“Guillermo Gómez-Peña: a lost poet in Borderlandia”

Columbus’ image is an inexhaustible source in the reflections and artistic productions of the Chicano poet, critic, political activist, and actor Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who has been exploring since his beginnings the idea of the ‘discovery of America’, to highlight the epochal turn imposed to world history from the western world, through this event. In the artist’s words, Columbus’ dream has become, as he uncessantly repeats throughout all his work, the nightmare for millions of people, who since then witnessed “five hundred years of genocide”. Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City; like most young Mexicans, he moved to California in 1978, to realize his private dream of Eldorado: going North was then a sort of generational obsession. If, on one side, the artist’s postmodern pastiche is inspired by the montage techniques of experimental cinema, which pervade all his works, on the other side, this postmodern pastiche is, as declares Gómez-Peña in an interview, the congenial pulse of a hybrid culture, that syncretic quality of Latin-American culture, which has always been a border culture. In his art the trendy idea of an interdisciplinarity of the arts and languages presents itself as the only possible answer to the variegated nature of the frontier between Mexico and the United States.