This article, first published in the summer/fall 1992 issue of High Performance by Mexican-born, U.S.-based artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, parodies the social, political, and cultural structures of the United States. A commentary on an imagined new society called The New World (B)order, Gómez-Peña’s essay criticizes the rigid politics surrounding American borders (political and cultural), especially when it comes to its Mexican neighbors. Filled with neologisms, the article describes the new society’s nascent formation as former political and economical structures break apart. The masses, “gringos,” as Gómez-Peña calls them, from the disbanded United States (newly called “Gringolandia”) migrate to the south in search of jobs. In an effort to undo the cross-cultural hysteria created by Gringolandia, interconnected and “ultra-nationalistic” political systems are devised across the continent. Hybrid identities like “Chicanadian” (a Chicano-Canadian) emerge and peace treaties are sanctioned globally to maintain the new-found order.

Mexican-born performance artist, writer, and educator, Guillermo Gómez-Peña is currently the artistic director of La Pocha Nostra, an international collective of artists, curators, and intellectuals. This San Francisco-based artist is recognized world-wide for his innovations in performance art integrating the use of media (video, radio, photography) with cultural theory, journalism, and poetry to explore the boundaries of cultural identity of the Mexico-United States border. Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a recipient of the American Book Award, and was a MacArthur fellow (1991–96). His installations and performance art has been included in numerous festivals and biennials around the world including Muffat Halle, Munich, Germany, 2001; Encontro Hemisferico, Lima Peru, 2002; Liverpool Biennale, 2002; House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2002; and, Tate Modern, 2003. Gómez-Peña is a regular contributor to National Public Radio and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).In this 1992 article, Gómez-Peña’s vision of The New World (B)order society ironically resembles the technological tangled world of the present where global communication is linked through various forms of media. The artist also parodies the negative effects of technology describing youth “entranced” by their video games and reality-TV producing illusions of identity. In this setting, Gómez-Peña’s critique defies time; twenty years later many of his ideas still portray the present-day U.S. cultural condition.Published quarterly from 1978 until 1997, the interdisciplinary art magazine High Performance concentrated on creating critical framework for original, unrecognized works of performance art. The archive for the magazine can be found at the collection of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, California. [http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/locations/high-performance-magazine/]