GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas — They came to Grand Prairie for the big reveal.

“I haven’t been able to see the whole project,” said one spectator.

“This was a surprise,” another spectator said. “I had no idea.”

“I didn’t know this was happening,” one woman said.

It’s a surprise they were promised would be spectacular, but almost no one in the crowd knew that what they were about to see came straight from the city dump.

The man who pulled it from the garbage is Joaquin Soto.

Soto is a sculptor, and he gets a lot of his materials from the landfill because, like these scraps, he knows what it’s like to be rejected.

“I felt like I was garbage at times,” Soto said. “But I had to kind of prove myself and show people that wasn’t the case.”

Soto is an immigrant. He came to the United States from Me

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