Laura Alvarez

"I'm With My Nanny", acrylic, watercolor on paper, Plexi Glass, ink on wood panel, 1999

Laura Alvarez has been one of the most intriguing and interesting Chicana artists I have come across yet. What I have inferred so far is that art is a compilation of personal expression and experience. Alvarez epitomizes her life experiences uniquely through her creation of DAS, otherwise known as her Double Agent Sirvienta over a span of 20 years. She uses her parents more often than any other thing as her inspiration behind this reoccurring series. The fact that her mother was a nanny and a maid and her father worked a secretive military job really emphasizes how much her personal experiences have influenced her artwork. In her "Im With My Nanny" painting, there is a little boy with blonde hair hugging the DAS and throwing a bomb as they are running away from something. Alvarez discussed in lecture that the little boy was acting as her accomplice. This is an image that can be similarly found throughout many of her other paintings. I found this image interesting because in many situations, there are families who hire a nanny to help raise their children. Often times, those children are so isolated form their parents that the nanny has to step up and fill in that role for them. This results in having many kids learning how to speak Spanish because of the tremendous amount of time that is spent with them over their own parents. Because the nannies are stereotypically the ones who know all the secrets and also spend the most time with the children, that brings in the spy element and the idea of the child working as her accomplice, because they are so attached to their nannies. Alvarez recreates this phenomenon in her artwork but adds a fun twist incorporating her mothers domestic background and her fathers secret agent background to form DAS and her accomplice.