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Carmen Lomas Garza

Tony Labat

Rafael López

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Yolanda M. López

by Esperanza Malavé Cintrón

American artist

An artist who works in a variety of media, including watercolors, mixed-media collage, posters, printmaking, video, and installations, López is an activist whose work challenges stereotypes. She is best known for her Virgin of Guadalupe paintings, a series that uses this icon to uplift the image of women of Mexican descent.

Areas of achievement: Art; women’s rights

Early Life

Yolanda M. López (yoh-LAHN-dah LOH-pehz) was born in San Diego, California, to a struggling, working-class family. Her grandfather, Margarito Senebio Franco, a tailor, and his wife Victoria emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1918. In 1942, when López was born, factories and shipyards that produced and distributed war goods were a growing industry in San Diego. Many of those jobs were closed to nonwhites, a factor that added to the city’s ethnic and economic segregation.

López grew up in a Mexican community near the border. During her early years, she lived with her mother, grandparents, and two younger sisters. Her mother, Margaret, made a meager living as a presser and seamstress. As a working mother in a conservative community, Margaret was prounion and relegated to cook for others, but she approached her work with passion and inventiveness. Her behavior helped to dispel stereotypes and influenced López’s attitudes toward traditional gender expectations.

After earning an associate’s degree at the College of Marin, López enrolled in San Francisco State College, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and became actively involved in anti-Vietnam War activism and in the Third World Strike, a struggle to integrate the student body and to diversify the curriculum. This 1968 rebellion resulted in a violent confrontation in which demonstrators were beaten by police. While the resulting media attention was intrusive, it helped the students achieve their goals and gave López a greater sense of the power of the image. López went on to earn a B.A. from San Diego State University in 1975 and a M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego, in 1978. After graduating, she returned to the San Franciso Bay Area with René Yáñez, and their son Rio was born in 1980.

Life’s Work

As an activist in the late 1960’s, López’s early work was influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the time, including her interaction with Emory Douglas, whose graphic art appeared in the low-budget Black Panther newspaper. Some of her earliest work included posters and graphic art designed to create an awareness of injustices committed against Latinos. Her poster art reflects an irony that increasingly infuses López’s work. In Free Los Siete, a poster created in 1969 to defend seven Central American youths accused of killing a police officer, the text of the Pledge of Allegiance frames and imprisons the black-and-white images of the youths.

The 1978 piece Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? was produced as both a poster and a mixed-media collage. It features an Aztec warrior standing in the pose of Uncle Sam while crumpling papers with the heading “Immigration Plans.” López’s biographer, Karen Mary Davalos, argues that this work admonishes the concept of manifest destiny and that its reference to actor John Wayne spins and undermines the iconic figure’s statement. She maintains that López’s art routinely uses pre-Columbian and Catholic iconography in an effort to analyze and investigate how images function in popular culture.

López’s formal education and burgeoning feminism contributed to her growing interest in the politics of representation, resulting in work that progressively examined the social and cultural invisibility of women. Her Virgin of Guadalupe series, which gained her international recognition, uses vivid oils and mixed-media collages to celebrate ordinary Mexican American women and includes images of her mother, grandmother, and herself. The series, which includes photographs by artist and colleague Susan Mogul, was completed between 1978 and 1988.

After returning to the Bay Area, López began to further hone her photographic talents, often serving as a photographer for hire. During this period, she created her Life in the Mission series, which captured compelling images of Chicanos in the Mission District of San Francisco, and a sequence of documentary photographs on the Day of the Dead. Her work also began to venture further into video and installations.

When You Think of Mexico: Images of Mexicans in the Media, a video López created in the late 1980’s, began as a satirical slide show designed to parody the negative images of Mexicans in contemporary culture. During the 1990’s, it was included as a component of the Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams exhibit, an installation which circulated throughout California art galleries and organizations.

Significance

In 1990, a New York Times article that discusses “quality” in art cites López’s installation piece Things I Never Told My Son About Being Mexican as a work that conveys both innovation and an awareness of aesthetic standards. Some critics argue that López is an artist whose work challenges form and whose power is in her willingness to do so. Others assert that López’s vision is transformative and that her work merges the past into the future.

Her works spans several decades and incorporates a variety of media from the traditional oil on canvas and printmaking to collage, installations, and film. Activism is inherent in her work. In creating art that exposes sexism and racism, López has received worldwide acclaim, as well as threats of violence.

Although most of López’s solo exhibits have been held at galleries and museums in California, her work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts, which was presented at the 2008 Women’s Caucus for Art in Dallas, Texas.

Further Reading

1 

Cockcroft, Eva Sperling. “From Barrio to Mainstream: The Panorama of Latino Art.” In Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, edited by Thomas Weaver and Claudio Esteva-Fabregat. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994. A history of Latino art and artists from a sociopolitical perspective.

2 

Cotter, Holland. “Through Women’s Eyes, Finally.” The New York Times, May 16, 1999, p. SM92. Examines the traditional image of women in art and how the inclusion of women artists is changing these images.

3 

Davalos, Karen Mary. Yolanda M. López. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2008. A thorough and reverent biography of the artist with an intense analysis of her work.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Cintrón, Esperanza Malavé. "Yolanda M. López." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240035801001.
APA 7th
Cintrón, E. M. (2012). Yolanda M. López. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Cintrón, Esperanza Malavé. "Yolanda M. López." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.