When I called Circuit Networks to reserve seats on Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Mexican bus tour of San Francisco’s Mission district, the voice at the other end of the line told me I was in for a very special treat- Guillermo himself would be guiding what is normally an 80-minute audio tour. That in mind, I opted for the $25 “wet” ticket, which included tequila shots and headed for Galeria de la Raza on 24th Street, the designated pick-up spot where fifty or so “tourists” milled about the gallery. The invitation promised a celebration of “the ever-evolving social, cultural and political sensibilities” of the Mission district, but as soon as Gómez-Peña and his collaborator, Violeta Luna, appeared, it was clear we had signed up for more than just a tour. Luna’s Kahlo-esque leg brace and painted monobrow, along with Gómez-Peña’s gender-bending rainbow serape, heavy black eyeliner, open leather vest and walking cane suggested we were in for an odyssey through a swamp of cultural and symbolic mash-ups.

Seated across from one another at opposite ends of the gallery, the pair engaged in a Surrealist pas de deux worthy of a Jordorowsky film. Gómez-Peña, manning a boom box, gave an impassioned speech about the Mission’s cultural and historical significance and paced the room in restless arcs while Luna plucked sharp implements from an electrical tape sheath under her skirt and poked them in her eyes and cheeks. The audience’s implicit participation in the tour was made explicit when Luna handed the free end of a leash tied around her neck to an unsuspecting tourist and began a choking dance at the other end, straining against the cultural symbols that bound each to the other. Introductions over, we boarded the brightly colored, shrine-encrusted bus that would, in the hands of our coyotes, shuttle us across the border of cultural schisms that is San Francisco’s Mission district. It seemed somehow fitting that my view on the scene was filtered through the visage of the grinning, sombrero-wearing skeleton tattooed on my window. Instructed to “fasten your conceptual seatbelts and grab your neighbor’s crotch,” we pulled away from the gallery, unsure exactly where we were headed.

A steady tri-lingual stream of Gómez-Peña’s trademark biting commentary flowed pre-recorded from the boom box in Spanish, English and Spanglish, punctuated regularly with live interjections and songs. For her part, Luna assumed the role of excoriating trickster, prancing up and down the aisles of the moving bus entertaining riders with no less than ten costume and character changes that grew in complexity and bizarreness as the trip went on. (My favorite sported a leering Ronald Regan Halloween mask and sucked oxygen from a bag emblazoned with an American flag that he/she/it clutched with a pair of furry wolf hands).

At Clarion Alley, which is located, according to Gómez-Peña “where Agitprop meets public art on the corner of Western civilization and Hell,” we paused while Luna swept the alley’s entrance with a straw broom in preparation for our walking tour of this “tabula rasa en extremis.” Here, crack and heroine meet art in a place where some of the city’s most celebrated murals serve as wallpaper for one of its most notorious shooting galleries. Like an enthusiastic art director, Gómez-Peña cajoled tourists to participate in artistic “interventions” by posing with Luna in various absurdist tableaux against the murals. One enthusiastic passerby stripped down to his underwear and joined the image. I couldn’t help but wonder how he would recount the event later to his friends.

Outside Mission Dolores, Luna again disembarked and mounted the steps. Much to the consternation of Saturday afternoon pedestrains, she flogged herself with a braided leather strop that she eventually wrapped tightly around her face while uttering silent incantations with the aid of a Santeria candle. Little wonder that the chapel had been locked to the tour after its first blasphemous visit there a few days earlier. Our next stop was a crowded neighborhood bar frequented largely by locals, who were both confused and amused by the sudden invasion of non-natives armed with cameras. The invaders were equally unsure of themselves- an example, perhaps, of what Gómez-Peña described as “the first world wrestling with the third and trying to make sense out of the sweaty proximity,” an exchange he encouraged by challenging tourists to dance with locals.

The prescience of Gómez-Peña’s running commentary was uncanny. While guiding us across the “border conflict between the locals and the so-called art hipsters” (gross generalizations, he conceded, because “the locals aren’t that local and the hipsters aren’t that hip”) a well-known gallery owner jaywalked in front of the bus as if on cue. Gómez-Peña evenly doled responsibility for this “vicarious experience in cultural otherness” amongst the various multi-ethnic tribes, socio-economic clans and cultural groups we encountered through the windows of our 80-minute tour. “We are,” as he said, “all authors within this intercultural poltergeist.” The bus, it should be pointed out, served a major role in blurring these lines of distinction by making it unclear just who was looking at whom; those on the street returned our safety-glass gazes with equal curiosity.

Even the most casual of observers can find culture clashes in the Mission, but to tour such a place with Gómez-Peña is to go on safari with one of the world’s foremost subversive ethnographers. Absurd as his and Luna’s performance may seem at times, it forces participants to acknowledge the complex cultural boundaries written and rewritten daily in the Mission. If they could find a way to entice more locals to join the hipsters on the tour bus, then perhaps Gómez-Peña could answer the unresolved question he posed to us at the tour’s end: “Am I a hipster or a local? Can I be both, please? “

If Gómez-Peña is able to successfully secure long-term funding for this project, as he hopes to do, the only shortfall for this potentially major cultural attraction will be that there aren’t enough Gómez-Peñas and Lunas to ferry each and every tour across the cultural divide personally; without the animated guidance of our coyotes, the translation would be much less colorful.

For more information on future tours, see La Pocha Nostra's website: 
http://www.pochanostra.com