Christina Fernandez uses photography to examine the relationship of gender and Mexican-American identity to labor, migration, and place.

Fernandez was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Chicano activists. Her art moves between the personal and the societal. She connects her family’s history of migration with the poor working conditions of migrant farm laborers.

Fernandez often weaves narratives into photographs of natural landscapes or the built environment. In Bend (1999–2000), the artist combines photographs of Zapotec ruins with text. The story links her experience of visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, with her grandmother’s death. Her Lavanderia works are images of laundromats at night. They capture the structures as frames for a highly personal form of domestic labor done in public.