Artists Give $10 Bills to Laborers : Immigration: Congressman and others object to public art project, funded in part by a federal grant. Organizers say the effort celebrates unsung economic contributions by illegal workers.

Armed with a $5,000 grant funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, three San Diego artists performed a public work of art Wednesday that consisted of handing out $10 bills to immigrant workers gathered at a day-laborer site.

The organizers of the taxpayer-funded giveaway, three conceptual artists who specialize in making defiant cultural statements, mean to celebrate the unsung economic contributions of illegal immigrants.

But the net effect of the “art rebate” has been to fuel the already-hot debate about illegal immigration’s costs and benefits, and the appropriate use of federal arts funds.

An incensed congressman has asked the NEA to prohibit further handouts and to consider demanding the money back.

“This is outrageous,” U.S. Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Escondido) said in a letter to acting NEA Chairwoman Ana M. Steele in Washington. “I can scarcely imagine a more contemptuous use of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. If ‘artists’ want to hand out cash to illegal aliens, let it be their own.”

The public art piece was commissioned by two local museums--the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Centro Cultural de La Raza--from a $250,000 grant awarded in 1989 by the NEA. The federal arts agency approved the grant for a long-running, multidisciplinary exhibit titled “La Frontera/The Border,” which also uses funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and other private donors.

In a statement Wednesday, NEA officials indicated that they were unaware they were funding a giveaway of money, even if it was staged as a public artwork. “No specific details on the particular exhibits or commissions were included in the application,” the statement said.

As for the art rebate, a spokesman said: “These people have not gone through our funding process. This is a museum making a determination. . . . We are not in a position to second-guess grantees.”

The NEA, which has been under attack for funding allegedly offensive or frivolous works, had not yet received Cunningham’s letter, said spokesman Josh Dare.

Museum officials were not aware of the details of the art rebate, but they stand behind the work, said Kathryn Kanjo, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The artists--David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco--say the angry reactions to their work illustrate the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment that motivated them in the first place.

With prominent figures including President Clinton and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) joining the call for tough new border controls, Hock said: “The rhetoric blaming the immigrants as a source of our economic woes became more shrill and more substantial.”

The trio’s guerilla-style art has brought notoriety before. In 1988, they installed billboards on buses deriding San Diego as “America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.”

This year, they decided to make the rounds of areas where day laborers gather. They signed and dispensed money, and also handed out an official-looking document lauding the contributions of “undocumented taxpayers . . . in an economic community indifferent to national borders.”

As word coursed along El Camino Real Boulevard Wednesday that people were handing out $10 bills with no strings attached, mystified laborers--most of them from southern Mexico and Central America--gathered quickly.

“I would say that 80% of illegal immigrants are a benefit” to the United States, said Delfino Alavez Soto, 51, of the state of Oaxaca. “Twenty percent are an anomaly, they fall into drug addiction, other vices. The day that this country rejects Mexicans will be the day that the United States falls apart. They won’t find anyone to work cheap.”

Anibal Yanez Chavez, a professor at Cal State San Marcos who joined the artists as a translator, handed an envelope to Amadeo Camacho, a Oaxacan worker who lives in one of the migrant shantytowns that have caused tension in north San Diego County suburbs. In 1990, in a crude threat to laborers who gather nearby, three men helped tie up a 27-year-old migrant and fasten a paper bag on his head. On the bag, they scrawled the words “No mas aqui, “ warning the laborers to leave the area.

“Instead of spending money on a sculpture or a painting, the artists have signed the bills and decided to give them to you as recognition,” Yanez told Camacho.

The idea is that the marked money will circulate, showing how migrants contribute to the economy.