A Selection of Quotes:
(On various projects):

About Gómez-Peña:

“Part freak show and part parody of anthropological museums, Mexterminator shocks and objectifies the viewer.”
-The San Francisco Chronicle

“It’s a sight to give Pat Buchanan a coronary.”
-Robert Dominguez, Daily News (NY)

“If Rembrandt, Rubens and assorted other Old Masters aren’t rolling around in their graves this weekend, it won’t be the fault of Mexican performance artist Gómez-Peña.”
-Joy Hakanson Colby, Detroit News

“Gómez-Peña's commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere's cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”
-Voice Literary Supplement

“His award-winning solos, combine languages-Spanish, English, Spanglish, Ingleñol, Nahuatl, wild theatrics and guerrilla satire to convey a new internationalism, a borderless ethos.”
-Jan Breslauer, L.A. Times

“He's one of the handful of great performance artists in America today.”
-Peter Sellars

“In everything he does, he remains an indomitably playful phrasemaker; a fertile rethinker of cultural contradictions, clichés, and conundrums; and an inspiring recruiter for a playground army of cultural pluralists.”
-The Village Voice, 1991: The Year of Living Ominously

“Gómez-Peña is magnificent, melodramatic, robustly hilarious and precisely, exquisitely witty...I emerge from his performances somewhat dazed...”
-Lucy Lippard

“Twenty years of wildly interrogations have put Guillermo Gómez-Peña at the center of the immigration debate.”
-The San Francisco Bay Guardian

“His focus on U.S.-Mexico relations has helped to inject the word ‘border' into the national arts discourse.”
-Ruben Martinez, The New York Times

“He's a citizen of everywhere and nowhere, a post-Mexican, neo-Chicano, trans-American. These transitional identities feed the work, become the work...He has become an invaluable voice in the multiculti discussions.”
-Cindi Carr, The Village Voice

“...a peacemaker in the world's culture clash.”
-Vanity Fair

“Gomez-Peña's work is among the most powerful examples of intercultural performance.”
-Richard Sheckner, American Theatre Magazine

“Cruise with him through a political landscape in which geographic borders have collapsed and language barriers have been disintegrated by Gringostroika; this is an America where ‘the other’ no longer exists.”
-Laura Jamison, Mother Jones

“Performance artists of the 90's such as Gómez-Peña reject the worn out distinction between performance, street theatre and gallery art as well as the dichotomy of art and activism.”
-Los Angeles Times, Faces for the 90's

“Gómez-Peña's hip, spirited style of anthropological performance art was well received in San Francisco.”
-The San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Computers are to Gómez-Peña’s work what food is to Karen Finley’s: one of many incendiary elements for electrifying the performance...The Net is the logical extention of Gómez-Peña’s established conduits.”
-Austin Bunn, Village Voice

“Gómez-Peña uses theatrics to erase borders. His inventive efforts to create a hybrid culture have won him international acclaim.”
-Miriam Horn, US News & World Report

“Extremely articulate, Gómez-Peña rivets attention through deliberate gesture and a commanding, versatile voice...his role reversing strategy allows the non-bilingual audience to experience first hand the outsider's perspective.”
-Victoria Martin, Artweek

“Few performance artists deliver their opinions with as much punch and with such delightful verbal acrobatics.”
-Jasmina Wellinghoff, San Antonio Light

“This peripatetic “post-Mexican romantic” travels around the U.S. and the world practicing a performance art and preaching an intercultural gospel that brings the American melting pot to a boil.”
-Scott Cummings, American Theater

-“Gómez-Peña is a linguist...As he shifted from one character, one accent, one language to another, I re-experienced the vertigo of the border.”
-Cindi Carr, The Village Voice


-“Pocha Nostra throws all kinds of visual, musical, thematic, and performance into their pot, stir a bit, and serve with gusto. Then, they abandon that pot for another equally brimming with eclectic ingredients.”
-Roberto Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner

“Considered one of the finest performance artists working in the U.S. today, Mexico-born Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his collaborator Roberto Sifuentes, have created a surreal, chapel-like environment. In this space, viewers become participants, revealing their innermost fears and feelings about Mexicans, Chicanos and Mexican culture...Listening to the tapes (confessions) is like listening to poetry. People are disturbed, confused, ashamed, hopeful.”
-Kathleen Vanesian, New Times

-“Gómez-Peña and his colleagues make an appealing appeal for borderless cross-cultural evolution, the manifestation of which is nowhere more immediate than in the quickfire assertion of 'Spanglish' and 'Ingleñol' as a viable and truly colorful linguistic currency.”
-Homer Robinson, THE Magazine

- “They slip into this scenario with the rudeness of a pirate radio-hack, bringing in news from across the border of mainstream propaganda and understanding.”
-Amitava Kumar, Iguana

-“Gómez-Peña (and his collaborating team) make an appeal for borderless cross-cultural evolution, the manifestation of which is nowhere more immediate than in the quickfire assertion of 'Spanglish' and 'Ingleñol' as a viable and truly colorful linguistic currency.”
-Homer Robinson, THE Magazine

About Gómez-Peña and Juan Ybarra (still to be collected):

-"A trio of artists opened to a full house Thursday night at Out North, (Anchorage, Alaska)presenting a provocative, engaging, often brilliant evening of that indefinable entertainment hybrid known as performance art. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Silvana Straw and Juan Ybarra's spoken-word oratorio "Apocalypse Manana" collectively spun a Rolodex of genre-busting disciplines from poetry to dance to social satire to dramatic and comedic monologues. The collaborative effort, specifically concocted for Out North, showcased each artist's specialty, creating a kaleidoscopic journey into the deepest, darkest and most ridiculous recesses of contemporary America."
--Mark Muro

About Pocha Nostra's opera adventures:

-"There is something in 'The Indian Queen' to offend just about
everyone. There is also something in it that should delight or at least
astonish just about everyone as well. It's a mess. But it's a dazzling
mess. It utterly, totally, unapologetically undoes just about everything
its authors, composer Henry Purcell and poet John Dryden, set out to do
in 1695. But it saves a work that probably could survive in no other
reasonable way. It brings something new to opera at a time when you
might think just about everything imaginable has already been done."
-Mark Swed, The Los Angeles Times

-"An in-your-face performance artist with a stong agenda to interpret
history from a politicized Chicano perspective, Gómez-Peña has no choice
but to understand Dryden's drama as Eurocentrist racism....Cultures clash. The main political outline of celebrating Chicano culture and skewering the racist West is not followed closely. Everything gets mixed up in parody and glorious parades. In fact, the real politics here is in pure storming of the opera stage, of putting as much on it as possible and doing it, ultimately, with a great sense of joy."
-Mark Swed, The Los Angeles Times

-“Forget the preachers and the soothsayers. When California slides into the Mexican ocean, put Gómez-Peña and Galindo on your speed dial. This is old-fashioned West Coast vision and prophecy time-warped into a future of digital polyculturalism that’s already here. Gómez-Peña speaks, shouts, whispers, and gushes in forked and curled tongues, a Nostradamus-Walter Mercado replicant who prays to Santa Selena and wears "Don’t Worry, Be Hopi" t-shirts. Galindo surrounds him in cut-up sound clouds of opera, speed metal, and urban noise—a jagged electro-ambience that converts the Hotel California into "la mansion de la muerte." These are chants for ethnic robots, rituals for post-millennial Mexican, and balms for the identity beleaguered. In other words, it’s fantasy and paranoia and hope and it comes in any language you want to make up." -Josh Kun

About the film “The Great Mojado Invasion”

-“A highlight of this selection of films is the latest work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vasquez, The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US-Mexico War). This mock documentary presents an ironic 21st-century reversal of U.S.-Mexican relations, as "dastardly mustachioed bandits" conquer the United States and impose their own language and culture upon Anglo-Americans.”
-The Margaret Mead Film Festival Catalogue