Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance praxis as decolonial public pedagogy: deconstructing borders, redefining identities, and decolonizing the gaze

This article clarifies and emphasizes Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra’s long-standing articulation of performance as decolonial pedagogy, foregrounding their praxis not merely as activism or artistic provocation but as a sustained, embodied, and public form of decolonial education. The analysis highlights how Gómez-Peña’s own publications—including Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011) and La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist (2021)—articulate the work as decolonial in essence, though its pedagogical dimensions have often remained underexamined in scholarship. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Bhabha, Said, Spivak), borderlands scholarship (Anzaldúa), performance studies (Schechner, Taylor), critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, Hooks), and visuality/colonial optics (Mirzoeff, Rancière), as well as recent dialogues in Global Performance Studies (2022) on decolonization and performance, the article situates Gómez-Peña’s hybrid personae, border praxis, and audience-engaged strategies as practices of radical citizenship that teach through disruption, disorientation, and imaginative intervention. His performances collapse the spectator/performer binary, mobilize linguistic and cultural hybridity as epistemic tools, and interrogate the colonial gaze by reworking the conditions of visibility and authenticity. The study argues that his work operates as public pedagogy, creating civic spaces where knowledge production, identity negotiation, and anti-colonial consciousness coalesce in performative encounter, illuminating the pedagogical intentionality that has always been central to La Pocha Nostra’s ethos.

1 Introduction

Guillermo Gómez-Peña occupies a liminal territory in contemporary cultural production: at once artist, activist, educator, and provocateur, he has forged a praxis that insists on the inseparability of aesthetics, politics, and pedagogy. His performances—often emerging from the contested geographies of the U.S.–Mexico border, from the embodied contradictions of immigrant identity, and from the residual logics of empire—enact a pedagogy without classrooms. They teach by destabilizing normative perception, confronting spectators with their own complicity in systems of othering, and modeling modes of belonging that are hybrid, fluid, and resistant to colonial categorization. Building upon Gómez-Peña’s own explicit framing of performance as pedagogical practice (see Gómez-Peña and Roberto, 2011, Gómez-Peña and García-López, 2021), this essay emphasizes the decolonial pedagogy at the core of his and La Pocha Nostra’s collaborative work.

The purpose of this reframing is to draw scholarly attention to a dimension that has been under-analyzed: the conscious pedagogical architecture of Gómez-Peña’s praxis—his “living classroom” of intercultural dialogue, risk, and radical empathy. Recognizing this pedagogical emphasis is vital, because it positions performance not only as critique but as epistemological practice, enacting decolonial ways of knowing in public space.

The urgency of such a reading emerges from contemporary scholarly debates about the roles of culture and performance in structuring civic subjectivity. While scholars have long noted the activist dimensions of Gómez-Peña’s work (e.g., the notion of “artivism”), fewer have rigorously situated it within the overlapping fields of postcolonial theory, public pedagogy, and performance studies as an epistemic intervention. This article fills that gap by reorganizing existing discourse into a coherent theoretical and analytical framework that (1) historicizes his border praxis through the language of hybridity and borderlands; (2) narrativizes his hybrid character work as a performative destabilization of essentialist identity; (3) situates his visual and representational strategies as a decolonization of gaze rooted in anti-colonial critique; and (4) foregrounds his techniques of audience engagement as deliberate, civic pedagogical strategies aimed at cultivating radical citizenship. Additionally, the paper situates this inquiry within ongoing debates on border aesthetics (Schimanski et al., 2023), extending Gómez-Peña’s own “border pedagogy” into dialogue with recent theoretical elaborations on aesthetic, epistemological, and affective negotiations of borders.

Gómez-Peña’s work is repositioned not simply as provocative performance art but as an embodied curriculum in which spectators are invited, coerced, and seduced into learning—through discomfort, parody, participation, and reflection. The article argues that his performance praxis enacts a radical reconfiguration of public education by introducing decolonial epistemologies into shared civic space, collapsing the boundaries between teacher/learner, center/periphery, and visible/invisible.

2 Literature review

This intervention rests at the intersection of multiple, overlapping literatures: postcolonial and decolonial studies; borderlands and transnational cultural theory; performance studies; and public pedagogy. Postcolonial theorists such as Said (1978) and Spivak (1988) have probed the epistemic violences embedded within knowledge production, representation, and the “authorized” gaze, especially as these relate to the production of the Other. Bhabha’s (1994) notion of hybridity and the “third space” describes the productive ambivalence of cultural intersections, a framework that is further complicated by Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands as both psychic and geographic zones of intense cultural negotiation and identity emergence. Bhabha’s emphasis on negotiation and mimicry directly resonates with Gómez-Peña’s parodic personae in works such as The Mexterminator Project (1997–2000), where hybrid figures like “El Aztec High-Tech” and “El Cyber Vato” expose the absurdities of racial, technological, and cultural purity through deliberate excess and misrecognition. Similarly, Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” finds corporeal form in Gómez-Peña’s multilingual, border-crossing performances, which enact border consciousness as embodied pedagogy rather than metaphor.

Performance studies scholars have emphasized the role of performance as knowledge-making and as an embodied archive of cultural memory and contestation. Richard Schechner (2002) argues that performance is a mode of “restored behavior”—an iterative, transformative practice through which individuals and communities negotiate meaning. Taylor (2003) expands the archive/repertoire dichotomy, asserting that lived embodied practices (the repertoire) transmit knowledge in ways that resist institutional capture. Gómez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra exemplify this principle. In The Temple of Confessions (1995), the artist transforms a museum space into a live confessional booth where spectators exchange stories of race, desire, and colonial fantasy. This act of reciprocal vulnerability operates as Taylor’s repertoire—knowledge transmitted through bodily encounter rather than textual record.

Within the field of public pedagogy, scholars like Freire (1970), Giroux (2004), and Hooks (1994) have critiqued traditional pedagogical hierarchies and proposed models of education that are dialogic, participatory, and oriented toward emancipation. Public pedagogy extends learning beyond formal institutions into cultural terrains—media, performance, art, and public ritual—where identity and citizenship are shaped. La Pocha Nostra’s Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011) explicitly operationalizes this notion, offering improvisational and relational exercises that teach “radical empathy” and intercultural literacy through performance. These workshops constitute what Giroux would term civic pedagogy—learning that cultivates the political imagination through embodied experimentation.

Additionally, scholarship on the gaze and visuality, including Mirzoeff (2015) and Rancière (2009), supplies critical insight into the politics of seeing and the emancipation of spectatorship. Mirzoeff’s notion of countervisuality and Rancière’s emancipated spectator both help unpack how Gómez-Peña does not merely present images but reconfigures the conditions under which audiences come to see and interpret, making visible their own roles within structures of power. In Mapa/Corpo 2 (2004–2011), Gómez-Peña’s collaborators inscribe words such as “terrorist,” “illegal,” and “alien” directly onto his body, forcing spectators to confront the visual violence of labeling. Here, countervisuality operates pedagogically: the act of writing and witnessing becomes a collective unlearning of colonial seeing.

Recent scholarship has deepened these intersections. The Global Performance Studies special issue “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” (Vol. 5 Nos. 1–2, 2022) underscores how decolonial performance functions as world-making pedagogy, a frame directly relevant to Gómez-Peña’s practice. Likewise, theorists of “border aesthetics” (Schimanski et al., 2023) have examined borders as aesthetic and affective sites of negotiation. Gómez-Peña’s border performances—literal crossings, staged interrogations, and hybrid linguistic play—embody these theoretical concerns, transforming border space into an educational and ethical encounter.

Collectively, these literatures provide the analytic tools for interpreting Gómez-Peña’s performances as site-specific, embodied, and communal forms of inquiry—performances that educate not by delivering content from a didactic platform but by reworking epistemic relations themselves.

3 Theoretical framework

This article draws on four interlocking theoretical registers to interpret Gómez-Peña’s work as decolonial public pedagogy: (1) hybridity and liminality from postcolonial border discourse; (2) performance as embodied knowledge and repertoire; (3) the colonial gaze and its counterpractices; and (4) radical pedagogy and civic learning.

First, in dialogue with Bhabha’s (1994) conceptualization of hybridity and the “third space,” the border is understood not as a static line but as a site of cultural translation, negotiation, and generative antagonism. Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands extend this spatial metaphor to psychic and linguistic territories where contradiction is not deviation but the source of new epistemologies and modes of being. Gómez-Peña’s Border Brujo (1989) and later Border Intimacies (2012) exemplify this theorization in action: by code-switching across Spanish, English, and Nahuatl while performing multiple identities, he embodies the “third space” as lived epistemology.

Second, performance studies, especially as articulated by Schechner (2002) and Taylor (2003), insists that performance is more than representation: it is a praxis of cultural transmission. In The Loneliness of the Immigrant (1986), Gómez-Peña walks through city streets wrapped in shipping tape labeled “FRAGILE,” dramatizing the migrant’s condition as both commodity and body at risk. This enactment turns Schechner’s “restored behavior” into civic ritual, teaching empathy through repetition and exposure. His staged provocations, hybrid characters, and linguistic strategies function as restored behavior—rehearsed cultural contradictions that reveal hidden norms by performing them in exaggerated form. The repertoire of his practice—hyphenated languages, mythic personae, and audience address—carries traditions of resistance, negotiation, and narrative that resist being fully captured by archival logics.

Third, the decolonial critique of the gaze and representation draws on Said’s (1978) Orientalism and Mirzoeff’s (2015) work on visuality to situate Gómez-Peña’s strategies of satirical display and manipulated visibility as countervisual tactics. In The Temple of Confessions, he literalizes the museum as colonial apparatus, converting spectatorship into complicity and confession. This aligns with Rancière’s emancipated spectator, who learns through participation rather than distance. Where colonial visual regimes exoticize, freeze, and present the Other as monolithic, Gómez-Peña employs performative mimicry, satire, and incongruity to expose colonial logics—making audiences aware not only of how they look at others but of the power structures conditioning that act of looking.

Fourth, the framework of radical public pedagogy incorporates Freire’s (1970) critique of banking education and his model of dialogic consciousness-raising; Hooks’s (1994) insistence on education as the practice of freedom; and Giroux’s (2004) linking of cultural production to citizenship formation. La Pocha Nostra’s workshops—often conducted under the motto “citizenship through performance”—translate Freirean dialogue into embodied practice: participants co-create rituals of vulnerability, exchanging stories and gestures across race, gender, and language boundaries. Such exercises enact Hooks’s pedagogy of transgression by dissolving hierarchies between artist, teacher, and learner. Gómez-Peña’s audiences are not passive recipients. Through confusion, humor, and shared emotional labor, they are compelled into reflexive criticality, choosing or being forced into positions of meaning-making. His performances thus operate as civic classrooms in which values of borderless solidarity, anti-colonial awareness, and hybrid belonging are taught not through lectures but through experiential encounter.

Taken together, these frameworks illuminate how Gómez-Peña’s praxis constitutes an ongoing experiment in decolonial learning—an “aesthetic of the border” where performance becomes pedagogy and pedagogy becomes performance.

4 Analysis

4.1 The border as performance

In Gómez-Peña’s praxis the U. S.–Mexico border is not simply a geopolitical line but a performative territory—“the Berlin Wall of the Americas,” as he has evocatively described—where cultural contradictions, asymmetries, and negotiations are made visible through embodied spectacle. This imagining aligns with Anzaldúa’s (1987) insistence that borders produce a “new mestiza consciousness,” a space of overlapping realities and hybrid identification. Gómez-Peña’s performances do not allegorize border dynamics from a safe distance; they re-enact them through experiential disruption that invites spectators into the unstable, liminal zone itself.

In early works such as Border Brujo (1989), Gómez-Peña embodies a shamanic trickster who switches between languages, costumes, and national symbols in rapid succession, dramatizing the psychic vertigo of the border subject. The performer’s oscillation between mythic and contemporary personae becomes a lesson in liminality itself—a form of embodied theorizing that teaches the audience to inhabit contradiction. Similarly, in Ex-Centris (1998), he stages the border as a digital and linguistic interface, projecting live translations, video fragments, and audience comments to show how globalization reconstitutes the border as both physical and virtual pedagogical terrain.

His linguistic strategies make the border palpable. Deploying Spanglish, Ingleñol, fractured code-switching, and multilingual wordplay, Gómez-Peña enacts what he has called cultural vertigo—an affective experience where dominant linguistic hierarchies are unsettled and the boundaries of comprehension become sites of reflection. This is deeply resonant with Bhabha’s (1994) third space, wherein meaning is constructed not in fixed cultural identity but through negotiation, ambivalence, and overlapping fields. The audience, depending on their language competence and cultural positioning, experiences varying degrees of inclusion, exclusion, recognition, and othering; the performance thereby enacts the multiplicity of border subjectivities. In workshops later codified in Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011), this linguistic experimentation becomes an explicit pedagogical method—participants are invited to “mis-translate” each other’s gestures or languages, creating productive misunderstandings that mirror border encounters.

Gómez-Peña’s The New Barbarians (2004) extends this pedagogy by reimagining the border as a planetary condition, where North/South hierarchies intersect with the politics of technology and war. Through parody and ritual, he frames globalization itself as a border machine that reproduces colonial asymmetry—thus teaching audiences that “the border” is not geographic but systemic, inhabiting language, vision, and behavior.

Thus, the border in Gómez-Peña’s work is simultaneously a site of injury (what Anzaldúa refers to as the “border wound”) and a crucible for emergent identities. His performance of the border teaches audiences that boundaries are not natural or fixed: they are contested, negotiated, internalized, and performed. This lesson is not delivered abstractly; it is lived, experienced, and made to reverberate through affect, humor, and disorientation.

4.2 Performing Mexican American identity: hybrid personae as epistemic disruption

Rather than presenting a monolithic subject, Gómez-Peña’s work constructs and performs hybrid personae—such as El Aztec High-Tech, El Cyber Vato, El Mexterminator, El Mariachi Liberachi, and El Warrior for Gringostroika—as strategic interventions into identity politics. These characters amalgamate cultural symbols, historical references, and contemporary anxieties to create cognitive dissonance in the spectator, which becomes a pedagogical site for interrogating essentialism.

For instance, El Mexterminator Project (1997–2000) literalizes these hybrid archetypes as “living cyber-masks.” Audiences could select an identity from an on-screen menu—‘Border Brujo,’ ‘Aztec Warrior,’ or ‘Illegal Alien’—and then encounter Gómez-Peña performing that stereotype in real time. This interactive format transformed the viewer into an accomplice, teaching through discomfort how easily colonial typologies are reproduced within digital and cultural interfaces.

El Aztec High-Tech, for instance, combines pre-Columbian iconography with globalized consumer aesthetics and linguistic play, collapsing the false dichotomy between tradition and modernity. In doing so, it disrupts the fetishization of indigeneity as static “authenticity” by overtly staging the permeability and adaptability of indigenous identity in a global techno-cultural moment. Similarly, El Cyber Vato engages the stereotype of the urban Chicano youth by layering it with technologized language, streetwise aesthetics, and performative resilience, thereby both invoking and destabilizing media representations. El Mexterminator juxtaposes Hollywood techno-villain imagery (e.g., the Terminator) with xenophobic fantasies about Mexican futurity, satirizing the framing of immigrants as invaders while also mobilizing the imagery to “brownify” and threaten sanitized cyberspace—an act of epistemic inversion.

These hybrid personae also function pedagogically during La Pocha Nostra’s workshops, where participants experiment with constructing their own ‘border avatars.’ By merging fragments of personal identity with invented alter-egos, they enact Gómez-Peña’s dictum that “identity is a performance, not an essence.” This exercise teaches through play and embodiment, echoing Butler’s (1990) performativity and Freire’s dialogical pedagogy: knowledge is produced collaboratively, not transmitted.

These figures enact what could be termed strategic essentialism in reverse: they deliberately present a composite identity that defies singular reading, forcing audiences to confront their own frameworks of classification. Drawing on Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity, these personae illustrate that identity is not a pre-discursive essence but an ongoing enactment; by hyper-performing contradictions, Gómez-Peña renders visible the performative scaffolding of identity itself. The hybrid figures do not merely represent multiple identities—they perform the process by which identities congeal, fracture, and resist.

Moreover, these characters operate as pedagogical fictions. Through satire and exaggeration, they provoke reflection on structural power—racism, nationalism, technological colonialism—by embodying its contradictions and making visible its mechanisms. By teaching through the grotesque, the ironic, and the uncanny, Gómez-Peña’s hybrid personae disrupt passive spectatorship and invite active decoding. The pedagogy here is tactile and semiotic: spectators must interpret, reconcile dissonance, and question their own cultural imaginaries in light of what is being presented.

4.3 Decolonizing the gaze

Central to the decolonial impulse in Gómez-Peña’s work is his interrogation of the Western colonial gaze as a structuring visual regime that exoticizes, immobilizes, and homogenizes the Other. His collaboration with Coco Fusco in The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994) stages this critique by appropriating the very spectacle of colonial ethnographic display and turning it into an inverted mirror. By positioning themselves as “authentic” Amerindians trapped and exhibited for voyeuristic consumption, they enact a pedagogical double-bind: the spectators’ instinct to consume and objectify is exposed as internalized colonial desire, while their shock and misunderstanding become material for critical self-reflection.

This pedagogical dynamic was reiterated in The Temple of Confessions (1995), where audience members were invited to whisper confessions about race and desire through small apertures in a museum installation while Gómez-Peña and collaborator Roberto Sifuentes performed as “living saints.” The act of confessing became a participatory revelation of colonial guilt and fetish, reconfiguring spectatorship into shared accountability.

This satirical mise-en-scène draws directly on Said’s (1978) critique of the production of the Orient as an object of knowledge and spectacle, while simultaneously employing what Mirzoeff (2015) would describe as countervisuality—an act of seeing back, of making the mechanisms of seeing visible and contestable. In Mapa/Corpo (2004–2011), for example, the artist’s semi-nude body becomes a map upon which collaborators inscribe geopolitical and racialized terms, visually dramatizing the colonial partitioning of the body. Spectators are forced to confront their complicity in visual consumption, enacting Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator who learns through the shock of recognition.

Beyond this collaboration, Gómez-Peña’s ongoing deployment of ethno-cyborg figures further complicates the colonial gaze by refusing the binary between traditional and technological, native and modern. These hybrid embodiments insist that indigeneity is not trapped in a temporal past, nor is it a passive object of salvage; it is dynamic, infiltrating even the most hyper-modern spaces, contaminating them with histories they seek to forget. The body in his work is an “occupied territory,” and performance becomes the site of decolonization—where symbolic, epistemic, and visual colonialisms are confronted through embodied contradiction. In this way, seeing becomes a dialogic process rather than a unilateral act: the gaze is unsettled, and spectators are taught to see their own positionality within systems of representation.

4.4 Audience engagement as public pedagogy and radical citizenship

Gómez-Peña’s performances turn spectators into co-activators. By destabilizing the traditional boundaries between performer and audience, he enacts what Jacques Rancière (2009) refers to as the “emancipated spectator”—one who is not a passive recipient but an active constructor of meaning. His work does not hand down interpretations; instead, it creates conditions where audiences are forced to negotiate their emotional, ethical, and interpretive stakes. This mode of engagement constitutes public pedagogy because learning occurs outside formal institutional curriculum, embedded in shared affective encounters and reflexive confrontation.

This pedagogical ethos is most fully embodied in La Pocha Nostra’s participatory workshops, where performance becomes a training ground for decolonial citizenship. Participants from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds collaborate on improvisations involving proximity, consent, and vulnerability—learning through practice how to dismantle inherited hierarchies of race, gender, and nation. These workshops function as laboratories for what Gómez-Peña calls “imaginary activism,” teaching that activism can emerge from imagination, empathy, and collective embodiment rather than solely from protest.

The comedic, often kitsch, and satirical surface of his practice—what Neustadt (1999) describes as “corrosive parody”—functions pedagogically by enabling critical distance through laughter while simultaneously disrupting complacency. The deliberate “performance of cultural mistakes,” linguistic slippages, and provocations operate as generative confusion, a tactic that invites spectators to question the naturalized coherence of cultural narratives. This aligns with Freire’s (1970) concept of conscientization, which involves awakening critical awareness through problem-posing education: Gómez-Peña’s performances pose cultural and political problems through hyperbolic enactment, making audiences recognize their complicity and capacity for reinterpretation.

His insistence on the term imaginary activism and the cultivation of radical citizenship shifts the focus from identity as a private status to citizenship as an ongoing performative and ethical project. Through collective projects like La Pocha Nostra, he models “temporary communities of rebel artists” and cross-border collaborations that function as living curricula—spaces where participants learn solidarity, negotiation, and resistance by doing. These communities enact Giroux’s (2004) notion that cultural producers play a key role in shaping democratic selfhood; they are public intellectuals not by title but by practice, fostering civic imagination outside bureaucratic apparatuses.

Recent projects such as La Pocha Manifesto 2020 and online pandemic performances extended this pedagogy into digital space, proving that radical public learning could continue under crisis. These hybrid online rituals, where participants performed symbolic acts of healing and resistance, demonstrate Gómez-Peña’s enduring commitment to art as collective education.

Gómez-Peña’s art teaches that citizenship is not a legal status alone, but a performative practice of continual border-crossing, empathy, and historical reckoning. The affective intensity of his work—confusion, discomfort, identification, outrage—becomes the medium of civic education. In other words, his audience is educated, not instructed.

5 Discussion

Reframed through the theoretical prisms of hybridity, performance as repertoire, visual counter-practices, and radical pedagogy, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s oeuvre emerges as a sustained, publicly enacted curriculum in decolonial subject formation. His performances function as civic laboratories where the politics of identity, visibility, and belonging are interrogated in real time. The border is not merely a theme but a pedagogical device; hybrid characters are not only satirical figures but embodied dialectical provocations; audience confusion is not noise but the method through which critical consciousness is cultivated.

This pedagogical function is not an interpretive imposition but an intrinsic aspect of Gómez-Peña’s own artistic philosophy. In texts such as Exercises for Rebel Artists (2011) and La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist (2021), Gómez-Peña explicitly describes performance as a “radical school without walls,” where artists and audiences rehearse decolonial futures through embodiment, risk, and vulnerability. By situating his work within public pedagogy, this article clarifies and emphasizes an element that has always been central to his praxis—the deliberate transformation of aesthetic encounter into epistemic and ethical learning.

Within this framework, Gómez-Peña’s performances enact what could be called a pedagogy of border aesthetics. Building on the work of Schimanski et al. (2023), border aesthetics involve not only representing but reconfiguring the perceptual, affective, and ethical structures that define separation and encounter. In performances like Mapa/Corpo and Corpo Ilícito, the border shifts from geopolitical metaphor to a dynamic aesthetic threshold—an interface of contact, contagion, and exchange. The pedagogy here resides in the act of crossing itself: participants and spectators learn how borders operate by embodying their tensions.

By collapsing art and education, Gómez-Peña destabilizes institutional hierarchies of knowledge production. His work offers a model for what decolonial public education might look like when freed from standardized, sanitized, and nationalist discourses. The performances demand epistemic humility from spectators—a recognition that knowing is relational, contested, and enacted in shared space. They suggest that effective public pedagogy is disruptive, participatory, and rooted in affective resonance rather than neutral transmission.

This discussion also extends to institutional implications. Gómez-Peña’s “living classroom” questions where learning happens and who authorizes it. By converting theaters, museums, and digital platforms into civic classrooms, he embodies what Freire would describe as the democratization of the pedagogical encounter—knowledge as co-creation, not hierarchy. His praxis invites educators, curators, and activists to consider performance as a pedagogical method capable of engaging communities in decolonial reflection and action.

Furthermore, Gómez-Peña’s performative pedagogy is profoundly relevant to current global crises—migration, racialized violence, and cultural polarization. His border-centered performances anticipate the epistemic struggles of our present moment, where borders multiply across digital, linguistic, and ideological terrains. By teaching spectators to inhabit ambiguity and relationality, his work cultivates what might be termed “border literacy”: the capacity to engage difference without re-inscribing colonial power.

Moreover, his praxis has broader implications for cultural policy and arts education. If public education is committed to developing critical, globally aware, and inclusive citizens, then performance art—especially of the kind Gómez-Peña practices—should not be peripheral to civic learning but central. His work demonstrates how art can cultivate border literacy, intercultural empathy, and anti-colonial historical awareness, making it an essential complement or corrective to conventional civic curricula. The notion of radical citizenship that he advances complicates citizenship programs based on assimilation or singular national narratives, proposing instead a model grounded in border-crossing, multiplicity, and collective agency.

In this sense, Gómez-Peña’s pedagogy is both performative and insurgent. It resists the colonial desire for fixed meaning, inviting instead an ongoing praxis of translation, improvisation, and relational accountability. The border—understood as epistemic tension rather than geographical limit—becomes the classroom, and performance becomes the language through which decolonial futures are rehearsed.

6 Conclusion

Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance practice operates at the nexus of aesthetics, politics, and education. Through hybrid embodiments, linguistic dislocations, satirical spectacle, and participatory strategies, he stages decolonial visions in public arenas, teaching audiences to see beyond the sedimented categories of empire, identity, and nationality. His work reconceives the border not as a site of exclusion but as one of generative possibility; identity not as origin but as performance; the gaze not as passive observation but as a site of ethical accountability; and citizenship not as legal status but as ongoing communal practice.

By clarifying rather than reconceptualizing Gómez-Peña’s praxis as decolonial pedagogy, this article affirms the artist’s own framing of his work as a living curriculum of intercultural empathy and resistance. The pedagogical dimensions of La Pocha Nostra’s performances—embodied exercises, participatory rituals, and affective exchanges—extend Freirean dialogue and Anzaldúan border consciousness into aesthetic form. In doing so, Gómez-Peña offers a model of education that is not institutional but insurgent: a pedagogy of imagination, humor, and collective vulnerability.

The global significance of this pedagogy lies in its adaptability. From The Couple in the Cage to La Pocha Manifesto 2020, Gómez-Peña’s practice demonstrates that decolonial education can occur anywhere—on stage, in the street, in a Zoom room, or in the body itself. Each performance becomes a microcosm of transnational ethics, where participants learn to negotiate visibility, difference, and care.

In doing so, Gómez-Peña offers a living, evolving model of public pedagogy—one that is resilient to institutional capture because it is enacted through relational performance and shared affect. Future scholarship might extend this analysis by empirically studying audience reception as pedagogical transformation, by comparing his practice to other transnational artivist traditions, or by considering how his living archives (such as the Casas Museos and La Pocha Nostra Online Academy) function as enduring pedagogical infrastructures outside museum ossification. Ultimately, his legacy points toward a world where art is not simply reflective but constitutive of decolonial horizons and where public education is vibrant, contested, and performed.

In an era of renewed border anxieties and cultural fragmentation, Gómez-Peña’s decolonial pedagogy insists on the opposite gesture: crossing, touching, miscommunicating, and reimagining together. His performances remind us that the future of knowledge lies not in certainty but in encounter, and that the most radical education begins when we dare to unlearn.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics statement

Written informed consent was not obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article because the paper is based in publicly available data.

Author contributions

LB: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research and/or publication of this article. University Foundation Los Libertadores funded the open access of this paper.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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