[6][3][7] His family moved when he was a young child, settling in Chicago, Illinois, where his father owned a restaurant for five years and worked in Gary steel mills for another four.

[8] During his youth in Chicago, the family traveled to Mexico City frequently, where Almaraz reports having his "first impression of art" that "was both horrifying and absolutely magical", in other words "Sublime".

He graduated from Garfield High School in 1959[10] and attended Los Angeles City College, studying under David Ramirez, and took summer classes at Loyola Marymount University.

Loyola offered him a full scholarship, but he declined it in protest of the university's support of the Vietnam War and stopped professing the Catholic faith altogether.

The leftmost panel in particular demonstrates how visually exciting it could be to pierce dark fields with bright light.... Forms could be dissolved or agglomerated by rough, ragged brushstrokes.

Most of the people are romantic couples; they are paired in boats, by the side of the lake, on the bridge, and even as a bride and groom in the center, under what could very well be a statue of Venus.

[19] Sunset Crash, a 1982 oil in the collection of the "Cheech," has been described as "a fine example of the motif that is most prized by Carlos Almaraz’s collectors.

It also demonstrated that one doesn’t have to render a burning car in much detail — smoke, fire, and a flying tire conveyed a catastrophic crash in a more effective manner.

Almaraz’s car crashes express the [film] noirish concept that a deadly disaster can strike at any moment, even on a leisurely Sunday drive.

"[16] Greed (1989), a very unusual Almaraz with fearsome dogs, was featured in the Hispanic Art exhibition and catalogue that toured several cities.

[19] [16] Hernandez, in fact, utilized what he had learned from Alamaraz's works and turned then into antithetical paintings: "The beautiful, curvaceous orange and yellow gestural brushstrokes that float and overlap on the surface of Almaraz’s lake were hardened and congealed into linear, geometric shapes, and sometimes transformed into explosive blasts (La Bomba, 1992) or twisted metal and broken glass (The Death of Chuey, 1991) that possess their own, terrible beauty.

Almaraz’s erotic dreams of procreative rapture in nature devolved into dark urban nightmares of explosive and violent death.

[23][7] He is remembered as an artist who used his talent to bring critical attention to the early Chicano Art Movement, as well as a supporter of Cesar Chávez and the UFW.

In 1992 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art honored him with a tribute featuring 28 of his drawings and prints donated by his widow.

An exhibition of his paintings, pastels, and drawings from the 70s and 80s opened in September 2011, in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute's "Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980".