La Raza Ambulante - The People Walking

The work consists of 15 life size silhouette ceramic 2D tile pieces of 12" square porcelain tile cut to measurement.

Roberto L. Delgado has enlivened the Douglas Border Station with 15 life-size figures of men, women, and children fashioned of painted porcelain tile. The colorful silhouettes, positioned along the wall of the exterior passageway, symbolize the flow of ordinary people back and forth across the border.

After photographing hundreds of people on the streets of Douglas and Los Angeles, Delgado chose these images for their impression of rhythm and motion. He projected them onto construction paper, creating drawings that emphasized the contrast of dark and light. The drawings were traced onto clear mylar acetate and were transferred from there to the tiles. The artist crafted the tiles with the assistance of Dennis Caffrey, director of The Tile Guild in Los Angeles.  He [Dlegado] glazed them using airbrush, hand-applied trailing, and silkscreen techniques to create layers of art upon art.  Inspired by Mexican and Mayan motifs, he embellished the figures with intricate patterns of color and line, brightness and shadow. He then silkscreened several of the figures with photogrpahic images depicting regional history and culture: a dancer, a woman with a backstrap loom, a miner working at an ore car. The photographs came from the Cananea Mining Museum in Sonora, Mexico; the Mining & Historical Museum in Bisbee, Arizona; and the artist's personal collection.