Kennesaw Review :: An Online Literary Journal

Summer 2002

Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Warrior for Gringostroika.
St. Paul, Minn: Graywolf Press, 1993. 174 pp.

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist in the United States and a writer in Mexico. This self-definition is but one of the contradictions he embodies by virtue of his dual Mexican and North American identity. By simply crossing the border, he changes shape, as we all do. His life work is to make that shape-shifting visible through essay, art, performance art, poetry, fiction, and memoir. He calls himself “the border brujo” and hangs himself on a cross in Mendocino, wraps himself up like a mummy in an LA elevator, and imprisons himself in a cage in Spain. By virtue of his Indian-Mexican appearance, he is already an art object. He exaggerates the icons associated with these identities to call our attention to their subtler appearances.

This summer in the Kennesaw State University Education Abroad Program in Oaxaca we read his collection of essays, poems, and performance pieces entitled Warrior for Gringostroika (Greywolf, 1993). Two of the four students reading this collection had immediate angry responses to it. One was angry because she saw him as a privileged middle-class person who could afford to spend his life doing this sort of thing. The other student felt criticized as an Anglo and objectified by Peña’s language. She remarked that she did not think that taxpayers’ money should be spent on financing art (Gomez-Peña received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award, which is private, not public money). Another student, from Columbia, felt represented by Peña’s speech and visible for the first time as a part of North American culture. All of these reactions seemed appropriate to me. They are part of the cross-cultural dialogue Peña calls for:

We [Latinos in the United States] don’t want to be a mere ingredient of the melting pot. What we want is to participate actively in a humanistic, pluralistic, and politicized dialogue, continuous and not sporadic, and we want this to occur between equals who enjoy the same power of negotiation. (41)

Warrior for Gringostroika forecasts a United States in which Latinos do have an equal power of negotiation and Peña warns North Americans to begin the dialogue now:

I say:
Generic citizenry
Norteamérica has grown
Back to its original size
From Yucatán to Greenland
From Michigan to Michoacán
I toast to Nuestra America
From the Papago to the punk
I toast to the beginning of an era
A true multicultural society
From ritual art to “neo-geo”
I toast in equal terms with you
My dear Anglosaxican partner
waspano de tercera generación
In my performance country
República de Arteamérica
You’re just a minority
But you have some rights
Like the right to listen respectfully
& as long as you continue
to fear moi or desire me
without proportion to my dignity
then, my dear involuntary neighbor
entropy will keep creeping
like magma into your home
into your troubled spirit
& I won’t be there to rescue you
from the flood of your guilt (94)

As a gringa in Mexico, I have experienced the fear and desire projected on foreigners. Gomez-Peña reminds me to keep this awareness with me as I come back “home.” He invites us all to become citizens of the border.

Linda G. Niemann

Linda G. Niemann teaches Creative Nonfiction at Kennesaw State University. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley, was a conductor for twenty years on the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and Amtrak railroads, and is the author of On the Rails and Railroad Voices.

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