Balmy Alley

The Mission District may be ethnically mixed, but the Inner Mission (roughly the area from Potrero on the east to Dolores Street on the west, and Chavez Street on the south to 20th or 21st Street on the north) is dominated by Latino culture.

Balmy Alley is a part of that. It had been the site of murals since 1972 when two women who called themselves Mujeres Muralistas (the women muralists), painted their first team mural. A few murals were added sporadically thereafter until 1984, when Ray Patlan brought some three dozen mural activists together and proposed a joint project in which each garage door or fence segment facing the alley would display a mural. They would be linked by dual theme: celebration of indigenous Central American cultures, and protest of U.S. intervention in Central America.