Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Featured Photo at top of page: Geloy Concepción, 2023.

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: How are you doing today?

Guillermo Gómez Peña: We’re doing well. We just got back to San Francisco after a three week tour in Texas. Emma will join us to help me answer a few of the more complicated questions, especially when it comes to funding. The more philosophical and anecdotal ones I’ll answer myself.

Emma Tramposch: Hello!

GGP: We’ve prepared ourselves for today with myriad notes. Your questions were very challenging. They forced us to open up the Pandora's box of memory. I love them, because they are very much in tune with our current research on living archives. I am really proud and happy to be a part of this archive. Thank you for including us. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to dedicate our interview to the memory of Lordres Portillo.

B&A: We are very, very lucky to have you.

GGP: We’re all in the process of working with our living archives. It’s paradoxical. We did a long interview with a Vietnamese historian recently where we had to answer some really tough questions about what we mean by ‘living archives.’  Essentially everything we own here in our San Francisco house, and our Mexico City house, in the Minnesota Street Project, in our suitcases— it’s all part of our living archives. The archives for performance studies and performance artists are very different from the archives of a writer or a visual artist. They include costumes, props, and objects in the house that are evidence of past performances and have been recycled into everyday life. What we do here at home or in your house is part of the living archives. It's complex.

B&A:  Were you happy with the recent performance you did and we got to be in, at St. Joseph’s Art Society here in San Francisco?

GGP: Out of all the large scale projects La Pocha Nostra has done in San Francisco, this might be my favorite. The collection of individuals and the beauty against the stormy times. Three hundred people attended on a Wednesday night, in a time in which San Francisco is not entirely back. It was a testimony to the artists who worked with us. It was a beautiful project and it filled us with happiness. We are ready to reconvene next year.

B&A: It was definitely a love fest. High art.

ET: I spent most of my time mingling, eavesdropping and observing the audience. The event meant a lot to a lot of people.

B&A: It was a humongous ritual to mourn the state of the world and come together as people.

JJ: Could you please introduce yourself?

GGP: I am a nomadic artist.I transit between cities and countries; between forms and languages. My job is to cross borders and empower others to do it as well. I follow my compass, the mandate of my DNA. My professional ID is that of a performance artist, which means I suffer from a permanent crisis of professional identity. At times I am a reverse anthropologist and cultural detective; other times an experimental linguist, a radical pedagogue, a poetic journalist, but always: an artivist. I use  non- traditional languages to express my social and political concerns. I identify with the term “artist citizen”.

B&A: Wonderful. Could we have some background on who you were before you came to San Francisco? Where were you born and what kind of family did you have growing up? Do you have memories of your high school years?

GGP: I was born in 1955, a year after you, Anita. I was born Guillermo Lino Liberio Gómez-Peña in Mexico City on September 23rd at exactly 12:00 pm. I remember that my bizarre intensity shocked my father. At a very early age, I had a very, may we call it, “performative personality,” and intense gaze. Like Lady Gaga says, I was “born this way.”  My father was a gallant indigenous looking sportsman, civil engineer, and experimental architect who devoted his life to bringing electricity to the Mexican countryside, putting food on our table, and playing jai alai. He built the house we have in Mexico City. My adored mother fundraised for social causes and was the irrefutable nerve center of the family. Since my father was always on the road, the household was a matriarchal heaven. The women in my household loved when I sang ranchero in my tiny mariachi outfit.

I remember elementary school, playing guitar and futbol, traveling constantly to the Mexican countryside with my family, and secretly cross-dressing with my mother’s clothes and wigs. When Emita and I revisited those photos, I asked myself, “Who would ever imagine that that lovely middle class Catholic kid would one day become the seditious Mexterminator?” What caused this dramatic change? Performance art or the immigrant experience? Was it San Francisco? I don’t know…But I do remember that the visits to Mexico City of my US relatives, would instill in me a desire to come north, specifically to California, which I saw as the land of permanent reinvention.

B&A: Were there any artists, musicians, performers that inspired you when you were young?

GGP: Ever since I was a teenager, Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg was my "conceptual godfather." He transformed me into a performance artist. "Poetic cartographer" and  “neologist” were the words he used. It's crystal clear to me that Felipe (Rest in Power) is still the most important experimental artist in Mexico and one of the most important in the Americas. For more than 50 years, he contributed with tenacity to the continuous expansion of the territory of art. We are here thanks to artists like him.  He taught my generation to locate ourselves confidently in the Global South and in the so-called “third world” within the first world, including Chicanismo. He taught us the importance for Latin American artists to engage in the project of tracing our artistic and intellectual genealogy away from the cultural centers of Europe and the US. This is a very important idea. These other histories of experimental art are rarely acknowledged in the continuing Eurocentric biases of ‘official’ art history. I would argue this still persists and San Francisco is no exception. But we’ll get to that later.

A&B: When and how did you come to California?

GGP: My family has been migrating to California since the late 1800’s. We saw the “north” as an extension of our own household. More concretely, in 1978 I received a scholarship to study at the California Institute of Arts (Cal Arts) in LA. That year, I remember crossing the US-Mexico border in search of artistic fresh air and my lost Chicano family.

In my first trips to California as a young artist, I suddenly became brown. I was white in Mexico, but in the US I was a “wetback,” a “beaner,” a “greaser.” I ignored the implications of these words. I began my process of Chicano-ization with the unsolicited help of the Los Angeles police, who beat me to a pulp. But that’s another story.

I remember my first first conscious site-specific performances. I did a photo shoot outside of an INS detention center and I walked from Tijuana to the California Institute of Arts (in Valencia) in two and a half days. My head was covered with gauze. I was wearing my father’s suit and carrying a briefcase containing my passport, assorted talismans and a diary. Since then, crossing the US-Mexico border has been my primal ritual of artistic inspiration. I have crossed the border by foot, car, and airplane. I cross it in my dreams and writings. The feeling of crossing a border is liberating to me.

I crossed the border to confront nationalism and xenophobia with words, images, and ideas. I called my “weapons” performance art. The art world became my hideout & office. 23 years later, I became a dual citizen. It was only logical for a citizen of duality like me to certify the existence of my other self. But I am getting too philosophical, Anita, let’s get back to your questions!

JJ: I feel like we’re getting a private performance here.

B&A: We are!

Out of everywhere in the world, why did you end up here in San Francisco?

GGP: Comadres, you are forcing me to open up another pandora’s box of personal memories! But I want to begin to dance with my personal demons. Firstly, I should say that there has always been a historical cultural corridor that begins in Mexico City, moves through Tijuana, San Diego, and LA, and ends in San Francisco. Many of the luminaries in the Chicano movement did that trek.

I followed that corridor. I came here like many of my contemporaries, in search of a myth: San Francisco’s artistic openness, queerness, experimental spirit, conceptual chicanismo. I was very attracted by its bohemia. My work at the time was, fortunately, well received and I could perform any of my multiple identities in public here. That was liberating for me. But my fascination with San Francisco actually began during the summer of love in 1967. I was in San Francisco on a family trip with my mother and cousins, visiting relatives and staying on Lombard street.

As a 12 year old, I witnessed some of the many marches that summer and they completely flipped me out - I saw hippies, nude bodies, rock bands, inhaled the fog of marijuana- I mean, the experience was a full immersion into the city’s zeitgeist.  I remember one day I went to buy my first rock and roll album, as a 12 year old, with my mom. In my broken English I asked the record shop guy to give me “the best music of the time”. He handed me a bunch of albums by Eric Burdon & the Animals, Janice Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors. They all traveled back with me to Mexico.

The seeds for my return were planted during this initial, formative visit to SF, where I discovered the strong mythology of the city as a destination for radicals and as the original source of the protest and free speech movements that we are seeing now in their latest chapters in our universities, where students are protesting the mistreatment of Palestinians. SF was also a permissive setting with a confluence of a myriad cultures from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. That blew my mind. I remember we visited City Lights Bookstore on that trip, not knowing that they would eventually become my publishers.

To me, San Francisco was the city of tender demons and horny angels. Why the hell did we all end up here? But let’s not get entangled in a spiderweb of nostalgia. Next question please.

B&A:  Once you moved here more long term, how did you become engaged in the San Francisco local arts community?

GGP: San Francisco’s Mission District has hosted and nurtured my madness for 39 (0r was it 30?) years.This wonderful barrio was so creative. So full of contradictions. It is the ultimate bohemian den. I revel in my longtime love for this hood. It’s been the stage for my art, my love, my friendships, and my escapades into forbidden territories, both on the streets and inside my psyche. It’s my personal laboratory for permanent existential reinvention. I’m here. I’ve written, performed, danced on fire and ice, loved my jaina, cried inconsolably, gotten drunk out of my mind and flesh, laughed, debated, demonstrated, escaped eviction and despair, confronted the cops, the demons of gentrification and the “alt right’ and neonazis crashing my dive bars here.

And after all these years, I still cannot solve certain mysteries: How come the Mission is sunnier and warmer than the rest of the city? Is it a Latino thing? Is it the heat generated by 700 taquerias? What is the source of this chemical, social, sexual, political and artistic stimulus? What draws people here? What social demons force them out or kill them? Are we seduced by the promise of bohemia in a country of restricted imagination, in an era of constrained freedoms? Are we then seeking freedom of the imagination, attracted by the mythical possibility of reinventing ourselves overnight? Of exercising all the selves and identities we wish to become without having to confront conformity every step of the way? Are we part of the ongoing wave of international exiles escaping failed revolutions and wars, from Salvador to Baghdad to Tijuana to Ukraine? Si? No? Maybe?

I didn’t know that the ultimate “Universal barrio” of the Mission would become a Bohemian theme Park for conservative techies and obnoxious “hipsters”. It’s unsettling!

A&B: Did you have formal training in your art practice?

GGP: Emma helped me research and remember this. From 1974-1978, I studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City and received a Licenciatura/Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Literature with a focus in linguistics. Then, after moving to the US, I continued my studies at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) from 1979-1982, earning both a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice and an MFA in Post-Studio Art. But enough about my CV, next thorny question please.

JJ: Which LGBTQ and or BIPOC artists influenced you the most? Were they in San Francisco too?

GGP: The first gender-complex arts collectives that come to mind are ACT UP and Queer Nation. I became acquainted with them in the early 90’s in Los Angeles. If I'm not mistaken, ACT UP provided access to new therapies and argued that radical care and medication must be everyone's right. Queer Nation was an LGBTQ activist organization founded in New York City at the time. It was created by HIV/AIDS activists from ACT UP.  The original founders of this amazing organizations were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay violence on the streets and prejudice in arts and media. I admired the group’s confrontational tactics, their slogans, and practices of calling out injustices and corrupt politicians.  Silence = Death is still so pertinent to this day. I was also highly influenced by queer artists of my generation like David Wojnarowicz, John Fleck, Tim Miller and Ron Athey to name a few. They taught me to be bold and uncompromising, and my Chicano colleagues confirmed that call to action. I was groomed by them and I was groomed by the Chicano movement. I was very lucky.

JJ: Did you feel there was an LGBTQ arts community when you arrived in SF?

GGP: Contraband is the first group that comes to mind, with Sara Shelton Mann, Keith Henessey, Jess Curtis, et al. They were our first doppelganger troupe in San Francisco, and when they disbanded, Sara joined La Pocha Nostra on the road for 3 years.

JJ: Oh, really? Did she dance with you? Or do performance art?

GGP: We really pushed the limits to create spoken choreographies, and plastic stationary advances. She was out of her territory, and she loved it. We loved her contributions.

JJ: What venues did you feel the most at home in?

GGP: This is a tough one. We presented work throughout the city at countless art spaces over the years, and I do believe that every corner in the city is a utopian/dystopian space and every space in our own neighborhood is a potential performance space.

But the “venue” I feel the most at home in is my studio, our Casa Museo, here in the Mission. My home here in the Mission connects my life as an artist with a cityscape, the larger Chicano experience and with all humility, with the international performance art world. For over 30 years, this loft has been a demilitarized ‘free zone,’ a bohemian den, where original art parties, performance salons & artistic & political discussions have taken place. These events, attended by rebel artists, activists, intellectuals and dandies and are tied to the San Pancho bohemian tradition of radical hospitality and deviant behavior. The campaign of Green Party candidate “Krissy Keiffer for Congress” was launched in our living room. A local TV station called it “The Smithsonian of the Barrio.”

Now, in the late 90’s, the rampant gentrification of the Mission put our neighborhood in permanent danger of becoming a bohemian theme park, or the headquarters of the tech industry. Then pandemia arrived and the tech industry fled the city, leaving it in ruins. We are now attempting to bring it back.  More recently, during the 2020 lockdown, this site became our survivalist art bunker and zoom broadcasting barrio station for our podcasts and virtual performances. In short, my live/work space continues to be my longest durational performance installation & conceptual zone.

B&A: We’ve seen some of the best performances of our lives in your home.

JJ: You were connected to Galeria de la Raza for so many years. Could you talk a little about that? Did you have a mentor there?

GGP: My formal relationship with Galeria de la Raza began in 1984. My troupe at the time, the Border Arts Workshop, was born at Galeria at precisely the same time Culture Clash was founded. Since then, I was an active member, curator, collaborator and advocate of many Galeria administrations.

In 2010, La Pocha Nostra was formally invited to move into Galeria’s Studio 24 at the corner because it would be “mutually beneficial to both organizations.” We were looking for an anchor in the Latino Mission and Galeria wanted La Pocha’s international scope and connections to Latinx experimental artists within and beyond SF. So, for 7 years, we occupied the corner space of Galeria.

During those years, we co-presented dozens of exciting public events including workshops, performance and spoken word salons and talks pairing local and international artists. Studio 24 at the corner of 24th & Bryant was our ongoing rehearsal, brainstorming, workshop and archival space. Then one day, we got evicted. It broke my heart.

JJ: Before we leave this topic, could we talk about Rene? 1984 was right before he got fired. Do you remember that?

GGP: I thought that was the end of the world for me. This ties into the question you asked, about my mentors. Rene was one of them. I had many…  Rene Yanez, Amalia Mesa Bains, Yolanda Lopez, Susan Lacey and Esther Hernadez to name a few. Amalia taught me an unforgettable lesson. She said to me one day, "Gomez-Peña, if you are offered a mic, don’t give it back.” Those were the words of a true Chicana leader. Rene, of course, was the godfather of the Mission. For over 40 years, he helped make this a city where subversion, creativity, and irreverence were not only “tolerated” but celebrated, where the politics went far to the left of everywhere else in the US. That was the San Francisco he showed me in 1981 when I first met him and the one that welcomed me back in the mid 90s.

This was the place where anyone could come to live out their alternative dreams, where artists and visionaries filled the cafes, a sanctuary city where migrants, outsiders, subversives and deviants could find refuge, including me and all of our close friends. It provided the perfect setting for La Pocha Nostra to emerge and thrive.

JJ: Rene did that for so many people. Culture Clash was Marga Gomez, Monica Palacios.. there were 6 original members, right? Rene was one of the first artists of color to get funded by the city of San Francisco, way back there in the late 70s, early 80s. That’s when I first ran into him. You could tell he had great ideas about once a minute. I think it was Renee who introduced us to each other originally. Or maybe Marie Acosta? I remember that you were staying in my house here and performing in Festival 2000. Did you get paid for that? Or did you get ripped off like most people?

GGP: My financial memory is not in great shape. I don’t know.

JJ: That's how we got the Cultural Equity Grants Program.  I think it was Marie Acosta who introduced me to you at the Mexican Museum. Another awesome connection is that the head of the California Arts Council was the director of Highways Performance Space. That organization produced so much.

GGP: I'm very proud to say that that was my generation of performance artists in Los Angeles. The Hittite Empire, Dang Guan and so many other artists like Marcus Kulianasario who twisted the arm of Susanna Dakin to make it a performance space.

XX: That was quite a group of people. Keith Antar Mason, Sherry Rabino, the pioneers of the cyberats movement. It was a convergence of amazing minds.

JJ: You were so identified with Rene in San Francisco and with Highways in L.A.. Two really vibrant organizations.

GGP: My dear Jeff, I was so lucky.

JJ: You're credited as one of the founding members of Highways. I ended up being the grant writer somehow, believe it or not.

I remember that after Rene was fired, I would see him everywhere passing out pamphlets. He got hired by Jack Davis to be the janitor. Can you imagine? One of the most brilliant curators in town got hired to be a janitor. And yet he was thankful.

B&A: Guillermo, what was your first big artistic breakthrough?

GGP: It happened in the Tijuana/San Diego region. In 1984 I formed “The Border Arts Workshop”(BAW/TAF) with a bunch of visual, performance and conceptual artists, a bi-national arts collective involving Chicano, Mexican and Anglo artists. Our objective was to explore US-Mexico relations and border issues using a mix of performance, video, and experimental poetry. I remember proclaiming the border region "a laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation," and proposing "the artist as a social thinker and bi-national diplomat." Our public relations with law enforcement really sucked.

But I remember similar activist groups forming in other parts of the country, including the Guerrilla Girls, Group Material, ACT UP and the Los Angeles Poverty Department.  Performance, political activism and community concerns were completely intertwined in the spirit of the times.

In this context, BAW/TAF’s strictly artistic activities helped protect our backs and legitimize our more activist work and get us out of jail. So in addition to binational art shows, publications, radio programs, town meetings and films, we organized performances right on the borderline, where the U.S. meets Mexico in the Pacific, literally performing for audiences in both countries. When the border patrol got too close, we crossed to the Mexican side. During certain performances, we invited our audiences to cross "illegally" to the other side. We exchanged food and art, caressed and kissed "illegally" across the border fence, and confronted the border patrol in costume. We were protected by the presence of journalist friends and video cameras. The political implications of the site and the symbolic weight of these actions garnering us immediate attention from the international media. These were the origins of the border arts movement and what I consider my early “breakthrough”.

JJ: That was how many years before you got the MacArthur Genius grant?

GGP: Probably 10? The Borderers workshop was founded in 1984, and the MacArthur was in 1991.

JJ: How did government funding impact your career?

GGP: I cede the word to my dear colleague Emma Tramposch, La Pocha Nostra’s Executive Director and Curator of the Living Archives. She has been the holder of the Pocha Nostra House for at least 15 years and is our internal historian on this topic.

ET: I’m happy to help fill in some details. Since La Pocha Nostra is also a non-profit as well as an arts collective many kinds of funding have impacted GP’s career and the organization’s chronology. From the government funding side we are grateful recipients of local, state and national funders including the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, the California Arts Council, NALAC and the NEA. Over the years these funders have supported not only the realization of many performance projects but also with operating expenses related to keeping the lights on and capacity building. La Pocha Nostra also has multiple progressive non-governmental foundations to thank too. But I know the question was about government funding. It’s certainly been a helpful boost over the years.

B&A: I have to ask, what were your first encounters with queer arts organizations?

GGP: That’s an impossible question. I have only ever worked with or collaborated with Queer-identified or queer friendly arts organizations. If they aren’t gender- or race- complex, we simply don’t work with them. Period! We’ve made a few missteps with places we thought were more inclusive and paid for it. But that’s the subject of another book titled “The Touring Misadventures of La Pocha Nostra…in a Post-Democratic Era.” Soon to be published by a random house.

B&A: Any random house! You crack us up.

What unique contribution do you think you made to the City’s queer and or BIPOC arts history?

JJ: You performed in the National Queer Arts Festival. I still have the poster on my wall.

B&A: Plus you have contributed greatly to our ecosexual movement. You oversaw our Ecosex Pride contingent in the SF Pride parade once. And co-authored our Ecosex Manifesto 2.0.

ET: La Pocha Nocha was founded in 1993 Los Angeles by three BIPOC artists with the explicit goal of gaining access to public and private grants that non-white artists rarely seemed to get. The original thinking was that by founding an organization dedicated to creating work that put BIPOC people at its center, this would both lessen their marginalization and - as a non-profit organization – give us greater access to funding that was usually reserved for “mainstream” artists.

At the time, and I believe still to this day, LPN has been a pioneer in the field.  For 35+ years, alongside a roster of national and international touring, LPN has maintained an artistic foothold and base of operations in San Francisco’s Mission District. Here, we have presented several large scale participatory performances (like the Mexterminator Project, in 1997), solos, keynotes, site specific performances and pedagogical intensives at many spaces including SOMArts, Galería de la Raza, Mission Cultural Center, Brava Theater, Fort Mason Center and the SF Arts Commission Gallery.  LPN has also presented countless site-specific pieces commenting on themes pertinent to local audiences such as El Corazon de la Misión (2007), a participatory “bus tour” of the neighborhood and The Phantom Mariachi (2016), an interactive performance piece commenting on gentrification and the displacement of artists and marginalized communities.

B&A: Iconic! We have experienced both of those pieces and they were absolutely fantastic and inspiring.

Which arts discipline would you say best describes your practice?

GGP: Well, like you two, I’ve always created my own artworld. In 1993 when we formed La Pocha Nostra, the objective was “to create an interdisciplinary association of rebel artists interested in collaboration.” We were inspired by Zapatismo, and our collaborative model of “concentric and overlapping circles” has functioned as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of like-minded artists in different cities and countries.

The Spanglish neologism "Pocha Nostra'' loosely translates to "our impurities'' or the "cartel of cultural bastards or traitors." It reveals our attitude towards art and society: interracial, poly-post-neo-gender, ultra-retro-experimental, trans/national, or a remix of all of the above.... During all these years we’ve created pedagogical experiments, artivism, books, digital art, and large performance events involving dozens, hundreds of artists and curators. We live across several countries and languages. Sometimes we are strategic insiders in the art world, like tonight; other times outsiders by will.

Ahora, why do we still use performance as a matrix? What interests me the most about performance is its ability to connect the bodies of the artist and the audience with the civic sphere in real time. I think of the human body as a metaphor for the body politic; and the space where the performance or workshop takes place as a metaphor for the social body. We believe in the pedagogical dimension of performance. It provides a portal for liberation.

Nowadays, freedom is a loaded term. But performance artists share a relentless search for freedom. The freedom to be able to move between various territories: art, activism, experimental sexuality, popular culture, journalism, new technologies, etc. Even within the territory of art, performance art does not recognize borders. I can be a visual artist, poet, theater artist, producer, installation and video artist at the same time. People even called me a “vernacular philosopher.”

B&A: We mop, we cook, we clean the space… It never ends.

Do you perceive different evolutionary stages in your career?

GGP: I’ll give it a try, broadly. These are my “periods”.  First, my Mexican period, meaning, the time in my life prior to migrating to the US in 1978. Then, my “border arts period” while I was living in the Tijuana/San Diego area including Los Angeles (when I was studying in CalArts). Those were my formative years. I also lived in New York for 3 and a half years in the early 90s and my art was connected to the multicultural debates at the time, mainly the politics of display and the troubling representations of Otherness in mainstream museums… And since 94, I call this my San Francisco period, a site specific body of work always created in dialogue with the local arts community. I’m beginning to sound a bit pedantic, but the question is such. I also have many other bloody periods.

B&A: Do you feel “otherized”? How and by whom?

GGP: Being Mexican in Southern California meant waking up every day and, as an act of will against all circumstances, deciding to continue being Mexican. Whether we liked it or not, we became part of a culture of resistance. Looking "Mexican" or speaking Spanish in public was in itself an act of political defiance. Our position vis-à-vis the dominant culture of California was paradoxical. We were everywhere and nowhere. We were the largest "minority" in the state and at the same time, the least represented in the power hierarchies; we constituted the backbone of the economy at the same time we were perceived as the monstrous specter in the Anglo-Saxon imagination. More paradoxes: We built the romantic backdrop of California with its favorite cuisine and music, and at the same time we posed a fear of epic proportions: Godzilla with a mariachi hat!

If it had not been for Chicanos and other American Latinos I probably would have died of loneliness, nostalgia and invisibility. Chicanos showed me a different way of seeing myself as an artist and as a citizen. Through them I discovered that my art could be the ideal medium to explore and reinvent my multiple and changing identities (something that would have been unthinkable in Mexico at that time). One of the basics of our work has been precisely to answer this question.

JJ: How do your artworks reflect the eras in which they were produced?

GGP: I firmly believe the role of the artist is to actively engage citizens and local arts communities in the larger debates of our times. I think of collaboration as a form of radical citizenship. I collaborate with performers, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, musicians and poets, and utilize audience interaction as artistic strategies to illustrate my ideas across national borders, race, gender and generations. It sounds heavy but we’ve been doing it for almost 40 years and we’re good at it. My projects involve acts of citizen diplomacy and strategies to create communities of "rebel artists” devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator.

I want to talk briefly about a project that Emma mentioned earlier, my 2007 interactive bus tour projec,t “El Corazon de la Mission” because it’s important for this archive project. The “art bus” was decorated inside and outside by local artists. Passengers on The Mission Tour were invited to participate in a Mexican “processional,” as if they too were personas on a parade float. In a way they were "eavesdropping" on the neighborhood, using the windows of “the Mexican Bus” as a safe vantage point to watch the street…and they were also eavesdropping on my own artistic mind.  For the duration of the tour, people on the street became involuntary performance artists on the stage of the rapidly changing neighborhood, immersed in a traveling poetic/performative journey across a mythical bohemian Mission…Pocha Nostra members were also performing live on the streets. I was the tour guide, and my poetry was the itinerary.

That’s one of our favorite SF based projects, ever.

B&A: Yeah, it’s one of our favorites too.

JJ: I liked that one a lot myself. But the one I remember most is the Mexterminator. That was probably your largest project in San Francisco, if I’m not mistaken. It was operatic. I was the grant writer for Jack Davis, so I wrote the grants for that too. That was a really challenging, in-your-face kind of work.

B&A: Does your art address social justice issues? Which ones and why?

GGP: The idea of creating work that gives voice to those who feel like they have no voice – no ability to affect policies and systems that denigrate their quality of life - has been central to LPN’s creative practice. The consideration of diversity and inclusiveness and attempting through our art to change systemic injustice and inequity is a part of every project we undertake, without even mentioning it. We view artists as citizens of the world whose role is to employ art to achieve social justice.

ET: La Pocha Nostra is committed to so-called “artistic excellence,” but we’re equally committed to pursuing social justice for all the people of San Francisco and the cities we tour, especially those disenfranchised people who routinely have had little or no experience of equity or inclusion. Lately we are committed to our living archives and making them accessible for generations to come. La Pocha Nostra’s living archives are a powerful testimony of a lifetime of artistic border crossings and troublemaking in many directions and cultural contexts. The collection is “American” in the largest sense of the word, but also includes documentation of work done internationally, especially in Latin America. The nerve center of our Living Archives is here in SF. So that’s kind of a circular way of answering your question.

B&A: The way that you support your community is phenomenal. In this alienated post-COVID era, that kind of support for your friends is so important. I remember you brought Rene over here to our house when he was trying to fight his eviction and that was so moving to us. The performances at your home are so beautiful, and a whole range of people are always welcome there, from young artists to old friends. It’s beautiful how you hold your community. I think that’s a real social justice issue too. It’s a lost vision of radical hospitality that you don’t often see anymore. This city is so fragmented now, but we still support each other here. It just doesn’t feel competitive.

GGP: Yes, I agree with you Annie.

JJ: But you know, back before the Arts Commission started giving out money to people of color and queers, it was very competitive. Everyone competed with each other and it was very cutthroat. When we started the Queer Arts Festival, we wanted to show people how much further we could go if we worked together rather than competing with each other. When the SFAC committed to having specific money for POC and queers, it really made that possible. But it just wasn’t true before 1992. If you were a Latino arts organization, you were seen as a challenger to Galleria. That’s the way people thought.

But then we got the funds to empower communities of color and queers, and that was just unheard of. California’s Proposition 209 says that you cannot use race to decide anything. Well, that’s exactly what we did with the Cultural Equity Grants Program, and nobody has challenged it. I don’t know why. They could’ve thrown us out after a month. I think a lot of it had to do with Grants for the Arts’ terrible reputation for being racist.

It’s interesting, too, that you used the phrase “artistic excellence”, which is a term that many people who opposed diversity also used. The diversity and inclusion people won and artistic excellence has gone down the drain. People don’t get funded anymore because they’re doing great artistic work. Now you get funded because you know how to answer the questions on the grant.

B&A: Interesting perspectives, Jeff.

Guillermo what motivated you to advocate for diversity as an artist? What was your role in transforming the SF arts community? Don’t be modest.

GP: Emita, please help me. I don’t like to talk about my own achievements.

ET: La Pocha Nostra’s mission is to create performances that speak to the lives of our region’s Chicanx/Latinx and all people designated as “other” throughout the world. We accomplish our mission by providing an artistic home for a loose network of rebel artists from various disciplines, generations, and ethnic backgrounds whose common denominator is our desire to cross and erase dangerous artificial borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator.

By creating work that speaks to the Bay Area’s diverse Latinx communities, which have historically been (and continue to be) economically disenfranchised and underserved, our programs bring to light issues faced by all people designated as “other” (than white, male, English-speaking, straight, Christian and of European descent). We think deeply about what content will “cross borders” – that is to say, we care about cultures and communities other than our own and desire to understand them on their own terms.

Our projects offer audiences the opportunity to be not merely spectators but to interact with performers and each other as performances unfold. We consider ourselves rebel artists, by which we mean we believe that many things that separate people are artificial borders constructed by people/groups/political parties who benefit from divisiveness. As citizen artists, we believe it’s our responsibility to cross these borders.

JJ: Can you tell us about your involvement with organizations like the California Arts Council and SFAC Cultural Equity Grants program? Do you think that these groups contributed to the diversification of the national arts community?

ET: I can help elaborate here. Over the course of GP’s career as a working artist he has received funding from CAC and SFAC for individual projects & performance work and La Pocha Nostra has also received capacity building grants. Most recently from SFAC, GP and LPN were the recipients of the 2023 Artistic Legacy Award honoring over 30 years of artistic leadership. This helped fund the recent extraordinary event that Annie and Beth were involved in at St. Joseph’s. We are grateful for these funds, of course, but I am not sure how I can comment exactly on how these funders have directly impacted the diversification of the national arts scene as a whole... We certainly hope it is true that there has been a significant increase in funding and prioritizing for BIPOC and LGBTQ artists. We also hope that the review panels are equally as diverse and knowledgeable since they are critical to the outcome of an application's funding.

JJ: Personally, I think it’s time for a total reanalysis of the peer review process. Now it’s just like playing roulette. We have these panels of young people who just showed up to San Francisco who are now deciding how millions of dollars get spent in the arts. They don’t know who you are, or who Annie Sprinkle is. They don’t know anything. It almost feels like I would much rather have the Arts Commission making the decisions instead of these amateurs who come in and are getting on-the-job training while deciding the fate of numerous artists in the process.

Emma: I totally agree. I think the whole system needs to change.

JJ: Foundations are better off in this regard because they’re not pulling in random panelists, and they’re doing research. Their staff are being paid to do this and they do a good job. Previously, they only funded white people because they were afraid that their boards would get bent out of shape if they funded amateur artists or folklorists or whatever.

B&A: Reverend Billy, who just opened for Neil Young last night, was talking with us about artistic excellence versus community also. He had to pick the fifteen best singers to go on this tour and they weren’t necessarily the best community members and he said a lot of feelings got hurt. So it’s a balance. These aren’t opposite things. Hopefully you can have both.

JJ: What have the biggest challenges been to this diversification in the arts? Who pushed back? Why? What prejudices or challenges did you face? Is there as much pushback now as in the earlier decades? Stories please.

GGP: From 2012 to 2015, I wrote obsessively on the dangers of the ultimate “creative city,” the much-touted “post-gentrification era” and what it meant to be a foreigner in my own neighborhood waiting for an inevitable eviction notice.  During this time, my own troupe was evicted from our infamous 24th street studio in the Mission District of San Francisco. My obsessions were also driven by what some may describe as philosophical or material anxieties. In both cases, I ask a similar question: how do I wait? Or should I even continue to wait?

But we endured and decided to remain here. Sometimes I felt like the last standing Mexican artist in the Mission.  More recently pandemia and confinement, and the tragic death of George Floyd shifted the conversation, and cultural institutions were forced to look inward and reflect on their systemic colonial and racist practices. Now, have they done it? They are all now talking about “social justice” as the word of the month. But are they walking the walk? This is a topic for another conversation..

B&A: How important have grant writers been to this change? Could this move towards diversity have happened without the diversity grants for artists?

ET: I see grant writers as providing the invaluable connective tissue between an artist's ideas and goals and access to a funding source. Since “grant-ese” as we call it internally is such a specific language, grant writers need to be magicians in adapting artistic concepts into pointed grant language that will resonate with a panel or funding body and succinctly describe a project. Yes, I personally believe a “sea change” of diversity would happen regardless. But that funding for artists is vital, and it can assist in realizing a whole artistic trajectory and funding should increase each year.

B&A: Did Jeff write grants for you? What do you think his role was in this sea change?

GGP: We see Jeff Jones as the orchestra conductor of all the non-main stream organizations in the city. Period. His contribution to a “sea change” cannot be overstated enough. We can testify to the importance of his grant writing for organizations like the Galeria de la Raza, Dance Mission, Cultural Odyssey and many others and also for the guidance role he has offered for LPN and many others. He has raised over 100 million dollars for BIPOC and GLBTQ artists in San Francisco. Which has no doubt made for a more equitable and interesting art scene in the Bay Area. He deserves all the medals from the goddesses of the funding world, or at the very least a gorgeous, permanent artist made bronze statue or mural in city hall. Jeff es un chingon!

JJ: Well, I don’t need accolades because I’ve met so many fabulous people. They are my life.

B&A: What was the art scene like in the 70 to the 90s compared to now?

GP: With pandemia and confinement, we were forced to redefine time and space and reconsider body-based art practice. Remember those days? We lost our live audience, our main source of energy. And in the absence of human contact and political certainties, we were 'zooming’ everyday, and dreaming a lot, trying to artistically survive by performing an illusion of “live art,” online, a contradiction in terms.

In 2020 and 2021, my colleagues and I had a myriad of questions. What exactly was performance art in times of triple pandemia and generalized paranoia?  If everything we loved; – international touring, crossing borders, working in community, in proximity to other bodies and if we couldn’t do it  anymore, how could we possibly reinvent ourselves to bear this perceived impossibility? How could we “embody” our artistic practice on/OFF line or on zoom? Could our wounded bodies and frail minds crossover into Siberia? It was heavy.

Now, in the current political landscape–the culture of pervasive fear, the new social restrictions on sexuality, and the prohibition of the debates on war, imposed by academia and the media, we are presented with more challenges when teaching and presenting performance. A new elliptic culture of euphemisms and circumventions is affecting our aesthetic choices (consciously and subconsciously). The new question is, how can we exercise our full citizenship through performance? How can we continue to talk back to power and fight for freedom in a setting of hyper-conservatism and puritanical discourse coming from the far right and the liberal left? These concerns simply did not exist 10 years ago, or earlier.

B&A: Gay marriage was legalized almost ten years ago and everyone shrugged. But now we’re back at “don’t say gay” and anti-LGBT legislation is being introduced all across the country. It’s pretty disastrous. Abortion rights, civil rights, the fact that librarians in 17 states can now be charged with a felony if they check out the wrong book or that doctors can be jailed for performing abortions.

JJ: I remember that before Michelle Tea left town, the last grant I wrote for her was for the first Drag Queen Story Hour, and it got funded. Now people think “oh my god, they’re grooming children to be queers!” But it wasn’t even for straight kids. It was for children of queer people or even kids of straight parents who didn’t want them to inherit a culture of homophobia. That’s why it was founded, to guarantee that these children would not be brought up with homophobia and sexism and racism as their only options. And look at what they’re doing now. Nazis are assembling outside libraries where something as innocent as that is going on.

B&A: Do you think the future will be more diverse? Or could all of this progress be erased?

GGP: I am afraid that the city will incur the same historical mistake. To hand the city yet again to another tech industry, say AI or biotech…instead of emphasizing the importance of funding arts and culture as the key to bring back the spirit of the city. If I were a politician, I would appoint a board of artists and writers to oversee the so-called return of San Francisco. People tell me…dream Mad Mex.

Now the challenge for arts funders in a city which is almost 16 percent Latinx is to purposely fund Latinx art, which we notice has fallen off the table in the last decade. After all these years, the only visible remaining Latinx organizations in the city (that I’m aware of) are the Mission Cultural Center, the new Galeria de la Raza, Accion Latina and La Pocha Nostra. It breaks your heart.

We wish to convince funders to truly invest in the Latinx communities and believe they have become invisibilized. Why does the contemporary US look towards Asia, Black America and Europe but not as much towards Latin America? We think this is one of the many forces behind why Latinx working artists have had to leave the city.

JJ: In the last two years, the city put out the Dreamkeeper Initiative, in which they poured 2-4 million dollars in the black arts community. Now that community has about 4 or 5 stable groups doing good work. But the Latino arts community is still a mess and there are twice as many Latinos as there are blacks in San Francisco. Mayor Breed is ripe to do something for the arts in the Latino community. But at the same time, the city is about to pull the plug out of the Mexican Museum.

JJ:  Well, the Mexican Museum has been an absolute mess.

B&A: Are there any final thoughts you want to convey in this oral history archive?

GGP: Our intellectual and artistic elders have been abandoned by society. No one is listening to them. Very few young artists are actually working with them. What if all artists chose an elder from their communities to adopt? Once a week they could spend time with their adopted elder, listen to their stories, take them for a walk or a drive to a place of their choice, document carefully their opinions, listen to their new compositions, help them choreograph their latest illusion, organize their archives, and of course in the process, help them make their living spaces more pleasant and vibrant by bringing other artists to talk to them. We can also extend this service to artists who have been impaired by illness and even to the homeless in your street.

In general we also see a new pandemia emerging that has to do with mental health and feel it is important to address this in the arts.

B&A: That’s very true. Wonderful ideas.

Before we go, and as you reflect on your contributions to the arts and the challenges you’ve overcome, do you have any advice or insights to offer to emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ artists who are navigating their own artistic journeys?

GGP: Be clear minded and uncompromising. The times are extremely delicate and dangerous. Art can be one of our possible salvations.

Thank you, Jeff, Beth and Annie, for your work on this project. It’s an important one. Okay, love you. Goodbye.