Analyzing Gomez's Painting 'Beverly Hills Housekeeper'

Often, domestic spaces represent safety, comfort, and familiarity and people rarely want that to be infiltrated by the unfamiliar. This is how the concept of immigration plays into the idea the home can be seen as a symbol of country. In the United States for example, immigration policies have fluctuated and changed throughout and over the years. Many Americans have the view that they don’t want their “home”, this country, to be infiltrated by foreigners, yet they for- get that this country was built by immigrants and is made up of immigrants and without immigrants, this country would not be as successful as it is. This can be seen in Gomez’s painting, “Beverly Hills Housekeeper.” Here, a “foreign” woman has infiltrated the home or domestic
Many of the paintings in the Magazine Series show typical pictures that would be found in magazines, but instead of models, cars, jew- elry, furniture, clothes, perfume or food being the focus, the laborers are placed into these scenes to be the focus. Gomez’s painting “Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams + Maria” from the Magazine Series does an excellent job of showing the necessity of the work and “Maria Waiting For Her Check,” also does an excellent job of showing how the rich ignore and take for granted the sig- nificance of the hard work these people do everyday. In the painting, “Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams + Maria,” Maria is seen vacuuming an extravagant room with beautiful white furniture and expensive works of art on the wall. In a typical magazine, the names of the people under a picture like this would suggest that they are responsible for the beauty of it; beauty referring to how the furniture is set up and the accent pieces that are in the picture as well. Gomez cleverly added Maria’s name to the list in this picture to show that she is every bit as responsible for maintaining the beauty of this room, just as Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams are responsible for arranging the furniture and setting the room up for a picture. By
Instead, it seems like Gomez painted this Latino man cleaning the pool as the owner of the house, hence the title, “Working for the Week- end.” In another one of his paintings from his large-scale mixed media projects entitled, “Valentin Cleaning the Pool,” Gomez is bringing up the same concept but this time, in a very ironic way. In this painting, the back of a house is shown and a man is pictured cleaning the pool. Underneath him and the pool are the words, “It’s very fulfilling to bring together a midcentury modern gem with buyers who will care for it (Charlie James Gallery 17).” This is ironic because at first it gives the appearance that the man cleaning the pool is the one who is buying the home and will be the one taking care of it. But I believe that those words serve as the advertisement to buyers of the upper class who will take care of the house by hiring workers to be the ones to ac- tually take care of the house. In a way, it’s also very sad because the workers are honestly more deserving of a nice house and a nice pool, not just because they will take care of it, but because they have actually had to work hard their whole lives and will probably never get the chance to buy or live in a fancy place or take complete and total care of their families. Meanwhile, the up- per class are consistently taking advantage of these things in life that people toil for forever, and they just had it handed to them; served on a