Babes Across the Border

ob Matheny has fascinated me for decades. Most people fondle their dreams  but he prods them into life. Seen on the street, he looks like a mildly prosperous merchant or a bureaucrat eyeing retirement. But really, he could be Peter Pan's agent.

So when Bob called about the giant concrete woman in Tijuana, I asked only what time and where should I meet him.

Of course I'd heard rumors about that statue. Now and then some paper would do a silly-season piece on it, with pictures that were more puzzling than explanatory. But I wasn't ready for the reality of the thing, standing there in a garbage-filled gully, its eyes turned toward the sky as if its ankles weren't rooted in smoking shacks, rusting junk and yapping curs.

And I certainly wasn't ready for Armando Muñoz, self-taught linguist, tenor, chef, engineer, sculptor and man-of-the-world.

In some ways, Armando is Tijuana personified. Yet so many people in his home town seem peeved at him. Why? It's hard to say. What passes for an art establishment in Tijuana apparently thinks he's an air-head opportunist. The politicians try not to think of him at all. The tourist establishment can't imagine the attraction of a handmade 58-foot concrete woman when there are so many new discos and malls to visit.

Who loves Armando are the neighbors who point proudly at their statue, the tourists who stop along the airport highway to gawk at the statue, the friends who see to it that he doesn't starve, the ladies young and old for whom he serves as catnip and the journalists from all over the world who find their way to Colonia Aeropuerto and La Mona.

Hanging out with Bob and Armando, then, is like pushing off into the Mississippi on a raft with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. They activate each other.

It may be that the Babes first were fertilized in casual answers to some of Armando's endless questions about life outside Tijuana, specifically on this occasion, socially-acceptable English language usage. What was the proper word for attractive women? Girls? Ladies? Broads? Tootsies? Cutie-pies? ... Babes? Nothing seemed quite the equivalent of guys, fellows, boys, gents, etc. Although "babes" wasn't the final choice - there was none -  it did get kicked around.

Armando also obsessed about big statues, especially the one in New York Harbor. Apparently that discussion went far beyond anything I remember because, on a subsequent visit to Tijuana, I heard from my Huck and my Tom that Armando's exquisite small versions of La Mona were to be combined with reproductions of the Statue of Liberty base and then turned into, well, see the rest of the show.

I suspect  that more of these babes come from Bob’s studio than Armando’s. But I KNOW that they would never have existed without the biggest and best Babe of all: La Mona herself.

All I can say, after several tries in print at introducing her to the wider world, is that she must be seen to be understood. By now, the fact of La Mona seems to be fairly well established. But her REALITY lives only in that Tijuana gulch.

The day will come when her hometown will celebrate La Mona and her creator for their splendid, exuberant defiance of the ordinary and their celebration of shared dreams. But meanwhile, she needs routine repairs and a new coat of paint while he needs the time and money to move on to the next project.

Armando is out there surviving, not necessarily in any identity officially recognized. And La Mona seems safe enough, though you never really know. But both are ripe for more exposure.

So, Bring on the Babes!

Welton Jones
Critic-at-Large
San Diego Union-Tribune
November, 1998