Strange democracy : an evening with spoken word brujo Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Border Brujo stopped by NYC to share his spoken word's enchantments. Always at the center of discussions about US anti-immigration policies, Fulana's Fabi Fernández opens the show reading the impossible instructions to apply for a visa to the US, while Guillermo Gómez-Peña reminds to whomever it might concern that 'we are here precisely because you were there.' Gómez-Peña exposes the contradictions of US anti immigration and anti Spanish language enforcement with his well-known linguistic mix that jumps from Spanish to English, Spanglish, and unknown tongues,. He also generously offers a Spanish lesson for gringo friends who have to work with Latinos (with Barbi and Fabi's help) addressing the ups and downs of 'intercultural' relations. Moreover, in this particular occasion, Gómez-Peña's persona deals with the coming of years, his fear of loosing his Chicano mojo, and his sexual pathologies with a computer. Between eroticism and imaginary political speeches, 'GGP' shows the power of spoken word, the power of performance art, and how great it feels to imagine.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer and the director of the transnational arts collective La Pocha Nostra. He was born in Mexico City and came to the US in 1978. Since then he has been exploring cross-cultural issues with the use of performance, multilingual poetry, journalism, video, radio, and installation art. His performance work and eight books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, identity, and US-Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Australia. He is a MacArthur Fellow, American Book Award winner, and a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).

Fulana is a video and performance collective created in 2000 by four Latinas in New York City (Cristina Ibarra, Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Lisandra Ramos-Grullón and Andrea Thome). Using parody and satire, their work delves into topics affecting the Latino communities in the U.S., and responds to the ways products and ideas are marketed and sold to us through the mass media.