Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “Strange Democracy: Border Wars” (2011)

In his performance of “Strange Democracy: Border Wars” at the Hammer Museum on April 5, 2011, Gómez-Peña “laid out a vision for an ideal future in which artists, writers, philosophers, and critical thinkers are key players in the national discourse and are consulted on issues such as health care, foreign policy, and immigration. He described a world where the marginal is the mainstream. That simple wish marks Guillermo Gómez-Peña as a true iconoclast (and perhaps a madman) because only an individual with a radical imagination could describe such a peaceable society.”—Audrey Chan, in “Reports from a Strange Democracy: Guillermo Gómez-Peña.”