Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back Book

A self-described migrant provocateur with a "hyper-Mexican mustache and loungy sideburns," Guillermo Gomez-Pena performs as he lives and travels -- from America through Europe, Asia, and North Africa -- making his border crossings and crosscultural misencounters into art. He reflects in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, seeking out Mexican and Chicano communities, retracing the roots of his heritage, and revisiting the many overlapping cultures to which he belongs: diasporic Latin Americans, people on the margins of society, the hybrids, the renegades. In Dangerous Border Crossers, he interweaves poems, performance chronicles, essays, radio scripts, and reflections on culture, politics, and identity, from his life on the road. His landmark pieces -- such as his interlude as an "endangered species" inside a Plexiglas box and his disarming confessions -- set the tone: by turns shocking, facetious, erotic, political, and urgent. Passionate, myth-breaking, emotionally resonant, and electrifying, Dangerous Border Crossers connects a remarkable range of subjects, revealing what goes into the making of performance art, and establishing Gomez-Pena as one of this century's most persuasive voices for a borderless future. Read More