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Guillermo Gomez-Peña with fellow troupe members in costume.

La Pocha Nostra (LPN) was founded in 1993 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Nola Mariano in Los Angeles, California as a way to provide a formal framework for performance artists, poets, activists, and pedagogues to collaborate with Gómez-Peña’s experimental performance art productions. In 2001 the company became a non-profit organization.

Current core members of La Pocha Nostra are Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Emma Tramposch, Saul Garcia-Lopez aka La Saula, Balitronica Gómez, Paloma Martínez-Cruz, Robert Gomez Hernandez and Micha Espinosa, with a slate of over 30 associates collaborating on multi-disciplinary performances throughout the world. LPN provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, gender complexities and ethnic backgrounds.  

Projects range from solo or duet performances to large-scale, immersive, multi-media productions that engage the participation of audience members.  In Pocha Nostra’s live art and prolific publications, geo-political and cultural exiles are moved to the center while mainstream identities are pushed to the margins, requiring audience-participants to interrogate political and aesthetic borders and notions of cultural privilege.

La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, and artist and spectator. Over the last quarter century, LPN has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across the grids of national origin, race, gender, and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists. Key performance works over the last ten years include, but are not limited to: Posnacional Series, The Phantom Mariachi, Adam and Eve In Times of War, Corpo Insurrecto, The Enchilada Western, and We Are All Aliens.  

Critics and observers have described LPN work as "Chicano cyber-punk performances," "ethno-techno art," and a “virtual maquiladora (assembly plant) that produces brand new metaphors, symbols, images, and words to explain the complexities of our times.”

Two costumed members in front of a black backdrop.

Functioning as live art jams, performances often constitute a bricolage of global pop culture, punk rock, hip-hop, comics, journalism, anthropology, sexual fetish, religious imagery, decolonial theory, and the history and politics of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Fundamental to La Pocha Nostra’s aesthetic are ethnic and gender “hypertypes,” or the cultural subversion through exaggeration, Chicanx irony, and distortion. Most notably, “rascuachi” art images depict women, queer, transgender, and other marginalized subjects in positions of power. Co-creation with participant-observers and immersive performance games are fundamental to LPN’s challenge to social norms, constraints, and taboos.

La Pocha Nostra’s artwork has been presented at over a thousand venues across the US, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the UK, Germany, Haiti, Latvia, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Russia, Australia, South Africa, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Argentina. La Pocha Nostra has participated in the following Biennales: Venice, Documenta, Havana, The Whitney Museum, Sydney, Liverpool, Thessaloniki and Mercosur, and have performed at the Venice Biennale Performance Art Week. The troupe’s photo-performances are now in the permanent collections of Daros Foundation (Zurich), Galeria Artificios (Gran Canaria), Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), and the Getty Center (Los Angeles), among other institutions.

Every year, LPN conducts a summer and a winter performance art school in which La Pocha Nostra's radical pedagogy (a site-specific performance methodology that has been developed during the last 10 years) is shared with large groups of radical artists spanning three generations. The site for these pedagogical adventures changes every year.