If there is a defining and recurring theme in my work as a writer, performance artist, spoken word poet, visual artist, and director of youth performance projects, it is my fascination with the mythology of the “American Dream” as an Odyssean journey filled with real life racial drama, ethnic alienation, and urban reinvention in the face of cultural hegemony.

Having been born in Ecuador, South America, raised in New Jersey and New York, and living in New Orleans since 1984, I know the meaning of the epic journey and how such migrations affect one's identity.   As a Latino immigrant, such issues of cultural identity color my perspective in the search for the “American Dream” in a country that professes “freedom for all,” but has a shameful history of discrimination and racial injustices. I have employed performance art as a creative strategy to explore the difficult issues of our time and the racial divide that continues to plague this country.   A fusion of spoken word, conceptual actions, visual tableaus, and rituals of fire, my hybrid brand of performance art has offered me a voice across the stages of the United States to speak the unspoken and chronicle my personal experiences as an immigrant. Since 1995, I have also developed performance art projects in various communities, often working with marginalized teens, in an effort to cultivate young voices through this genre.   These include “Youth Performance Projects” with African American homeless teens in Houston at the MECA community center; with Latino teens in Brooklyn exploring the effect of AIDS among Hispanics at the Center for Art and Cultural Healing; and with immigrant teens in Miami commenting on their search for the “American Dream” through Tigertail Productions.

I hold steadfast to a belief that performance art is best served when it is used as a creative catalyst to build community collaborations across the borders of age, class and race, and as a forum to address social ills—marrying personal and political content with experimental form.