The Final Frontier: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Great Mojado Invasion

Abstract

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, who has been described as “without question the best-known Latino, Chicano, Mexican performance artist in the United States, Latin America, and the art world of the North Atlantic corridor,” is a transnational figure in terms of his biography and his work (Mendieta 2003, 539). Gomez-Pena has forged a composite identity as a Mexican-born artist who resides mainly in the United States and who describes himself as a “Mexican in the process of Chicanoization” (2000, 21). His writings, performances, and filmic works, especially The Great Mojado Invasion (The 2nd US-Mexico War [2001]), which will be the focus of this chapter, seamlessly blend high and pop culture as he interrogates notions of cultural belonging and exclusion. Together with his long-term collaborators, Pocha Nostra, Gomez-Pena joins forces with performance artists and activists across the globe, producing works that create new spaces and communities through performances and Internet projects that transcend easy categorization in terms of race, gender, and even species. Given the fact that his own life has involved movements across borders of different kinds that are mirrored in his artistic practice, transnationalism provides a useful framework for the analysis of his work.