Martinez heroicizes farmworkers while highlighting the injustices that they face, an approach informed by his own experiences working on factory farms in Washington state. He draws and paints directly onto cardboard boxes used to ship fruits and vegetables, explaining that the advertising images on these boxes “hide the realities farm workers endure [on] the front lines.”

Royal-ty is based on an early 20th-century advertisement for the Corona Citrus Association showing a queen displaying an orange. Martinez replaces the orange with a broken scale, symbolizing injustice, and he paints over part of the word “PRODUCE” on one of the boxes so that “ICE” is emblazoned across her chest, an allusion to the ever-present threat of deportation and the industry’s reliance on undocumented labor. The queen appears alongside a scene of workers at lunchtime: Martinez appears in a self-portrait to the right of center, holding a taco plate like a painter’s palette. Facing the viewer, he appears as a firsthand witness to the disconnect between advertising and labor.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)