[5][6] Her grandparents migrated from Mexico to the United States, crossing the Río Bravo river in a boat while avoiding gunfire from the Texas Rangers.

[5] In 1969, López was instrumental in advertising the case of Los Siete de la Raza, in which seven young Latin American youths were accused of killing a police officer.

Serving as the groups artistic director, she designed the poster "Free Los Siete," where the faces of these men are shown behind an inverted American flag that appears like prison bars.

at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where curator Evelyn Carmen Ramos noted it had been "circulated at rallies and in newspapers, and galvanized the Mission District's Chicano and Latino community into a powerful social force with a noticeable presence in subsequent city politics.

[12][13] While at the University of California, San Diego, her professors Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler encouraged her to focus on conceptual practice with social, political, and educational impact.

One of the artworks for the set, The Nanny, addressed problems faced by immigrant women of Hispanic descent in the United States and was featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

As Guisela M. Latorre argues, "[i]mages such as Ester Hernandez's 1976 etching Libertad depicting a young Chicana resculpting the Statue of Liberty to resemble a Maya carving, and Yolanda López's pastel drawings (1978) that depicted herself, her mother, and her grandmother in the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe were examples of early Chicana art that placed women at the center of discourses on liberation and decolonization".

[38] López sought to depict the Virgen de Guadalupe in multiple ways due to the religious figures symbolic meaning.

It is a call to look at women, hardworking, enduring and mundane, as the heroines of our daily routine... We privately agonize and sometimes publicly speak out on the representation of us in the majority culture.

"[37] Traditional images of the Virgen de Guadalupe stress religious symbolic meaning[41] primarily maternity, reinforcing gender roles.

[42] López redesigned a powerful cultural icon in order to shift the observer's point of view by providing an alternative interpretation.

[39] The Artist as the Virgen of Guadalupe painting shows López herself running out of the picture frame, smiling with her running shoes as if competing in a race, wearing Mary's shawl as a cape, and jumping over the red, white, and blue angel, showing pride in her culture, and finally holding a snake to demonstrate the strength she holds.

López explained this imagery, saying "[s]he holds the Guadalupe cloak like a cape at the end of a race and jumps over the angel with red, white, and blue wings a symbol of the United States capitalism".

As Karen Mary Davalos, a scholar of Chicano studies, asserts, "López consistently confronts predominant modes of Latino and Latina representations, proposing new models of gender, racial, and cultural identity".

[16] The four by five feet canvas painted with acrylic and oil portrays a toned Lopez as the runner jogging intensely across a college campus in a tank top and shorts with her hair pulled back.

[51] In the artwork, a textured and three dimensional mixed media collage, children's clothes protrude from the warm yellow background wall, with barbed wire depicted from an aerial perspective.

As Karen Mary Davalos, argues, "López intentionally selected these objects for their mundane or everyday quality so that she could support her argument about the ubiquitous nature of stereotypical images.

The images of sleeping Mexicans, smiling señoritas, and dancing fruits and vegetables are made absurd through unexpected placement, juxtaposition, and repetition.

Her work interrogates images of Mexicans and Chicanos, and it challenges not only the context in which fine art is displayed but also the assumptions about who should be invited into such elite spaces.

[12] According to the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press (2009), "López's artwork aims to offer new possibilities for Chicanas and women of color living under conditions of patriarchy, racism, and material inequality.