This past Friday night, Grace Exhibition Space welcomed La Pocha Nostra to Bushwick, bringing their post-national, apocalyptic, trans-cultural performance with them. Dressed in a hybrid costume of clichéd Indian/cowboy, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, artist and director of La Pocha Nostra, introduced the night’s performances, speaking broadly of the context for the upcoming show. “The world [is] collapsing all around us,” intoned Gómez-Peña. His monologue, perfectly bilingual, waxed poetically about the state of the world, racial politics, globalization, and even performance art itself, seeing the art as a “failed attempt to find the truth.” While outwardly this diatribe seemed woeful, just as the simultaneous performances too felt heavy, dark and at times hopeless, the entire theme of the night dealt with issues of spirituality and sacrifice, cleansing, and honestly exposing oneself with a willingness to fall in order to rise up again.

La Pocha Nostra loosely means “cartel of the cultural traitors,” and stems from a term used to describe Mexicans who transgress their national border, conflated with the name for the Italian mafia, La Cosa Nostra. This concept of treachery, impurity and banding together creates an entire culture around Gómez-Peña’s performance art troupe, where individual artists unite in their own disparate, personal performances to elucidate a larger significance and even more interactive and dynamic performance art experience. While the group’s origins rest with Gómez-Peña’s own Mexican identity and the head-on confrontation of border politics and cultural stereotypes, today’s La Pocha Nostra is comprised of several core members with various cultural backgrounds where identity is only one of the significant themes they address.