Mex Files: Resistance Poetry and Audio Art Against Dystopia

Mex Files: Resistance Poetry and Audio Art Against Dystopia is a multilingual radio and archival program featuring wild poetry, experimental language, international music and irreverent reflections, hosted by Gómez-Peña, Federico Tello & Balitrónica and guest audio art curators. As we fast forward into a post-democratic, post-real dystopian era, we will be presenting episodes that highlight resistance amidst the collective global crisis, while also showcasing archival episodes from our past 5 + years of locura.  Let’s navigate these uncertain waters together and remain connected across time, sound and space.

Produced by Lumpen Radio (Chicago) and La Pocha Nostra, (San Francisco and Mexico City).

In mid 2020, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his troupe La Pocha Nostra created in SF a ¨Media Barrio Station to outlive confinement.¨ They began to record and present a weekly radio show titled “The pandemia chronicles: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border” in collaboration with Lumpen Radio and Public Media Institute (Chicago). The series presented re-mixes of Gómez-Peña’s previous audio artwork (1980–2015) as well as newly created and recorded material about the predicaments facing confinement.

Now in its 5th year, this now bimonthly show continues to offer multilingual live radio and archival audio programs that address “the multiple pandemics of racism, sexism, xenophobia and neo-colonialism on steroids in the Trump Era and beyond.”

Starting in 2025, at the very beginning of the second Trumpocalypse, we are seeking sources of hope and shifting thematic focus. We are especially interested in a radical spirituality and an activist poetics that can help us and our audiences navigate these dangerous times, for the lack of an obvious word.

Listen to all the episodes here!