As senators opened the immigration reform debate with a hearing Wednesday morning, spectral sentinels last seen in the Hollywood Hills and on Rodeo Drive began appearing on Capitol Hill.
They were life-size and two-dimensional, made of cardboard and acrylic paint: A fruit-picker in the grass before the East Front of the Capitol. A farmworker leaning against a rail outside the Rayburn Building. The day before, a painted Latino family of four took its place among the tourists taking pictures through the White House gate.
Ramiro Gomez, an artist from Los Angeles, had brought his "interruptions," as he calls them, to Washington.