The Visions and Voices folks must have had quite a time writing the promotional blurbs for Guillermo Gómez-Peña's January 28 performance, "El Mexorcist 4" at the USC Fisher Museum of Art.

The self-professed anarchist's one-man spoken word performance transcends descriptions.

But that didn't stop them from trying.

Internationally renowned artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña is one of the most dynamic and provocative voices on the contemporary-art scene.

Possibly the understatement of the year.

Dynamic?

Sometimes he gets creative and fellates the microphone. Or fondles himself.

Provocative?

See above line.

But there's more.

With a unique style of performance activism, Gómez-Peña confronts audiences with his infamous ethno-poetics and radical aesthetics.

Turns out Gómez-Peña puts his tongue to work in other ways. His thick accent a relic of his youth in Mexico City, Gómez-Peña tells irreverent anecdotes about the pending destruction of American ideals --while wearing biker boots, black leather gloves and an open dress coat that leaves exposed his sweaty round belly and tattooed chest.

Gómez-Peña is like the heartbeat to America's metronome--imperfect, palpitating and painfully organic in comparison. He's the world's mountain-grown ganja to America's fabricated meth, the street vendor's torta to McDonald's Big Mac.

When we say "God bless America," Gómez-Peña retorts "God bless Iran!" When we say "support our troops," he tells us about the time he had to run from an angry crowd of 500 US soldiers after what could have been the most ill-planned Cinco de Mayo performance in history. When we get complacent, he screams "nothing is permanent," except, as he tells it, the political, financial and personal turmoil gripping the majority of the population outside America.

He also spits lemonade onto one side of the audience and gives the other side a full liter of rum to share, perhaps a metaphor for the unfair way the world works sometimes.

Ethno-poetics? Please. If Gómez-Peña's reality were true, Americans would be the ones getting spit on. They'd be the outsiders looking in--the last ethnics in a diverse global community where the only semblance of continuity is the total lack of it.

In this performance, he assaults the demonized construction of the US/Mexican border: a zone literally and symbolically lined with Minutemen, globalization and transnational identities.

Seems like someone forgot to tell the 53-year-old this is what his show was supposed to be about. His performance casts a bigger net. At the same time, it still hits the same nerves. The pain caused by atrocious border politics in Mexico is the same pain felt in Gaza. The cautious hope dispossessed Americans feel heading out of the Bush era and into Obama's is the same tenuous optimism felt across the globe at the tail end of tumultuous times. The US can put up a figurative fence and dispatch its figurative Minutemen so the country can keep living in its unsustainable fashion, or so it can come to grips with the fact that it shares the planet without about 6 billion other people looking for the same dreams--peace, stability and a place to call home.

Of course, as Gómez-Peña says, nothing is permanent, and things will change.

Like, he feels, the Buendía family from Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, America will one day cease to exist "porque los estirpes condenados a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra."

"Because races condemned to 100 years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth."