CREATING AND PRESERVING POLITICAL ART IN SAN FRANCISCO'S BALMY ALLEY

CREATING AND PRESERVING POLITICAL ART IN SAN FRANCISCO'S BALMY ALLEY
By David Bacon
American Community Media - Oct 24, 2026
https://americancommunitymedia.org/arts-entertainment/creating-and-preserving-political-art-in-san-franciscos-balmy-alley/



Muralist Juana Alicia works on a mural depicting Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Francisco's famed Balmy Alley. 

Juana Alicia and Tirso G. Araiza are two of San Francisco’s most respected muralists and artists and were early contributors to the murals that now decorate Balmy Alley in the heart of the city’s Mission District. The alley and the works that decorate it — many of them inspired by the neighborhood’s Latino roots — are viewed by some as a birthplace of San Francisco’s modern muralist tradition. The artists spoke with photographer and journalist David Bacon as they worked on a new mural about the significance of the alley and the movement it helped launch in a city that is today vastly transformed from the one they began their careers in decades earlier.

Q: How would you describe Balmy Alley to somebody who'd never seen it?

JUANA ALICIA: Balmy Alley is in the heart of the San Francisco Mission District, which has been the Latino cultural district for the last forty years. Originally this was Ohlone land, before it was colonized. The first European peoples to live in this neighborhood, I believe, were Irish and Italian. Then Mexicans started moving in, in the 1950s and '60s. By the '60s and '70s, it was firmly established as a Latino neighborhood, mostly Mexican. Then, during the wars in Central America, there was a huge influx, particularly of Salvadorans. San Francisco became the city with the second-largest population of Salvadorans after San Salvador itself. And then Nicaraguans. We have a huge cultural mix here. But originally, the alley was just an alley — it didn't have the murals.

There are fifty-three murals, on this little stretch between 24th and 25th Streets, between Treat and Harrison Streets. It's right next to Garfield Park — a vibrant place. At the end of the alley, on 24th Street, there's Acción Latina and the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore. Galería de la Raza used to be there too. And there's Brava, for Women in the Arts, our fiscal agent for this project.

A mural in Balmy Alley shows the deterioration over time as the wood beneath the paint cracks and ages.

TIRSO G. ARAIZA: They're different murals from different times. At the start of this project, we were walking down this alley, looking at the murals, lamenting their condition, saying to our friends, we should do something about this, we're going to lose these murals. 

The mural Irene Pérez painted in 71 was restored once, I think in the '90s, and then it was forgotten. Nobody was looking after it, and we had to track down the artist. We decided to restore it because we knew its history. we knew it had been painted so long ago, and she was the only one left from that generation of '70s muralists. We couldn't not do it. So we found Irene Pérez and asked if she'd be interested in restoring her own piece. She had the courage to go back and redo it, and was happy we'd managed to get the funds. That's the oldest one.

Then there's Juana Alicia's, done in the '90s — also a pretty old mural, and I don't think it has ever been restored in almost thirty years. Three others were also in bad shape, the paint peeling and fading. The mini-park mural, painted in the '80s, was restored in the late '90s or early 2000s, and then forgotten again — years and years of neglect. We were lucky, because we knew the murals were in bad shape, but we didn't know the extent of the dry rot, or whatever damage the walls had.

Sometimes the city would rather fund a brand-new mural than restore an existing piece. That forces the artist to sacrifice a piece with tremendous historic and cultural value. It gets forgotten, and eventually the mural's gone. Most murals restored in the Mission have been restored by the artists themselves. But artists can't afford to do the restoration work themselves. When there's no support, it doesn't get done.  Our original proposal was actually to restore ten — we didn't get all ten approved, but we got six. I think we should keep forming a collective around this, to show that it's possible.

Muralist Juana Alicia describes her mural as an homage to Monsignor Óscar Romero, who was assassinated while saying mass in his church in El Salvador, in the mid-1980s, by a CIA-trained murderer. 

Tell me about the subject of the mural you're painting here.

JA: This is a memorial — an homage, a song — to Monsignor Óscar Romero. He was an amazing human rights defender, assassinated while saying mass in his church in El Salvador, in the mid-1980s, by a CIA-trained murderer.  He's beloved in El Salvador, but his legacy belongs to all the people who struggled against the repression in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and who continue to do so, because it isn't over. 

The colonial project continues, pushing Indigenous peoples out of their lands and their legacies, by corporations like Monsanto and others. The war in Central America was really about the US and other international forces of capital wanting to take the land, the riches of Central America, for their own. So of course there was a lot of resistance — the revolution in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, the work of Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala.

I painted my first homage to Monsignor Óscar Romero here in Balmy Alley thirty years ago, in 1996. I wanted to restore that mural, but the wall is crumbling — it's not really restorable. So I reinvented the mural. Thirty years later, I have better painting skills, I hope, than I did then. 

Juana Alicia uses crayon to outline the position of a butterfly.

In this version — “No one should obey an immoral law” — Óscar Romero is older now, and so am I. The butterflies on his cassock are embroidered along with his lace collar. None of that adornment existed on the earlier mural. That one was more somber; this one is more celebratory, more painterly. 

And it's not just me by myself. I have this amazing team helping me put in the background — Miguel Bounce Perez, an incredible calligrapher, tattoo artist, and muralist; G Molina, a muralist, colorist and textile artist, and Gener and David. We've done a bunch of murals together. When I ran the mural program at City College, we collaborated. A whole bunch of really great muralists were part of that program. It was fiercely taught.

Muralist Tirso Araiza beside the original mural of Oscar Romero painted by Juana Alicia 30 years ago.  The calligraphy shows the landscape style from Central America. 

The butterflies are an immigrant-rights symbol, aren't they?

JA: In Mesoamerican tradition, when someone dies, the butterflies carry their soul to the next life. They're a symbol of migration. We migrate, and butterflies migrate. You can see my granddaughters have already started to paint them, because they couldn't keep their hands off it. We're going to organize some community events so people can bring their children to paint more.

When you painted the original mural of Monsignor Óscar Romero, Balmy Alley and San Francisco were a different place. What's changed between then and now? 

JA: Irene Perez painted one of the first murals in Balmy Alley, in 1971, I think. Then there was Patricia Rodriguez, who was one of the original Mujeres Muralistas, and Ray Patlán, who was a muralist here too. They both lived on the alley, and they got together with a bunch of us to form a collective called PLACA, in 1984. There's a lot of history here on Balmy. Xochi has a new mural further down the alley, near where that very first one was. 

I first did an earlier mural about the genocide in Guatemala, in 1985. And then I did this first one of Romero in 1996, because the Guatamala mural had gotten pretty badly tagged by then.  The calligraphy in the old mural of Romero feels like landscapes because hey're done in the style of traditional Salvadoran landscape painting, or in the style of Solentiname in Nicaragua, the painters' colony established by the great poet Ernesto Cardenal. In the new mural, Miguel will work out a five-language translation.

Muralist G Molina helps prepare a wall for Juana Alicia. 

How would you describe yourself — a cultural worker, a muralist? And why are you doing this?

JA: I'm doing it because I love it, and I love my neighborhood. I love my community, and I love the work — the human rights work. Monsignor Romero's message is more pertinent than ever, given the current imperial administration we have in the United States — not that this country hasn't always been an empire, because it has. But it's very important to keep hope alive, to keep insisting on our rights, human rights, and to hold up the work of human rights workers all over the world, whether they're artists, or priests, or farmworkers. Whoever is doing the work.

It sounds like your role as an artist is also kind of a historian's role. 

TA: This project was born out of a historical interest, not wanting to lose the legacy of the painters who came before us. Ray Patlán, Patricia Rodríguez, who was a member of Las Mujeres Muralistas; Chuy Campusano — are gone. Their work has disappeared with them.  At the start of this project, we were walking down this alley, looking at the murals, lamenting their condition, saying to our friends, we should do something about this, we're going to lose these murals. 

We don't want to lose our art, our legacy in this neighborhood,. We've been here so many years, doing this work of painting the walls for so long. We want to keep it for future generations. Of course some murals will disappear, but new ones will come. Young artists are coming up — Lucia, the Twin Walls Mural Company, Trust Your Struggle — all these young people painting new murals, which is fantastic. The older generation is here to support them. So when a mural is gone, beyond restoring, it's wonderful that someone new can come and paint a new one in its place.

Chris Gazaleh paints a mural about Palestine at Lucky Street Alley. 

You're an example of a certain kind of cultural worker, a certain kind of artist. People look at you as combining art and politics in a particular way. 

JA: Well, I think artists need to work from their conscience. To paraphrase Alice Walker — we need to leave the world more beautiful. But we have to activate ourselves in times of repression. We have to illuminate and lift up the voices of resistance to the daily waves of despair, the daily ugliness we're fed in the news. We need to give people alternate images.

I don't know about being a cultural worker or political artist, I'm not trying to go for a label, and I'm not a pamphleteer. I don't want my work to be so didactic that it becomes a pamphlet. My work connects to our human nature, and the nature all around us. It responds to things beyond the headlines. It responds to our spirit, and to the unity we're all bound in.

A muralist works on restoring her mural, one of the first murals in Balmy Alley.

Even more than that — maybe this is true of muralism in general, but your work in particular looks out, rather than looking in.

JA: I think it looks in, too. It needs to be introspective, but yes, it looks out as well. Not looking inward created some of the mistakes our movements made in the '70s and '80s — rolling over our interior lives, prioritizing a materialist interpretation of Marxism, of socialism, without really considering the role of the heart and the spirit as part of our movements. That alienated a lot of people — a lot of people of color, a lot of women — because it didn't take into account the depth of our oppression, or our interior lives, or how we needed to respond in our personal lives — so that we could transform the world in a more sensitive way. The personal is political, right? 

TA: I was a cartoonist for a newspaper in Mexico. Sometimes you see things going on that you're not happy with, and you want to say something about it. The only way I had to do that was through a cartoon. And of course whatever you do is going to be read as political by somebody, because your work reflects who you are.

I see myself as an artist, and I think everything anybody does is, in a sense, political. What we do isn't decoration — it's not just about making the walls look nice. We make political comments with the work. We say things with it. When you look at a mural, you see a reflection of what's going on. So in a way, we're political artists. We're political workers.

Muralist Susan Cervantes in Balmy Alley. 

You've been working together for a long time now.

TA: We first collaborated many years ago. I was working at Mission Gráfica, one of the graphic-arts collectives, and Juana Alicia came to our shop wanting us to print some screen prints for her. That's when we started collaborating. We weren't partners then — we were both married to other people — but we were good friends, and we kept collaborating over the years. Later, when we became a couple, we started doing more work together as a team. We painted a mural in Mérida, Yucatán, and she taught a class there. We've done a lot of work together.

As individual artists, we each do our own work, and we show it to each other, ask for feedback. When I look at her work, I see my own work in it, because we do everything in collaboration. We bounce ideas off each other, which gives us a different perspective. A lot of people do that. You talk through your ideas with other people, and they look at your work and offer critiques. That's helpful for any artist. In our case, we do it more intentionally — we critique each other's work, constructively.

Muralist Irene Perez works on restoring her mural, one of the first murals in Balmy Alley.

Was San Francisco kind of the seed that planted a movement?

JA: You talk about muralism being a certain political tradition, and we have that. That's the legacy I step into: Los Tres Grandes in Mexico, and the muralists of the Black Power movement. But a lot of murals being done now have no narrative meaning at all — they're mostly decorative. There's this whole “pretty girls” school of mural-making. You can paint beautiful people of all colors, but if there's no message beyond “we're beautiful,” and we already know that, it doesn't push the debate or the public conversation forward.

I expect murals to stimulate people to action — to organize, to think, to debate, to argue. I want them to be provocative. It's a new era, for sure, and the city's become so gentrified. The population, the demographics, have changed a lot. We want to make sure the people who are still here are not invisible.

Tirso G. Araiza explains to photographer Najib Joe Hakim the process for restoring a mural in Balmy Alley.

[NOTE - Juana Alicia and Tirso Araiza have been working for ten years on a graphic novel called La Xtabay, which they've just finished. It's trilingual — Yucatec Maya, Spanish, and English. Tirso wrote the original Spanish version, and Juana Alicia illustrated it. US Glass just installed the fused-glass window Juana Alicia created for the San Francisco Public Library's Mission Branch, which opens November 14th, if the rumors are to be believed.]