Navigating the Minefields of Utopia: A Conversation

This text is part of an ongoing series of conversations with members of Pocha Nostra, the performance company founded by Guillermo Gómez-Peña in collaboration with Roberto Sifuentes and other artists. The material for this interview was distilled from conversations that took place over a two-week period in late May and early June 1999 while Pocha Nostra was in residence at the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales. During this period, I was working with the company, serving as dramaturg for two stagings of BORDER-scape 2000 earlier that spring, as well as contributing to an interactive installation piece being developed in Aberystwyth to be presented at the delightfully eccentric Museum of Ceredigion. Our conversations took place in the kitchen/common room of a rented flat that housed artists working on the project. In contrast to more formalized interview situations, Guillermo and I spoke in the midst of quotidian activities: as people smoked, drank coffee, exercised, and otherwise prepared for rehearsal and daily life. While we have tried, in the editing process, to smooth over fragmentation in the text, both the occasional discontinuities and the relatively charged nature of certain topics discussed can perhaps be attributed to the dynamic of informal conversation among artistic colleagues who know one another well. In the time since this conversation was recorded, various changes of personnel have occurred within Pocha Nostra. Certain collaborators, such as Juan Ybarra and Michele Ceballos, have become progressively more present in the work and others including Sara Shelton-Mann and later Roberto Sifuentes, have moved on to develop independent creative projects.

An extract of this dialogue will appear in Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, edited by Caridad Svich, forthcoming from Manchester University Press/St. Martin's Press. The complete series of dialogues that Guillermo and I have conducted over the past three years will be included in our collaborative book project, Mexterminator: Ethno-Techno Art forthcoming from Routledge Press.

—Lisa Wolford

Concentric Circles and Ephemeral Communities

WOLFORD:

Throughout much of the course of your work, you've tended to collaborate for long periods of time with various ensemble companies—first Poyesis Genetica, then Border Arts Workshop, and more recently Pocha Nostra. You have also engaged in shorter-term collaborative projects with artists such as James Luna, Keith Antar Mason, Rhodessa Jones, and others. What draws you to collaborative work, and what are some of the challenges, especially when artists work together in ways that push them to negotiate various axes of difference—of gender, ethnicity, culture, or professional background, for example?

1.

Juan Ybarra as an apocalyptic "Robo-Warrior" in Pocha Nostra's production of The Museum of Fetichized Identities at Performance Space in Sydney, Australia (2001). (Photo by Heidrun Lohr)

GÓMEZ-PEÑA:

I was very influenced by the grupos in Mexico City in the 1970s, the interdisciplinary collectives of the generation prior to mine. Felipe Ehrenberg was one of my godfathers. His generation created interdisciplinary collectives and utilized the streets of Mexico City as laboratories of experimentation, as galleries without walls. In the late '70s when I moved to California, I was surprised to find that there were also many Chicano collectives, such as ASCO and the Royal Chicano Air Force. It was the spirit of the times; a kind

"La Pocha Nostra"

The Words

The literal translation of pocho/a is "bleached." It's a derogatory term used by Mexicans for Chicanos, implying that they're bleached to whiteness by living in the USA. Within Chicano artistic and cultural circles, pochismo also designates an in-your-face style, very ironic, that appropriates dominant cultural motifs and materials in order to make fun of them. Also, "pocha nostra" plays on "cosa nostra"—a mafia of Chicano cultural subversives.

of utopian impulse, believing that to share visions, resources, and efforts could only multiply the impact of art in society. Also, the belief that collaboration is a form of citizen diplomacy, which later became the impetus behind the creation of BAW/TAF [the...