Episode five highlights the Taco Shop Poets Southern California, early tent theater of the Southwest called Carpas, and performance art in San Francisco.

Taco Shop Poets
The Taco Shop Poets is a group of artists devoted to creating community empowerment through the arts. A group that realizes the Latino community's intangible treasures that can be explored through all of the arts, the Taco Shop Poets learn from the struggles and successes of all those who came before them and create venues of artistic expression for those who are currently involved in the continuing creation of the community.

The taco shops throughout the border and beyond are inherently flavored places of culture and of celebration, where all walks of life collide for a brief moment and the Taco Shop Poets wish to affirm this coalescence in an explicit manner,and contribute to it, in the most humble of ways, through their performances.

Amparo Garcia Crow
Amparo Garcia-Crow is a multi-disciplinary artist who acts, directs, sings and writes plays, screenplays and songs. She has been produced Off-Broadway, Los Angeles, Chicago and the Southwest. She has appeared in various regional theatres including the Kennedy Center and has directed in many theatres in Austin, Texas.

A recipient of the prestigious NEA/TCG Director's Fellow, Garcia-Crow teaches Acting and Directing. This spring she was awarded the Outstanding Professor award by the Fine Arts Council which seeks to recognize excellence in teaching. She is one of the premiere faculty of the newly formed Humanities Institute at the University of Texas. Presently she is the Artistic Director of Prism Works, an artists' cooperative housed at the State Theatre Company, that develops new work about the diverse experience of people of color.

The company is presently developing a musical by Garcia-Crow entitled LA CARPA GARCIA. She is a former Fellow of the Michner Center for Writers and has been a professional actress for sixteen years. Her favorite roles include the starring role in MARISOL and Carla in Big State's IN THE WEST. Currently Garcia-Crow starts in LOAVES AND FISHES, (a short film she also wrote) that is touring national festivals as one of the SWAMPS "Best Texas Independent Films".

Guillermo Gomez Pena
Performance artist and writer, Guillermo Gomez Pena was born in Mexico and arrived in the US in 1978. Since then he has investigated border culture and trans-cultural identity. Through journalism, performance, radio, video, poetry and installations he has explored the relationship between Latinos and the US. From 1984 to 1990 he founded and participated in the "Border Arts Workshop", and contributed to the national radio programme "Crossroads." He is one of the editors of "High Performance" magazine and of the "Drama Review." He has received the Prix de la Parole at the International Theatre Festival of the Americas (1989), the Bessie prize in New York (1989) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), among other awards. Author of the book "Warrior for Gringostroika" published by Graywolf Press in 1993. In 1997, his book "The New World Border" received the American Book Award.

Royal Chicano Airforce
The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) is an artistic collective based in Sacramento. Initially named the Rebel Chicano Art Front, the RCAF was founded in 1969 to express the goals of the Chicano civil rights and labor organizing movement of the United Farm Workers. Its mission was to make available to the Chicano community a bilingual/bicultural arts center where artists could come together, exchange ideas, provide mutual support, and make available to the public artistic, cultural, and educational programs and events.

The founding members of the RCAF include José Montoya, Esteban Villa, Juanishi V. Orosco, Ricardo Favela, and Rudy Cuellar. Montoya and Villa knew of each other through their involvement in the Mexican American Liberation Art Front and the California College of Arts and Crafts. During the Chicano Movement students pressured colleges and universities to diversify their faculties. As a result, Montoya and Villa were hired as professors of art at California State University, Sacramento. Their academic positions gave them the creative freedom to initiate programmatic exchanges between the university and the barrio community. Through this effort they initiated many programs including the Barrio Art Program, which required university students to go out into the community including senior centers to teach art courses.