A Sculptor’s Homage to His Latino Roots

“We use the term illegal aliens as if the people who come here from Central America are monsters from outer space, but many of them are family groups just like this,” said artist Luis Jimenez, pointing to his new sculpture in MacArthur Park.

“Border Crossing,” a 10 1/2-foot-tall fiberglass piece depicting a man carrying a women and her baby on his back, was installed earlier this week on the island in the MacArthur Park lake near 7th Street and Alvarado Boulevard.

“This is a very important piece for me,” Jimenez said. “It’s an archetypal image. You can see this happening every day in El Paso. Men often carry women across the river so they won’t get wet. But this is also a personal piece. It’s dedicated to my father, who came over from Mexico in 1922. He was an illegal alien.”

The sculpture is the latest project for the MacArthur Park Public Art Program, established in 1983 to upgrade the park and provide a point of community pride for a neighborhood that has been plagued with crime and drug traffic. “Border Crossing” is the last of 10 works originally commissioned for the $400,000 program, sponsored by the Otis/Parsons art gallery and several community groups. The project has subsequently been taken over and expanded by the MacArthur Park Foundation.

Some people were appalled that Jimenez would put his work in such a trouble spot, “but I think it’s a beautiful park,” the 49-year-old artist said. He expects no damage to the sculpture, and not only because it is protected by water. “I know that it only takes one crazy person, but in 20 years of doing public projects none of my work has been vandalized,” he said. He figures his luck has something to do with his preference for popular subject matter and materials that are more at home in auto shops than in art museums.

“I was really excited to be asked to participate in the project when I realized that the park is a gathering place for Latin Americans and illegal aliens,” Jimenez said.

“ ‘Border Crossing’ reflects the reality of the immigrant neighborhood. We figure that about 40% of the people walking around MacArthur Park actually walked over the border,” said Aldolfo V. Nodal, the director of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, who initiated the public-art program while he was director of the Otis/Parsons gallery.

Jimenez first visited the park in 1983 when the project was announced, then made repeated trips to work out his ideas for the sculpture. In his studio in Hondo, N.M., he modeled the life-size figures from clay, then cast the piece in fiberglass and spray-painted it with acrylic urethanes that have been developed for use on jet aircraft.

He intended to base the sculpture on the bottom of the lake so that the figures would appear to be emerging from the water, but Nodal said that the engineering would be too expensive for the sculpture’s $14,000 budget. Instead the figures are mounted on a Cor-Ten steel base that stands about 5 feet above dry land.

Another disappointment greeted the artist when he arrived on the scene, but it’s likely to be temporary. The formerly overgrown island had been cleaned up especially for the installation. “I thought of the island as a tropical landscape, a miniature Central America,” he said with a moan. Now it’s a tidy, weed-free island, only occupied by palms. If nature takes its course and maintenance crews stay away, the island may soon return to the state that Jimenez prefers.

The completion of “Border Crossing” has been delayed for several years. “People are always mad at me, but I can’t work fast. I use very traditional methods to build the sculpture and make molds, so it takes two or three years to make a sculpture,” Jimenez said. Among his other public works are a recently installed fountain at the Omni Hotel in San Diego, a sculptural “Steel Worker” in Buffalo, N.Y., and a “Vaquero” in Houston. Nearly all his works are backed by public funds--generally the National Endowment for the Arts--and matched by private donations, he said.

Despite his international reputation and a steady stream of public commissions, Jimenez said that making art is always a struggle. Congealed to a capsule, his career sounds like an astonishing success story, however. He studied art and architecture at the University of Texas in Austin, went to Mexico in 1964, returned to Texas in 1965, then took off for New York in 1966. He spent the first couple of years working for the New York City Youth Board, running programs for teen-agers in riot-torn neighborhoods. In 1969, he had his first exhibition in New York and he has made his living from art ever since.

“I decided that I didn’t have to live in New York to make art,” Jimenez said, so he moved back to the Southwest in 1971, where he lives with his wife, Susan, and their two young sons, Luis Adan and Juan Orion.

Looking across the park at his boys playing quietly on a park bench, Jimenez pointed out another personal meaning in “Border Crossing”: The baby being carried by his parents is an homage to the artist’s young family.