Linda lives in an alternate timeline in which proposition 187 has transformed California in to a police state ruled by right-wing fundamentalist groups, which enact the removal of equal employment and affirmative action policies.

Tired of seeing her people persecuted, Rivera dons the mantle of Cihualyaomiquiz, a term from the Aztec language translated as "Woman ready to die in battle" and becomes a vigilante known as the Jaguar.

[3] Molina viewed the proposition as a license to discriminate and a direct attack on human rights, as explained in her 1996 introduction to the character: Racism is alive and well in California and is becoming overt in the politics of this country.

Too many took 187 as a license to discriminate...more people of color are becoming victims of the exploding prison-industrial complex and the corporate culture - creeping into every area of life is leaving us with even less opportunities for free expression.

In regular life, she is a "scholar of the law" who slips into her animal double persona in order to obtain papers important in her fight against the contemporary California backlash against civil rights and people of color.

Molina's "Cihualyaomiquiz: the Jaguar" is perhaps closer in its aesthetics and politics to the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, given the seriousness of the social issues that the format of fantasy allow them both to broach.