El Corazon de la Mission

By Robert Avila

“Let’s take the Mexican Bus,” says your disembodied guide, “and cruise my inner barrio.” It’s unusual in the hospitality trade, you can’t help thinking, for a group tour to begin with a collective invocation summoning the spirit of your conductor. But then we’re not talking about the usual itinerary either. The tour through El Corazon de la Mission is a trip through a land with many ghostly presences, living pasts, and unscripted, undisciplined, unruly futures. It’s a transgressive glide across the fronteras of the mind. How natural for it to be led by the transubstantiated life force (and recorded voice) of Mexican writer, filmmaker, performance artist, border-cruising bad boy, and longtime Mission District denizen Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Ten times beginning July 28, Gómez-Peña’s personal version of the city’s rollicking multicultural neighborhood takes the shape of a rolling public art show. Willing travelers assemble at Galeria de la Raza on 24th Street before boarding the beautifully bedecked, garish jewel that is the Mexican Bus (a roving piece of Mission culture all by itself) and gliding up the 24th Street corridor to destinations “so far from Bush’s America.” The trek –

08.09.2006