Performer, writer, and radio commentator Gómez-Peña has lived for 20 years in the USA. He has created what reviewers call a "Chicano cyber-punk performance". His view is the standpoint of marginality, where subcultures become mainstream and the reputedly mainstream is treated as something exotic and suspect. His audience finds themselves put into the position of foreigners and minorities. In his performance "Mexótica 2002", staged jointly with dancer and actor Juan Ybarra, Gómez-Peña examines how Mexico and Mexicans are viewed – as objects of desire as well as fear, they are demonised, romanticised or eroticised. In their interactive "Living Museum", they investigate the allegedly exotic Mexican subcultures, mixing English with Spanish, facts with fiction, social reality with pop-culture and the humour of the chicanos with a politics of action.
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