Álvaro Márquez

Álvaro D. Márquez is a visual artist and part-time professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Cal State LA. Much of Marquez's work explores art as social inquiry, looking at the history of displacement in the Americas, starting with Indigenous dispossession after European conquest, following through to current issues around gentrification and homelessness.

Marquez was born into the working-class migrant community of East Salinas, in California’s Central Coast. Coming from three generations of migrant farm workers, his upbringing in this community informs his work as an artist, researcher, and advocate.

A majority of these prints are from the Al Norte y P’atras” (North and Back) series, which presents a visual narrative of Mexican migration to the United States through a series of twelve hand-embellished, limited edition linocut prints. Using figurative expression and comics’ aesthetic grammar to tell the story of an undocumented Mexican farmer and his journey north.