Transculturalidad y borderología: El arte fronterizo de Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Abstract

The border between Mexico and the United States is the programmatic topic in the performance art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a chicano artist who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. By calling himself “performancero migrante” y “borderólogo” the artist questions the border in a playful, subversive and polycentric way. His style is characterized by an experimental esthetics that combines expressions of pop culture with political claims and a didactic posture. As “borderólogo” Gómez-Peña challenges the mental boundaries that often predetermine cultural contacts: In many of his performances he portrays himself exaggeratedly and grotesquely as a Mexican delinquent, thus questioning the prevailing stereotype of Mexicans in the United States. My article analyzes the dynamics between fixed borders as well as their transgression, both of which Gómez-Peña sets up and subverts on a cultural and national, symbolic and linguistic level. Based on the examples “El Psycho-Linguist” and “Border Interrogation” (from the album Ethno Techno, 2004), I will examine how borders enter into the concept of transculturality. In the context of the hybrid identities and the migratory experiences of chicanos in the United States, I will highlight moment of exclusion, demarcation and transculturation in order to illustrate in how far Gómez-Peña’s borderología moves between fixed, marked and exceeded borderlines.

Keywords

• border art
• chicano
• guillermo gómez-peña
• migration
• transculturality