ABSTRACT
La Pocha Nostra (LPN) was founded in 1993 by Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Roberto Sifuentes, and Nola Mariano in Los Angeles, California as a way to provide a formal framework for Gomez-Pena's collaborations and experiments with other artists. In 2001, the company became a non-profit organization. Artists Violeta Luna, Michele Ceballos, James Luna, Erica Mott, Dani d'Emilia, and Saul Garcia Lopez figure among the core members who joined the founders in the years since the company's inception. Inn this chapter, the author shares how he consistently inaugurated his courses by assigning the performance texts of Gomez-Pena's and Sifuentes' La Pocha Nostra in order to answer the questions about positionality and identity in our own lives. In particular, Gomez-Pena's book publication Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, and Exercises for Rebel Artists helps students to enter into critical dialogue that cuts across cultural assumptions and scripted social identities.
