by Guillermo Gómez-Peña

About the author: Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a writer and performance artist living in San Francisco, California.

From 1978 to 1991, I lived and worked in and among the cities of Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Like hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I was a binational commuter. I crossed that dangerous border regularly, by plane, by car, and by foot. The border became my home, my base of operations, and my laboratory of social and artistic experimentation. My art, my dreams, my family and friends, and my psyche were literally and conceptually divided by the border. But the border was not a straight line; it was more like a Möbius strip. No matter where I was, I was always on “the other side,&rdquo...