In We Are Patriots With Dark Faces, Jose Torres Tama explores the effects of advertising upon our collective psyche and confronts this labyrinth of mixed messages as a dark-faced man searching for the "American Dream." He offers a sinister and comically absurd vision of a techno-pop TV culture, claiming that corporations sell American beliefs, values, and false empowerment along with hamburgers, Cokes, and fries.

He questions who can really "just do it" and "have it their way" in a society where you are what you buy, and where your freedom is directly related to your purchasing power. By taking these seemingly banal familiar slogans out of their commercial contexts, he politicizes them and reveals their loaded psychological subtext.

Torres Tama weaves a dark spell of corporate slogans into his narrative, ingeniously combining sardonic humor and metaphoric prose with dramatic rituals of fire and movement. With a persona that is part talk-show shaman and part stand-up comic, he delivers the hour-long piece in a surrealistic setting created by a semicircle of twelve Santeria candles.