by Guillermo Gómez-Peña

“It’s a complicated border war. On the surface it’s a war between boom boxes and I-pods; between tequila and…more expensive tequila. But deep inside, it’s a much nastier war between those who remember and those who forget.” –El Mad Mex

(In the shadow of our collective global reality, performance artist and spoken word poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña guides the reader through history, poetry, vernacular anthropology, and social reality into the heart of the Mission District of San Francisco, a place that spends a lot of energy dreaming of a better future. The literary passengers of this tour are invited to participate in a processional as if they, too, were characters on a parade float. They witness “the creative neighborhood” and the city as a bohemian theme park, using the windows of an immigrant bus as a vantage point to watch the streets while eavesdropping on Gómez-Peña’s mind. People on the street become involuntary performers on the stage of the artist’s hood and living metaphors of a border zone. This poetic journey across a mythical Mission District invokes the pantheon of collective gods and godesses buried by globalization and urban hipsterism – passion, civility, compassion, boldness, fantasy, and political imagination – all these wondrous points of light that shine here and there in San Francisco as they do in other bohemian destinations such as Toronto, Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Oaxaca and pre-Katrina New Orleans.

Gómez-Peña’s text does not make a distinction between the local and the global. It erases those fictive boundaries to reveal a microcosm of larger challenges facing other inner cities and ethnic neighborhoods throughout North America, issues that reveal the historical and current reality of immigration, legal and illegal, as well as the complicated politics of “progressive” tourism that turn vibrant neighborhoods/cities into shallow spectacles.

Gómez-Peña ponders some of the following questions: How different is his Mission from the “real” hood? How different is the Mission from the rest of America? What can we learn from this extreme displacement/gentrification process that has/is happened/ happening in many other cities? For the moment, the Mission District is being euphemistically labeled by urban philosophers as “the ultimate creative community” located in the “creative city” par excellence.)

1.-An Ode to the Mission

These poetic postcards are my homage to the hood that has hosted and nurtured my madness for almost 15 years.

The Mission has been the stage for my art, my love, my friendships and my escapades into forbidden territories, both on the streets and inside my psyche. It’s my personal laboratory for permanent existential reinvention.

“Here,” I have written and performed, danced on fire and ice, loved my jaina, cried inconsolably, gotten drunk out of my mind and flesh, laughed, debated, demonstrated, escaped eviction and despair, confronted the cops and the demons of gentrification.

Primer misterio: How come the Mission is sunnier and warmer than the rest of the city? Is it a Latino thang? Is it the heat generated by 700 taquerias? Is it true that we have more sex in this part of the city? What is the source of this chemical, social, sexual, political and artistic stimulus? What draws people here?

Are we seduced by the promise of bohemia in a country of restricted imagination, in an era of constrained freedoms? Are we seeking freedom of the imagination, attracted by the mythical possibility of reinventing ourselves overnight? Of exercising all the selves and identities we wish to become without having to confront conformity every step of the way? Si? No? Maybe? Or are we part of the ongoing wave of international exiles escaping failed revolutions and interventionist wars from San Salvador to Baghdad? Are we part of the wave of sexual and artistic misfits escaping orthodoxy in our distant homelands, or are we merely taking a ghetto cruise? Let’s find out. Let’s cruise my inner barrio to the beat of Radio Mission SF-FM.

2.- The 24th Street Corridor

The infamous 24th street corridor, el corazón de la Misión, poster barrio loco de Califas Norte, has become the most visited Latino strip in the whole pinche country. Why?

This poly-cultural faultline epitomizes America’s main intercultural wrestling match: “la borderización vs. the global project,” round 3: Will the US become a Third World country or will it remain a delusional world power? Here, the 1st world wrestles with the 3rd down the street while all continents converge in the corner trying to make sense out of their sweaty proximity: norte, sur, este, aquel…

Digital snapshots: Old world cantina stands between an art space and a designer boutique…A community center, defending the rights of la gente, is framed by an old-fashioned beauty parlor and an ice cream shop that would make John Waters salivate…Catholicism fights for believers and space with New Age shops and Santeria while fringe Evangelical churches breed a new generation of Latino Intifada.

Ommmm, shalom, jihad, mocos, amen…alleluia!

Here, Central American restaurants feed starving white artists and refugees from wars sponsored by the US, and when you sit at a local bar you just don’t know if the Vato drinking next to you is a Norteño or a Sureño, an X-Salvadoran rebel or a Guatemalan soldier, an unpublished novelist or a Mormon psycho. And you really don’t care cause…we are all others within this intercultural poltergeist.

In the Mission we are all happily immersed in X-treme barrio aesthetics. Here, psychedelic Aztec gods fly from the walls of panaderias to the gorgeous skin of designer primitives in baroque dialogue with virgins and revolutionaries. It’s the globo-tropical aesthetics of sacrifice and hope, and we love it!

3.-Hipsters vs. locals

“In two years, they’ll all return to Iowa or Wisconsin” -whispered an old Chicano drunk as if consoling himself.

The first paradox we encounter in Planet Mission is a border conflict between the so-called “locals” and the “art hipsters,” two gross generalizations because, stricto sensu the locals aren’t that local and the “hipsters” aren’t that hip.

The main complaint of the locals is that the hipsters don’t really “live” in the Mission, ontologically speaking; that they are here temporarily only to have a vicarious experience of bohemian locura and cultural otherness. They are perceived as obnoxious tourists crashing the hood cause its closer than San Miguel Allende or Oaxaca, cheaper than Santa Fe or Venice Beach, and less dangerous than Tijuana.

And after a few Grey Goose martinis, the hipsters also complain. They complain about the homeboys’ machismo and their primitive tattoos; about the homegirls’ rowdiness and long black nails; and moan that everything closes so early in the mecca of hipsterism.

It’s a complicated border war. On the surface it’s a war between boom boxes and I-pods; between tequila and…more expensive tequila. But deep inside, it’s a much nastier war between those who remember and those who forget.

The gaze of the homeboys is heavy and defiant, true. But the gaze of the hipsters is…vacant. So what is more offensive? The cultural boldness of working class Latinos or the existential indifference of the Anglos? Hard to tell.

Do the hispsters and the locals ever meet? Occasionally…during a one night stand (and mostly the queers) cause according to hipsterologist Claire Light, “21st century heteros aren’t mating outside their sociocultural group.”

For me, the unresolved question is: Am I a hipster or a local? Can I be both… please? Can I inhabit both psyches and wear both identities? The problem is that to them I look like a biker shaman, and to me they look like tourists.

4.- 24th and Mission

Right in 24th and Mission Street, we enter one of the 4 vortices of hell where the victims of America’s endemic lack of compassion gather to howl. It is precisely here that gang banger entrepreneurs negotiate their mysterious turf wars with old hookers, lunatic evangelists and Noe Valley commuters, while pathetic undercover cops ticket the homeless and keep watch over the pay toilet. This bizarre multi-cultural ritual repeats every day.

Right across the street is La Boheme, one of the oldest coffee shops in the city, where you often find the wanna be/has been Latino intelligentsia from the Pleistocene era and a few Chicanosaurus Erectus still discussing the whereabouts of Che and the pertinence of the Cuban revolution. Neta, It’s a museum of the broken dreams of the left. And we all love to partake in their romantic coffee and domino rituals.

5.-Borders, mas borders

The Mission’s crisscrossed by myriad borders, invisible and overt; porous and abysmal.

The border between South and North America; between Old and New San Francisco; San Andres y la Sierra Nevada. The border between Valencia and Mission St; Valencia Gardens and the Castro; the Inner and Outer barrios; between bohemia and neglect, club life and church life, bookstores and gun shops. The border between high life and low life; high and low art; high and low desire…stop!

The border between Victorian romance and an anonymous blowjob is so pinche easy to cross. Let’s face it: Sometimes one crosses these borders without even realizing it.

Haiku postcard: A skinny hooker exiled from Tennessee knocks at the door of La Iglesia del Mundo. She wants something to eat, a place to pee. The minister tells her to go to hell. She answers, “Oh, I’m sorry sir. I thought this was the entrance.”

6.-Driving down Mission Street

In Mission Street, suave low-riders in their tricked out, chrome-trimmed, neon embellished moving cathedrals, used to cruise on weekend nights, bien wicked, remember? In the late 90’s the dot.com boom pushed them South to San Jose where they are now allowed to cruise…but only on Cinco de Mayo. Coño! I miss those vatos locos!

Shhhhhh! You still hear their hydraulic serenade; ghost sounds in the dead night of the hood.

When you walk down this strip, you feel you are at the same time in Tijuana, Tepito, East LA, Calcutta, Kinshasa and the Lower East Side.

Composed of myriad informal businesses, Mission Street is another highly charged corridor where Latin America intertwines with Asia and the Middle East in a somewhat coherent pattern. And what binds this poly-cultural, multi-lingual community es la economia informal, por no decir el contrabando, America’s biggest nightmare…I call it, “the other global project,” capitalism at a grassroots level.

On the weekends, so tender, you can spot Salvadoran moms shopping alongside vegan lesbian artists, shopping for multi-colored tortillas and Nan bread. It warms your heart carnales. We are so far away from Suburbia. I call it “the Universal Barrio.”

So, what are you really looking for? A social security number? A work-visa? A brown baby for adoption? No problem, señor. Yucca, bidis, mole negro, purple eggs, chili vaginal cream? Anonymous oral sex? Asian porn translated to Spanish by a Russian mobster?

The list of barriobilia is endless and intoxicating: Electric Guadalupes and Fridas “made in Taiwan;” designer clothes with misspelled brand names; pinto jewelry, stilettos for your favorite drag queen; zoot-suits with classic designs from the 40’s. You name it; we got it. You state your desire; we cater to it. Quick check cashing; no questions asked…Paletas, paletas, besos, pantaletas!

Segundo misterio: Most of these chingaderita stores are operated by Latinos but owned by Asians. Why? Is it something in the DNA or in the cuisine? Or maybe it’s just a gentleman’s agreement between the Hong Kong mafia and the Tijuana Cartel.

Do you have another theory?

7.-Clarion Alley

Remember Balmy Alley? How nice and ordered it was? No smell of urine; only the sparkle of clean paint and memories of revolution immortalized on the walls? Remember its canned representations of Latin American upheavals? Well, here we are, on the opposite side of life, in one of my favorite places: Clarion Alley where agit-prop meets public art on the corner of Western Civilization and Hell.

Clarion is edgy, diverse, experimental and unpredictable but always stinky… apestoso, como la vida. It’s walls feature layers upon layers of underground art. Some chido and some disappointing, como la vida.

Clarion also happens to be a “shooting gallery” for tecatos, tabula rasa in-extremis. So you can get your drogas here; your mota, heroin, crack, cocaine, and crystal meth, ‘cause San Pancho is a major feeding ground for drogas from all over the world. From Istanbul to Cartagena and from Kingston to Tijuana, they all converge aqui!

Here so many tecatos have died while artists were painting the backdrop of hope; so many cholos have been killed in the norteño/sureño wars; so many runaway teens have met the germ of death in someone else’s needle. Here, death and art are fighting for the same oxygen. Planet Earth can be such a narrow alleyway.

So…my dear tourist friends, you’ve got 10 minutes to cruise the Alley and I’ll meet you on the other side. If you choose to go, La Junkie Misionera will be your temporary tour guide across this dangerous border. Please, don’t forget your passport, maintain a respectful distance from the inert human bodies and watch out for fresh human excrement!

8.-The Women’s Building

We are now approaching the Women’s Building, a kind of Vietnam Wall calling for recognition of the true place of women in history.

To create it, 8000 questionnaires were distributed asking people to make a list of “the most important women ever.” The result was this fabulous and yet fabulously imperfect mural which came out of extensive community meetings debates about representation and history…and a nasty battle between a day care center and a rowdy Irish bar. That’s San Francisco, a place eternally debating between social justice and decadence; el corazón y la nalga.

It is no coincidence that half a block from here is the famous super-loco Lexington Bar where all lesbian subcultures fight for tenderness and attention every weekend.

9.-Mission Dolores

This is definitely ground zero in San Francisco’s history, the oldest center of the city; a great city founded on conversion and deception. And it is not a Chicano overstatement to say that more than 7,000 Native Americans died here from European disease and slave labor.

Mission San Francisco de Asis is the oldest intact building in the city, and was erected next to last in the chain of Spanish Misiones marching North with Fray Junipero Serra, from Baja to Sonoma.

Dolores was founded around 1776 to convert and baptize the Yelamu Indians, the original San Franciscans, mis-named “Ohlone” by the Spanish friars.

The building is a bit too cute for me; too restored for my rascuache taste. You know what happens when Departments of Tourism decide to commodify history? It ends up looking like a movie set for a cheesy historical drama. I can almost see Zorro bursting out of the entrance on his black stallion; his Anglo señorita waving señor Banderas good-bye.

But I do love the cemetery where you can honor all peoples vanquished before 1848. If you look carefully, most of the names on the tombstones are in Spanish. Porque? They are the ghosts from the past, a Mexican past in a city of ghosts, before it became a city of gold diggers and flamboyant prostitutes, of gamblers and adventurers like you and me.

Ay! San Pancho de Locos, city of horny angels and sexy demons, count me in; let me loose.

Right across the street they used to stage fights between grizzly bears and Spanish bulls. It was like…the primal Californian cock fight. The bull, in all its horny glory representing the pride of Nova Hispania versus the brown California bear, clawed, hairy, pensive, omnivore, the symbol of the emerging Republic; a perfect fight between the Mexican and US histories staging their own mythologies before a drunken crowd.

What would be the contemporary equivalent? Albino pitbulls fighting Burmese pythons at The Power Exchange? A homeless Mexican exchanging insults with a drunken yuppie?

10.- Dolores Park

We are in El Parque Dolores, which translates to the park of sorrows or pain. I’d say, a pain in the political ass of the city. Do you know that Emma Goldman, the original feminist anarchist, lived right here when she worked as a midwife and agitator? And so did the family of Marxist diva Tina Modotti.

Since 1905, this quiet and bucolic Victorian setting has been the quintessential protest park, a huge performance stage for labor, civil rights and anti-war protests, as well as the open-air theater for multi-ethnic festivals, activist Aztec dances and topless Dykes-on-bikes summits. Santana, the Mime Troupe, The Dance Brigade, La Pocha Nostra, you name it. We all have howled under the full moon right here.

And these days, on a sunny weekend, Dolores Park is a great place to cruise, flirt, do tai chi, have a barbecue, take off your clothes, show off your tattoos and pale nalgas and step on exotic dog shit to the beat of taiko drums. We all love it! We’d all love to have an apartment here, que no? But…well, let’s face it, we can’t afford the view, specially if you are a Chicano performance artist. Prime Real State in Old San Pancho is the sole privilege of upper class gringos. Just like Santa Fe. Scary comparison que no?

11.- The Valencia corridor

On April 18th, 1906, the famous 4-story Valencia Hotel standing at the corner of 18th and Valencia, sank into the west end of Mission Bay. And a hundred of its international guests drowned.

In the late 90’s, a cyber-earthquake rocked the Mission and block-by-block, the old barrio tumbled into the Chilicon Valley faultline.

Before the cyber-bonanza, the Mission was a wild gender-ethnic-bender border zone and Valencia Street was the city’s lesbian boulevard, with lots of amazing places like Osento, Old Wives’ Tales, Amelia’s and Good Vibrations. But now, it’s become, according to airline magazines and tourist guide books, “the hippest strip” in “the hippest city of America;” the ultimate mating area for the hetero-vanilla bohemia of a nation in denial.

The new Valencia is a picturesque “multi-kulti” bazaar with boutiques bearing pretentious names I won’t mention because next month, they will all be gone, only to be replaced by yet another retro-neo-ultra-anti-posmo-fad.

The question here is, what does your current trans-ethnic persona crave for today? Period hats or Polynesian furniture? Specialty dildos or Santeria talismans? A ritual coffee shop for the techno-literati? Fridomania, pirate-obilia, hi-kitsch for the connoisseur? Red, blue hair, trenzas, white extensions, mini-dreadlocks, shaved heads with intricate henna calligraphy, X-treme instant fashion for the art flaneur in search of a slicker identity?

Empty questions in empty ears.

A few of the old funky shops and used bookstores still survive but are now intertwined with pedantic hipster bars and restaurants offering valet parking to Hummers and SUVs.

In this border town, bicycle cops weave through traffic as Goth rockers and stiletto-heeled chucas walk down the street on their way to tantric yoga class or a “puppets for peace” workshop. In this border town, the old bohemia is barely holding it down amidst the celebrity wannabes who merely look the part. In this city of hype, the wrong look can render you a nuisance. In this city of youth, people over 30 don’t really exist.

PD: Is there still a place for us in this parade? Or is it that we exist in a parallel San Francisco?

12.-Bohemian theme park

The Mission may have both the largest concentration of writers and artists and the largest concentration of ephemeral art spaces and independent bookstores, all existing in one clearly defined neighborhood.

This can be both inspiring and unnerving. Inspiring for the obvious reasons: La cultura breathes and flows freely in the quotidian realm. And unnerving cause everyone here is or claims to be an artist, a poet, a musician or a filmmaker. If you look hip and engage in acceptable hip behavior, by extension you are an artist. It’s a lifestyle thing around here, part of the city’s mythology of self-expression: “I express myself relentlessly therefore I am from San Francisco.”

The entire city is a huge bohemian theme park. We’ve got the gear and the looks and the context calls for it therefore everyone here does capoeira, folclorico, reiki, chi-kun, contact improv, S&M, Zen poetry, shouting therapy, performance art, aerial inverted cello playing…. wah! But only on the weekends, cause the city is too expensive and on Monday we have to go back to work. And then we work and work for 10, 12 hours a day so the next weekend we can express ourselves again.

Yes carnales, dilettantism reigns in the kingdom of self-expression.

By the way, does anyone have a poem to share? An impromptu performance? An improv dance to help us attain peace in the Middle East? Go for it! It’s a beautiful day and San Francisco is your ephemeral stage. There are no audience members. Everyone here is part of the show.

13.-The Redstone Building

We are now at the legendary Redstone building, former temple of labor and historical landmark dating back to 1914. Remember the famous 1934 General Strike? It was actually organized here. And the echoes of those passionate meetings are permanently imprinted on the walls.

The Redstone hosts some of the most amazing political and cultural organizations in the City, including Theater Rhinoceros, the first professional gay and lesbian theater in the US; El Teatro de la Esperanza, one of the oldest Chicano teatros; Art & Revolution, a workshop where many anti-globalization marches get planned; The Lab, a notorious alternative space for young interdisciplinary locos; La Pocha Nostra, the offices of my macabre performance troupe…NGOs who feed the homeless and the trannies, save the land, defend brown and black prisoners and fight greedy landlords. You can spend an entire day knocking at every door, and talking to people about politics and counterculture.

The only problem is that the Redstone building is located in one of the most dangerous cross-sections in SF, 16th and Capp, urban sphincter of America’s nightmare. Rich with unsavory smells and mysterious fluids, this corner is the last waystation for the orphans of gentrification.

Here, 17-year-old runaways and infirm male and female prostitutes hang out with petty drug dealers and newly released prisoners while artists and activists walk in and out of our studio spaces oblivious to our surroundings. It’s like a garden of new ideas and used syringes; a place where the bohemian myth implodes and we forget we are in San Francisco. And I tell you carnales, I tell you, this can be quite liberating.

So…I invite you to step out of my poetic bus and have a drink at the corner bar, The City Club, a gathering place for newly arrived migrants from Yucatan…or you can engage in an interesting social experiment: walk around the block with your eyes closed. You can hold hands to make it easier. If you make it back…we are talking! You are an honorary Mission citizen…Go for it! Please watch your nalgas and handbags. And if you get mugged, just show them your passport. No sweat!

14.-The ritual of permanent displacement

I’m laying on Sweet Cecily’s tattoo chair located at Cyclops, on 16th and Valencia. She’s working on my most recent tattoo, a huge eagle with open wings on my chest. “One of your inner animals,” she says.

As I get into pain-trance, my mind begins to wonder in search of an end for my Mission tour. I begin to hallucinate:

“…And then came the friars displacing the Ohlone and the gold-diggers displacing the Mexicans. Then came the Italians and the Jews displacing the Irish. Then came back the Mexicans pushing the European migrants to other hoods, followed by the Salvadorans and the Nicaraguans, who in turn were followed by Guatemalans and many more Mexicans. And they all became Chicanos by default.

But soon Russians and Arabs displaced them, who in turn were displaced by an internal migration of Chinese and Koreans. The obnoxious dot comers eventually displaced them all. When the cyber-market crashed, the mysterious Mayans began to arrive, crisscrossing their fate with art hipsters from the American province.

Tomorrow we simply don’t know. Will the Mission become the quintessential Universal Barrio or a heritage park for the radical chic? Falluja or Santa Fe? Where will we be in 5 years? Where will the soul of the country be located 10 years from now?”

Sweet Cecily wakes me up slowly and offers me a glass of water. My 4-hour tattoo session is over. I walk back to my house located in the corner of Cesar Chavez and Valencia. While walking, I find the final text of my tour:

“Standing on the map of my political desires
I toast to a borderless future
with…
our Alaskan hair
our Canadian head
our US torso
our Mexican genitalia
our Central American cojones
our Caribbean vulva
our South American legs
our Patagonian feet
our Antartic nails
jumping borders at ease
jumping borders with pleasure
amen, hey man”

15.-Post-script: Third and last mystery

How come there are no Mexican gourmet restaurants around? Don’t we all wish to go beyond giant burritos without lard? You know, locos, the only thing I miss from Mexico is the high gastronomy. The rest is already here.