This latest performance piece is Jose Torres Tama’s final installment of a three-part series entitled Trilogy for the North American Dream/Tres Obras Para el Sueño Norte Americano that also includes his NEA award-winning $CASINOAMERICA$ and the fist solo he toured across the country called We Are Patriots With Dark Faces, which premiered in New York at Performance Space 122 in 1995.

In this seventy-minute autobiographical performance collage, Torres Tama combines personal stories and incantations with dramatic movement and visual tableaus to create a dynamic work that explores rites-of-passage in urban American culture. In the process, he manages to create an engaging performance experience that is exemplary of a personal aesthetic the artist calls "minimal mysticism" with a setting that is efficiently surreal and magical.

He recounts coming-of-age stories of his geographical migrations that have transformed him from an immigrant child raised in the urban corridor of the Northeast to a Latino “Yankee” living in the Deep South. As such, he comments on issues of race between the North and the South and the effect geography has on one’s identity.

Torres Tama’s point of departure is that of a dark-faced passenger in search for the “American Dream,” and while he employs the personal story as a mythic journey, he  touches upon such universal themes as the spiritual search in modern culture and whether to wage one's battle with the pen or the sword.

Peppering his montage with American popular culture references and sardonic humor, he delivers this visually loaded and politically charged solo with the intensity of an urban warrior and moves rapidly from poetic drama to the hilariously absurd--continuously breaking the wall between performer and audience.