Sculptor. He perfected a secret process in which he carved chemically treated reinforced concrete so that it looked like wood. Because he traveled throughout the United States to work on commissions and did not speak English, very little is known about him. The son of Catarina Rodríguez, he was born in Toluca, capital of the state of México, in 1891 or 1893. As a boy, he developed skills he later used in his art by working in a foundry and for an Italian artist who produced imitation rocks. He reproduced ruins of ancient buildings in collaboration with Mexican architects and engineers such as those at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City. He came to the United States in the 1920s and moved to San Antonio, Texas. The largest examples of his work are located in San Antonio. He produced several major works in San Antonio's Brackenridge Park, notably the concrete footbridge that simulates an arbor of woven wooden limbs. During the 1930s he sculpted pieces for three parks in Little Rock, Arkansas. He worked with an architect to design a site to look like an abandoned mill in which everything but the stone walls of the mill was molded from cement. This mill appears in the early opening credits of the film "Gone With The Wind." In the mid 1930s he completed a dozen works based on literary and Biblical themes in Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. The centerpiece of the cemetery is a massive grotto, the inside of which is studded with crystals. Other examples of his work have been found in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Suitland, Maryland; Ann Arbor, Michigan; New York City; and Clayton, New Mexico. His inclusion of such painstaking details as insect holes, peeling bark, and broken-off branches in his work, which he called el trabajo rústico, demonstrates a highly refined aesthetic as well as technical mastery of his medium. He sculpted the moistened cement with his hands or simple tools such as a fork, knife, spoon, or twig. He stained the cement while it was still wet, using chemicals such as copperas, sulfuric acid, muriatic acid, iron oxide, saltpeter, and lampblack for various tints. He jealously guarded his special techniques, particularly those relating to the tinting process. He had no immediate survivors at his death. Several of his surviving sculptures are on the National Register of Historic Places.