From the Archive: Guillermo Gómez-Peña: The New World Border

This artist talk by Chicano performance artist, visual artist, writer, and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña was given in June 1996, coinciding with the release of his book The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century. Gómez-Peña performs passages that wittily touch on themes common in his work: geopolitics, identity politics, displacement, ethnic stereotyping, and the interplay between race and language. Throughout the performance he switches between English, Spanish, Spanglish, and “indigenous dialects,” exploring the concept of translation as he moves through topics of identity and nationality.