[7] Gomez spent her childhood admiring the tireless work of her mother, Maria Elena, a school custodian, and her father Ramiro Sr., a Costco truck driver.
[7] While her parents worked, Gomez's grandmother took care of her and her sisters, assuming a vital role in her upbringing and providing her with unwavering support as she came to terms with her sexuality.
[8][7] Throughout her childhood, Gomez grappled with her sexual identity, identifying at the time as male and understanding that her attraction to other boys was disapproved of by her traditional Mexican family.
[8] Not only did it provide a steady income and a reliable living situation, but it also allowed Gomez to work alongside people whose backgrounds resembled hers, reminding her of her family's Latino immigrant roots.
[8] During these two years when Gomez cared for the family's children, she began her first artistic series, Domestic Scenes, which documented her daily experiences and observations of the other workers in the home and the neighborhood.
[2] Gomez depicts the figures of housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners completing their daily duties in the Chicano Rasquache style, as a way to both, acknowledge and document their lives and labor.
[9] Gomez gives each of her workers a Latino name such as Maria, Lupita, or Carmen but renders the figures with loose and rough strokes that blur any identifiable facial features, which writer Katharine Schwab states "reframes the David Hockney paintings and glossy magazine advertisements he takes for inspiration, putting the lives of California’s near-invisible and individually disposable workers front and center.
[9] Gomez sought to revise Hockney's compositions by including the implied characters who work to maintain the depicted beauty as well as to portray dark-skinned workers, diverting the focus of the piece from luxury to labor.
In this series, Gomez's main objective was "to slow people down, to have them double-take, to make them take notice and see" the cardboard figures that she placed along the sidewalks, on lawns, and against buildings.
[3] Gomez paints loose renderings of people on life-size cardboard cutouts, which she collects from the dumpsters behind a Best Buy at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.
[7] Gomez displays most of her cutouts throughout the lawns, street corners, and playgrounds of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, which she says is intended to force passersby to recognize who maintains the city and cares for its children.
[9] In 2012, Gomez planted four cardboard Latino workers on the hedge of actor George Clooney’s home prior to a fundraiser event that President Obama was to attend.
While working at the Whitney, Gomez observed the custodians, security guards, and staff members, documenting images on her phone so that she could later create cardboard cutouts of these subjects.
The exhibit served as part of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative that seeks to promote an appreciation and exploration of Latino and Latin American Art in Los Angeles.