10-10
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A Song Often Played on the Radio
Overview: In a search for the mythological Cities of Cibola, a horseman finds himself in a race against another rogue seeking the valuable metals of the New Mexican desert. Spurred by the justification of moralistic 'dichos', the rival explorers come to learn about what truly brought them to this land, understanding their true identities, and finding they were only stealing from themselves.
Genres: Western
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2019-10-25
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Bizarre Thanksgiving Performance Ritual
Overview: A Thanksgiving Ritual
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-12-31
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Instant Identity Ritual
Overview: Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Identity Ritual
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-01-01
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Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
Overview: From the creators of the first queer environmental documentary feature films comes a hot new offering. The third chapter is their most epic and daring yet — fusing art, activism, and intimate storytelling in a touching journey through crisis, change, and renewal. When a firestorm rips through their redwood forest home, two artist-activists — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle —emerge with a powerful message of love, resilience, and ecological hope, guided by a relationship with their magical peacock.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2025-06-20
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