Sculpture Pays Homage to Salvadorans

A sculpture honoring the city’s Salvadoran community and the tens of thousands of Salvadorans who died during their country’s 12-year civil war is scheduled to be unveiled in a 2 p.m. ceremony today at MacArthur Park.

“Porque Emigramos”--Why We Emigrate--is a 15-by-7-foot work by sculptor Dagoberto Reyes commissioned as part of the Los Angeles Festival. Reyes, 45, whose works have highlighted the suffering of the Salvadoran underclass, fled to Los Angeles in 1981 after he was targeted by right-wing death squads.

During El Salvador’s civil war, more than 75,000 civilians and combatants were killed and about 1 million Salvadorans fled to the United States. Many of them settled in the Pico-Union/Westlake area--home to the largest concentration of Salvadorans in the nation.

The sculpture “highlights the reasons we came here--the war, jails, death squads and persecution,” Reyes said. “We came here because we had to.”