Dancing Along the Border : Art: Luis Jimenez’s sculpture depicting a traditional hat dance is installed at Otay Mesa border station.

While installing the 8-foot-high fiber glass sculpture “Fiesta--Jarabe” outside the Otay Mesa border station on Friday morning, Luis A. Jimenez Jr. stopped for a moment to go inside the government facility that serves as the official entry from Mexico into the United States.

The New Mexico-based artist, who has just completed the $57,000 commission awarded in 1986 from the U.S. General Services Administration, said he found himself in a familiar--but deeply disturbing--situation.

“Citizenship?,” a border agent asked the El Paso-born Jimenez, as he stepped into the building.

“American,” he replied.

“American, what?” was the response.

“American citizen.” Jimenez perfunctorily responded the obvious as another agent nearby laughed and remarked disparagingly, “He looks like all the rest of them.”

“I don’t like being hassled,” Jimenez said angrily. “But that experience explains exactly why I think this work is so important to me,” the 51-year-old artist said later about the incident as he stood in front of his sculpture of a Mexican couple dancing a traditional Mexican hat dance, called jarabe , which was officially installed without ceremony Friday.

“Doing something for the government that is based on a traditional American theme, that’s a big deal for me.

“I grew up in El Paso, a city where they didn’t allow you to speak Spanish on the school grounds. The city tore down a historic Mexican plaza and turned it into a parking lot. They tried to erase every trace of the city’s Mexican past,” Jimenez said.

“This work is very Mexican-American, and for the government to come along and accept that kind of theme at the time that I was growing up would have been considered radical.”

“Fiesta--Jarabe” portrays an archetypal image: A dark complexioned man with distinctly Indian features is dressed in a green caballero costume with a serape flung back across his shoulder. He stands swaggeringly and suggestively, facing the woman. She also is strongly Indian in her features and is costumed in a multicolored, multiruffled dancing dress. Her yellow blouse decorated with red flowers is slung low, revealing bare shoulders above full breasts. At their feet lies a hat.

The work’s blatant sensuality stands in direct contrast to the stark, nondescript modern architecture of the nearby station.

Placed in a plaza on the southern side of the official crossing, just 15 feet from the actual border, the sculpture will greet pedestrians crossing into the United States, a majority of them Mexican. It is also highly visible to passengers in cars moving slowly through the nearby crossing.

“Fiesta--Jarabe” is the internationally acclaimed artist’s second major commissioned sculpture in San Diego. His blue obelisk, which features a nautical theme at its base, stands at the entrance to the Omni Hotel in Horton Plaza. Though they use the same materials, the two works are very different in theme: The obelisk is dominated by a 20-story-high luminescent blue tower, but its base was inspired by a Baroque Neptune fountain by Bernini in Rome. Jimenez’s obelisk pays homage to San Diego’s ocean life.

“Fiesta--Jarabe,” by contrast, is more typical of Jimenez’s work, focusing on classic images of the working class, often with Mexican themes. Among Jimenez’s recent works is “Border Crossing,” a 10 1/2-foot-tall fiberglass rendering of a man carrying a woman and her baby on his back. The sculpture, one version of which was permanently installed in 1989 in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, is a commentary on the desperate situation of immigrants who attempt to cross the border illegally from Mexico.

Jimenez said that “Fiesta--Jarabe” is not intended to make a social commentary, it is simply about people dancing. An image like “Border Crossing,” he said, “wouldn’t be appropriate at a Border Patrol station, or even possible.”

To Jimenez, the strength of the work lies in its symbolic embrace of the Mexican culture and in its sculptural form. “I feel good about it as a piece of sculpture, and that’s what’s most important to me,” he said.

“It’s an out-and-out Mexican hat dance. It’s not cute. It’s not a Disneyland version.”

Elmo J. Novaresi, fine arts officer for Region 9 of the General Services Administration, has overseen the the Jimenez commission since it was awarded five years ago in a program that allots half of 1% of the construction value of a building project for art. The Otay Mesa Border Station, which cost $8 million to complete (not all of the costs are calculated in the process of evaluating how much will be spent on art), opened in 1984, and Jimenez designed his work to accommodate the existing space.

Novaresi expressed delight Friday at seeing the work finally in place. Jimenez is known for working slowly, developing drawings and models, then building the work in a series of molds. The finished work, Novaresi said, is “extremely close to the maquette we originally saw.”

The GSA also is working on two additional art commissions for the region, one for a new border station at Calexico and a second for a commercial facility near the Otay Mesa station.