Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

Guillermo Gómez-Peña and transnational ways of knowing
May 6, 2008

Last week an old friend came down here for a conference at University of Texas Pan-American.  Border Walls and Border Mirrors: Language, Literature and Culture on the Border attracted scholars and artists from far and wide to discuss the literature, performing arts, and visual arts of the borderlands.

One of the keynoters was the noted novelist, essayist and poet Cristina Rivera Garza who was born in Matamoros (twin city of Brownsville, on the Mexican side) in 1964 and has been attracting enthusiastic critical and popular attention with books like her best-known Nadie me verá llorar (Tusquets, and also in translation by Curbstone Press as No One Will See Me Cry).  Her latest is La muerte me da, a murder mystery published just this year by Tusquets.  She has degrees from universities on both sides of the line and has copped a trunkful of literary awards in Mexico.

My estimable pal Ilianita (excuse me: Doctor Iliana Alcantar), who when we were classmates at UCLA patiently endured the countless babosadas that poured from my hocicón, is now teaching Spanish at Reed College in Portland and carving out a niche as a leading scholar of theater and film.  She is brilliant.  Watch for some version of her dissertation In Pursuit of the Mexican Chimera: New Notions of Identity in Contemporary Literature, Film, and Performance at a bookstore near you, someday.

Iliana's paper--which was part video, too--introduced a roomful of folks to the great border-straddling performance artist, writer, and all-around bon vivant Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

You might be familiar with his devilish, comical intensity.  He won a MacArthur genius grant in 1981 (indeed, he was the first so-called 'MacArturo,' as no Mexican or Mexican-American had one before him) and for years his sly, sinister voice was heard on NPR.  It's a voice that we ought to be hearing more of right now, amid all the talk about immigration and walls.  Lou Dobbs needs to invite Guillermo Gómez-Peña on his show.  That would be something to see.

His brilliance shines through in such books as Warrior for Gringostroika (Graywolf Press), New World Border (City Lights), Ethno-Techno (Routledge), his latest Bitácora del cruce (published in Mexico by Fondo de Cultura Económica), and others, as well as in audio works like Apocalypse Mañana (Calaca Press) and, sure enough, on video:

We are talking radical history, not just weird TV for bored suburbanites  --Guillermo Gómez Peña

Like it?  Then don't miss this cyber-pocho's spectacular, informative website.   
  
The chair of Modern Languages and Literature at UTPA, Glenn Martínez, wrote in his program notes of "the escalating militarization and the increasing deconstitutionalization of the border region," calling for participants to "highlight the cultural and social bonds that link our borderlands and that sustain our transnational ways of knowing."

Posted by Bruce Jensen on May 6, 2008 | Comments (0)