Chicanx Futurist Performances: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the La Pocha Nostra Territorial Cartographies

Abstract

[Abstract] This chapter examines the performative power of La Pocha Nostra to build a transnational alternative space for neglected communities. Such space represents, through radical politics, a form of futurism in which reversed epistemologies and disidentified bodies coalesce to create new forms of society based on a posthuman aesthetic. In their cyberpunk pedagogical performances, La Pocha Nostra move cultural borders away from the epistemological margins, and they support alternative renderings of the exotic and the unfamiliar. This analysis of Gómez-Peña’s project also looks at other Chicanx narratives that present forms of futurisms in mural painting, video productions, literature, film, and performance.