Mission District Murals: Forty Years of Witness

Balmy Alley is one block long, running between Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth streets in the Mission District, and almost every surface on it has been painted, repainted, and painted over again. It has been a mural alley since nineteen seventy-two, when a woman named Maria Galivez began painting its fences and garage doors with local children. The Mujeres Muralistas, among the first organized groups of female muralists in the country, added their work in the years following. The alley was a neighborhood art project before it was anything else.

In the summer of nineteen eighty-five, the alley became something more specific. A muralist named Ray Patlan had been organizing since nineteen eighty-four. That summer, thirty-six artists completed twenty-seven murals in a single season. The subject was Central America: the wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and the American foreign policy that was funding the violence. The Mission District had been receiving refugees from those conflicts for years. The murals were their community's response. The faces of the dead looked out from the garage doors.

By the two thousand tens, the murals had new subject matter. Rent-eviction notices appeared in the painted imagery. The Google Bus schedule, the corporate shuttle that carried tech workers through the Mission to offices in Silicon Valley, appeared on building facades. Artists were painting the displacement of the neighborhood in real time, on the walls of the buildings being displaced from.

The alley is a living document. Some of what it said last year has been painted over. Some of what replaced it has already changed. The argument about who this neighborhood is for has not been resolved. It is still going on the walls.