Carlos Almaraz is recognized as one the first artists to advance Chicanismo, a revolutionary cultural assertion in the 1970s that proclaimed and celebrated the experience of Americans of Mexican heritage. He has often been vaunted as a pioneer of "identity art," one who promulgated the notion of an "essential" cultural identity and pride. Yet, though Almaraz was born in Mexico and always maintained that his roots were there, he lived most of life in the United States. Moreover, representing himself specifically as Chicano meant that his cultural identity historically was marginalized by mainstream society in both the United States and Mexico. And although he was married and had a daughter, he was actively gay or, more accurately, bisexual, situating him in another group not generally embraced (and certainly not during his lifetime) by mainstream American or—especially—Latino culture. And while Almaraz saw himself as a cultural activist, as he evolved artistically his art became less and less political and more and more personal, ever more psychological and dreamlike.
Painted in 1988, late in his career, School Days harks back to his much earlier transitional works from the early 1970s. Those works had an expressionist, erratic, rather compulsive style of cryptic figuration that ultimately led to his mature work. This painting thus brackets the early and late phases of Almaraz’s career.