Laura Alvarez Recreating Histories

Laura Alvarez is a visual and recording artist from Orange County, California. Her ongoing work "Double Agent Sirvienta" makes up the largest fraction of her art. The Double Agent Sirvienta is a woman who presents herself as a nanny, but in reality, she really is a double agent; she most likely does not know a thing about being a nanny or cleaning a house, as many of her cleaning tools are really weapons. In her series, she created a "Double Agent Jardinero" who was a double agent gardener. I choose to talk about this piece because most of us are aware of her work with the Double Agent Sirvienta; I wanted to show the duplicity of her work. Alvarez's work with DAS is a perfect example of Debra Blake's writing about recreating our pasts. Mexican Americans and other Latinos make up a large proportion of the gardening and housework industries. By creating these works, Alvarez takes all of the negative ideas about this kind of work and makes them so much more. She makes these jobs appear to others as what they really are-- so much more than just house work. These people have lives (sometimes very interesting ones) outside of the work they do. By using something as ordinary as these two occupations and creating them into so much more, she alters people's conceptions of these people.