For High Stakes

Rene doesn’t remember anything about crossing the border. He was just 3 when his parents bundled him and his 2-year-old brother up and, with the help of a hired coyote, left certain poverty for the uncertainty of the United States.

But Rene, now 14, has memorialized his family’s 1,400-mile trek from Mexico City into San Diego with a game called Crossing the Border. He created the game for an annual contest celebrating folk art for middle and high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Rene, who fears deportation for himself and his family if he gives his last name, says it was easy coming up with an idea for this year’s contest theme, “Games of Life.”

“You just roll the die,” he says of his entry that landed him first place last week in the middle school category. “It’s like playing with your life. You either stay or you go.”

In Rene’s game, each player rolls a die and then moves that many spaces. The object is to get to the other side of the board, or the border, outrunning the INS agent to the finish line--the United States.

But even though that’s the end of his game, it’s just the beginning for immigrants, he says. Even Rene--now a college hopeful with a B average who dreams someday of attending art school--knows that at any time an immigration agent can tap on his shoulder and send him back to start.

“I think about it a lot,” he says. “And my mom does too.” Rene, whose parents are vendors, hopes to be sponsored for legal residency by an older brother who was born in the U.S., making him an American citizen.

“Folk art helps [students] ... look with a keener eye at their own life,” said Thomas Coston, president of Light Bringer Project, a Pasadena-based nonprofit that, along with the Neutrogena Corp., has for the last four years organized the art contest--called FACES, for Folk Art as Community Expressions. “It allows students ... to use things in their own life to tell about who they are.”

Judges of the contest, including representatives from the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum and the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institute, were drawn to Rene’s piece for its social and political commentary.

“It was the artistry of his story that intrigued us,” said Coston, who was also a judge. “He really used courage and boldness to tell his story.”

For his game, Rene used tiny whisky bottles as game pieces. Each bottle has a photocopied black-and-white picture of immigrants of various nationalities rolled up inside. And each bottle is outfitted with necessities for a journey across the border: tiny sandals for “the long difficult steps the immigrants took” and a tiny colorful Mexican serape--a blanket wrapped around the bottle like a shawl--for warmth at night.

The border patrol agent, an action figure Rene found in a toy box at home, is spray-painted a dull gray and is peched atop a cobalt blue inkwell. The Darth Vader-like figure wears a mean grimace and a black, wide-brimmed hat.

With each turn, the immigrants move along fluorescent orange tiles through barbed wire, over raging rivers, where many real immigrants have lost their lives, and through rocky terrain--all of which Rene has skillfully painted on a wooden playing board--until they arrive at the Los Angeles skyline.

Rene--who has no formal training in art--took about four weeks to complete his work, often sketching out designs in class and then taking the piece home to work on in his family’s tiny apartment.

“It looks like it wasn’t made on a penny,” said Patricia Hurley, also with the Light Bringer Project, “and that’s the essence of folk art.”

Rene’s game is one of 70 submitted by middle and high school students throughout the LAUSD for the contest. Entries ranged from Monopoly-like board games with themes of trying to graduate from high school to finding a date to the Consequences of Drinking and the Road to Hell (in that case, the first to the finish line loses).

All of the student work submitted for the contest will be on display June 12 through July 7 at the Craft and Folk Art Museum at 5814 Wilshire Blvd.

Each winner will receive a cash award. First-place finisher Rene, who attends Berendo Middle School, and his high school counterpart will also travel this summer with a family member, their art teacher and representatives of the FACES program to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., where their work will be on display.

“I’ve never been outside of Los Angeles [since moving here],” said Rene. “It’s going to be really cool.”