2 Receive Prestigious MacArthur Foundation Awards : Artist: Performance artist and activist Guillermo Gomez-Pena focuses his work on U.S.-Mexico border issues.

Most people would jump for joy upon hearing that they’ve just been awarded $230,000 to support their work, but Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a San Diego-based performance artist, received the news that he is one of the 31 fellows announced Monday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation with a sober sense of responsibility.

Mexico City-born Gomez-Pena, 35, has long centered his writings and performances around issues of the Mexico-U.S. border, specifically the migration of undocumented workers. In bilingual performances that often taunt audiences to consider the cross-cultural nature of 20th-Century America and the increasing Latino presence in the United States, Gomez-Pena has made a name for himself as an artist-activist.

“Certainly there’s an incredible sense of jubilation,” he said of the $230,000 grant that will be parceled out in increasing amounts over the next five years, with $44,000 for the first year.

The award has no conditions, and its recipients can spend the money in any way they want.

The other San Diego County winner was UC San Diego philosophy professor Patricia Smith Churchland, 47, who relies on modern science and technology to study the brain’s behavior and how the brain’s actions affect an individual’s life.

Speaking on the phone from Brooklyn, where he is working on a project to be presented next fall in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the normally extroverted Gomez-Pena sounded circumspect: “There are also the beginnings of a serious process of consideration. For the next five years, my economical angst will be somewhat resolved, but I have to consider how to keep a sense of political clarity and social responsibility, how to keep my cultural commitment to the changes that this country is undergoing. I want to do it right, very carefully.

“In a sense, it’s a kind of position of leadership. I want to be very responsible and careful.”

Like many Chicano artists, Gomez-Pena has written and performed solo some of the time, but, more often, he has worked in collaboration with other artist groups, among them, until last year, the San Diego-Tijuana-based Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, which he helped found in 1984.

“Border Brujo,” a performance-video collaboration with San Diego filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, recently won first prize in the 1991 National Latino Film and Video Festival in New York, and, in 1989, Gomez-Pena won a New York Performance Award, or “Bessie,” for his theatrical performances.

He said he is anxious not to take all the credit for himself, but wants to acknowledge the collaborative nature of his work.

“I think the ideas that are being recognized are a product of a collective effort,” Gomez-Pena said. “The gesture of recognition of that collective effort, of Latinos-Chicanos in the making of contemporary culture in this country, it’s an important gesture.

“I believe, like many Chicanos do, that artists must lead the way to the 21st Century. That we have to obtain a central voice in the national debates of this country. This is a heritage from the Mexican and the Chicano community, that we must speak from the new center, not the old margins.”

Gomez-Pena said he is developing a trilogy of performances, the first portion of which was presented in the Los Angeles Festival ‘90, followed by a national tour of the work. The second part will premiere in Brooklyn, and the third, which will be done in collaboration with other artists, will be completed in 1992 and will be shown first at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“I’m working with alternative efforts to define the so-called discovery of America,” he said. “Trying to contribute to this important debate, to help develop a model that is more enlightened.”