In his performances and manifestos, "border artist" Guillermo Gomez-Peña draws attention to the cultural fissure dividing the two worlds that he and other Latinos inhabit; as he says in Border Brujo he is "floating on the ether that is the present tense of California and the past tense of Mexico." Born and raised in Mexico City, Gomez-Pena came to the United States in 1978 and has since then been exploring cross-cultural issues and North/South relations with the use of several media: performance, radio art, book art, bilingual poetry, journalism, video, and installation. A founding member of the Border Arts Workshop, Gomez-Pena is a noted member of Post-Arte, a network of Latin American conceptual artists and visual poets. Using his body, language, and wit as primary tools, his work challenges conventions of race, culture and class. One of his projects include The Shame-Man And El Mexican't Meet The Cyber-Vato at http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects/CyberVato

For this 2002 interview, curator Kaytie Johnson and Gomez-Peña made the following statement:

Curators and artists throughout the world are experimenting with original presentational formats for contemporary art which take into consideration the drastic epistemological changes in the relationship between audience and cultural institution; artist and audience produced by the current mainstream culture of interactivity and role playing. In this candid conversation regarding the genesis of their project "El Border Curiosity Cabinet", writer/performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and curator Kaytie Johnson envision a new way of presenting their ideas. The original conversation took place in late 2002. It was revised and slightly updated in July of 2004.