La Pocha Nostra
Founded in 1993 in Los Angeles, La Pocha Nostra is Gómez-Peña’s ultimate and most long-standing project.
La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization & 501-c3 non-profit that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, gender complexities and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. For 25+ years, LPN has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists.
La Pocha Nostra’s performance work mixes experimental aesthetics, activist politics, Spanglish humor and audience participation to create a “total experience” for both live and online audience member/reader/viewer. Continually developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, La Pocha Nostra creates what critics have termed “Chicano cyber-punk performances,” and “ethno-techno art.” In the work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members and readers in the position of “foreigners” or “minorities.”
Residency/Fellowship
Equal Justice 2017/2018
Website
Location
San Francisco, CA USA
© Santa Fe Art Institute / Santa Fe, New Mexico / 