October 14, 96

Vol. 12 , No. 03   


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Crossing the Border: U.S. Latino Writers on the Move
GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1996

Since first arriving in the United States in 1978, Mexico City native Guillermo Gomez-Pena has essayed many forms of artistic expression-from the traditional to the experimental, from literary, social, and cultural criticism to multimedia performance and installation art. The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies takes great pride in welcoming this uniquely versatile artist to CMC as the fourth participant in its fall Athenaeum series on U.S. Latino writers.

A founding member of the Border Arts Workshop Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1990), a regular contributor to the national radio news magazine, Latino USA, and to newspapers and journals throughout the U.S. and Mexico, Guillermo Gomez-Pena has still somehow managed to maintain an extraordinarily busy performance schedule. Demand for his multimedia presentations has taken him to Montreal (where his performance of Border Brujo (1990) won the Prix de la Parole at the International Theatre Festival of the Americas), New York (where the film version of Border Brujo garnered first prize in the 1991 National Latino Film and Video Festival), Australia, Columbia, England, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the former Soviet Union. His experimental radio works include Border-X-Frontera (produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), Border Notebooks (which won the Silver Award in the Performance/Spoken Word Category from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and the series We Don't Speak English Only, Vato! (1995), which received first prize from the National Association of Community Radios. For his most recent radio project, Menage-a-Trade (1994), Gomez-Pena won the 1995 Golden Reel Award.

In the collection of his writings published under the title Warrior of Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (1993), Gomez-Pena explores cross-cultural issues, diversity, identity, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

His most recent book, The New World Borders: Prophesies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (1996), has recently been published.