"Aqui Estoy" by Laura Alvarez

“Aquì Estoy”, acrylic, watercolor on paper, ink, Plexi Glas on wood panel, 1999

          I was very astonished with Laura Alvarez's Double Agent Sirvienta (DAS) career. I am really glad that she presented her life with the class because it really helped me understand her art. I thought that it was very interesting how her childhood was very different compared to that of her cousins. Alvarez stated that she and her brother were the only ones that would go and visit her family from Mexico and were the only ones that spoke Spanish. In her series Double Agent Sirvienta, she presented connections between her life and her artwork. For example, her mother was a maid and her character Remedios was also a sirvienta (maid). Alvarez shared with the class that when she was a kid she loved to play spy with her brother and realized that this was due to the fact that her father worked for the government. Alvarez's DAS is a combination of her mother and her father as a spy. 

       The painting that I have choosen is titled "Aqui Estoy". I chosed this painting because of the lyrics that are painted around the sirvienta and the bird. Some of the lyrics in Alvarez song state, "Aqui estoy sin instruciones porque me han abandonando..corriendo down the hallways... de esta casa exclusiva". I believe that the lyrics portray how the DAS feels regarding her job. The bird might represent how the DAS has gained her freedom as being a spy, or how she felt traped like a bird in a cage when she pretended to be a sirvienta. In Blake's Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she claims that images like the contrast of the traditional Virgen de Guadalupe, artist like Yolanda Lopez use their art as a way to empower women. Alvarez has done the same by combining both of her parents jobs and using her art to empower them and create something original.