Dream Ranch Forsaken

One day in 1979 a Mexican grocer drove past a ranch for sale in a lonesome valley north of Santa Barbara.

Oil pipe lay strewn about like abandoned skeletons. The house was collapsing, and piles of stone littered the barren property.

Although he was a practical, self-made man, the land seemed to speak to him.

Jose Luis Bonilla had never built anything. But he bought the ranch and on a long canvas he began painting the layout of a Mexican village. He drew Italian poplars marching in columns along its main entrance. A village plaza was next, with lamps, benches and walkways under the shade of weeping willows and plum trees.

To one side of the plaza, he painted a stage and a hexagonal bandstand under a roof of elaborate metalwork.

Across the plaza he drew an arched corridor fronting a large marketplace. There was a lake for boaters, with a giant fountain. Then, overlooking stables for 70 horses, he painted a Mexican rodeo arena with seating for 3,000 spectators.

Twenty years later, the Mexican wonderland he'd painted on canvas had risen from the land where the dilapidated ranch once stood. He called his village Asi Es Mi Tierra -- My Homeland Is Like This.

In its audacity and out-of-placeness, it echoes a time when California gave free rein to the fevered imaginations that spawned such monuments as the Watts Towers or Hearst Castle.

"In life, you have to think big," Bonilla said.

Simon Rodia erected the Watts Towers with shards of crockery, colored glass and tile. Bonilla also used what was at hand: stones and old oil pipe.

Like Rodia -- who, after 33 years of labor, gave the keys to the Watts Towers to a neighbor and disappeared -- Bonilla too abandoned his dream. In a dispute with Santa Barbara County planners, he stalked back to Mexico three years ago.

Bonilla's folk masterpiece covers 100 middle-of-nowhere acres along California 166 in the Cuyama River Valley, the silence disturbed only by the wind and the clip-clop of the prized Andalusian horses still stabled at Asi Es Mi Terra.

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Started as Dishwasher

Bonilla had grown up with horses in Fresnillo in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, where his father owned a lumber mill. At 11, Bonilla decided he wanted to see the United States, so he came on his own to Los Angeles in 1950, planning to stay a few weeks. Then he got a dishwashing job in a Glendale restaurant, and 10 years later he was still here.