Raza Man Vibration

When President Clinton assembled the think tank behind his Initiative on Race, he couldn't have found a more far-reaching mind on the subject than Mexican-born "border artist" Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Not that el Presidente did select him. For years -- Gómez-Peña came to the U.S. in 1978 -- the performance artist has challenged established notions of race, gender, and culture through his performances and writing; he's even taken his ideas to the Internet. His interactive performance piece of a couple years back, "The Mexterminator Project" (with collaborator Robert Sifuentes) challenged participants to think about the culturally loaded baggage embedded in our nation's mind; those who arrived in stereotyped costume got a discount.

More recently, Gómez-Peña assembled and schooled an intergenerational group of Latino poets and performance artists on his cross-cultural vision for Brown Sheep Project. The group brings together words -- an entirely new language perhaps; Gómez-Peña has invented a few of his own -- and performance to counter cultural disappearance while affirming their own identities. While challenging cultural conceptions that give rise to phenomena like talking chihauhuas hawking "Mexican" food, the Brown Sheep tap into the fertile field of contemporary Latino culture, finding common references in African American, Asian, and Anglo pop culture, while forging a path uniquely their own.