Annotations for People: Avalos-david

The only twist was that the taxpayers we chose to return the money to were undocumented.

Well, interestingly enough, in the past, many projects that I've worked on have been criticized as a waste of taxpayer dollars. So Louis, Liz and I came upon the idea of taking the money for an art project and returning it to taxpayers who would think that anyone could criticize us for that? The only twist was that the taxpayers we chose to return the money to were undocumented workers, and that seems to be the problem in most people's eyes.

I think it's a very simple gesture. Louis, Liz and I pay taxes and we recognize that we're part of a tax paying community and we recognize the undocumented worker in the United States as part of that tax paying community. Many of them have taxes deducted, federal income taxes, for example, deducted from their payroll checks. Others pay taxes in a variety of ways whenever they fill up their car with a tank of gas, whenever they buy a pair of socks or a bar of soap in a Kmart. This is something that's been forgotten in all the hysteria and all the hatred that's been whipped up by politicians like Pete Wilson against the immigrant. So we think it's ridiculous when people criticize the undocumented for using taxpayer dollar supported services. Hey, they're taxpayers too. That's all we're saying.

It's definitely an art project. I think if you look at the $10 bill as a material of this project, instead of using bronze or marble or oil paints, we used as a material for this project, this $10 bill, I think it's pretty easy to realize that the monetary value of the bill has been replaced in the public's mind with a symbolic value of the bill. $1,250 is what we're talking about in terms of the NE's portion of the $5,000 commission.

We're talking about a molecule in the bucket, not a drop in the bucket, but what people are reacting to is not the monetary value, they're reacting to the symbolic value and I think they're reacting because it is so painful for many of us who want a simple answer to the economic problems in this country. It's so painful for many people to recognize, "hey, the undocumented are part of our community." Like it or not, they're part of the tax paying community like it or not. So we're dealing with symbols. Unfortunately in this country, the quote illegal alien has become a media symbol, a media celebrity. The hard-earned tax dollar is another cultural symbol in this country, and we put those two symbols together. We juxtapose them just as artists, juxtapose symbols and images all the time, and the reaction that we've seen is a reaction that is all out of proportion to the amount of money that we're talking about.