Marathon runner Alex Vanegas has been in charge of polishing a bronze bust of the poet Rubén Darío, located in a park south of downtown Los Angeles, in the United States, where he arrived less than a year ago fleeing from the repression of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
“Using a brush and a spatula, Alex Vanegas spread a cleaning solution on a bronze bust of the Nicaraguan poet and national idol Rubén Darío”, thus begins the account of his story as a migrant, published in this edition Friday, November 11 from the Los Angeles Times.
Vanegas felt dazed and disoriented as an asylum seeker, the text notes. Seeing the time-worn monument made him very sad and decided to restore it.”She is one of those figures who give us hope as we learn to navigate a new country,” he said.
Vanegas, 65, a recognized figure of the citizen insurrection of April 2018, ran protesting against the regime of Daniel Ortega, soon becoming a visible face of the blue and white struggle. The threats, verbal attacks and more than five police arrests forced him into exile in Costa Rica, where he lived on the street, according to a publication in Diario La Prensa.
Vanegas ran everywhere in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, especially around the Rubén Darío roundabout. He shouted verses from one of Darío’s most notable works, “If the country is small…” “If the country is small”, until the pedestrians and motorists responded, “A great one dreams of it!”, then one dreams in big, he told the American newspaper.
“It’s what I knew how to do best – run – and, therefore, it became my method to try to raise awareness and call the government,” said Vanegas, who was in prison for four months before going into exile in 2019 to Costa Rica, and then, in 2021, to the United States.
Shortly after arriving in the US, Vanegas contacted German Peña, who founded the Nicaragua American Opportunity Foundation, a 26-year-old Los Angeles-based organization that provides services and acts as a cultural space for immigrants. Nicaraguans.
Peña took him to the Maywood Riverfront Park, where he saw the Darío monument, the bust crowning a black marble structure. Vanegas went to work. He patched up cracks and holes and lathered up a fresh coat of copper paint. Little by little, the monument began to shine.
Photo: Archive
A little Nicaragua in Los Angeles
Meanwhile, Peña helped Vanegas with his immigration and political asylum paperwork. In recent years, this work of his foundation has become more essential than ever.
According to the Los Angeles Times, there are more than 400,000 people of Nicaraguan origin living in the United States, far fewer than the number of Salvadorans (about 2.3 million) and Guatemalans (1.4 million), the two largest subgroups. from Central America. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the Nicaraguan population is approximately 40,000 residents.
For Nicaraguans who feel isolated and overwhelmed in Los Angeles, the foundation fosters a sense of community and belonging. “It’s spaces like these where I can find people who look and talk like me,” said Vanegas, who regularly attends the group’s cultural events. “It’s a little reminder of home,” the newspaper says.
reigning bolus of pride, as well as a voice of resistance to colonialism and imperialism throughout the hemisphere. The foundation formulated the idea of erecting a monument to Darío, says the text.
Alex Vanegas keeps running to run Ortega
Although most Central American residents live in downtown Los Angeles, Peña set her sights on Maywood, the third-smallest incorporated city in Los Angeles County. The monument was inaugurated the day the park opened to the public: May 27, 2008.
“I would say that Maywood is the number 1 cultural city in the world. Why? Because there is the monument to Rubén Darío,” Peña told the Los Angeles Times.
The marathoner has not stopped running. He continues to participate in the protests organized by the diaspora in Los Angeles and assured the newspaper that he will continue to publicize the problems in Nicaragua and take care of Darío’s bust. “He is my hope,” he assured the newspaper.
