Mission District

This guide to the Mission District in San Francisco centers on Balmy Alley, the narrow lane behind its taquerias where thirty-six painters spent nine months in the early 1980s covering garage doors with murals protesting U.S. intervention in Central America. It follows muralists Ray Patlan, Patricia Rodriguez and Herbert Siguenza, the project's sole Salvadoran artist, and the households who gave up their doors for what they called Placa. Siguenza's own door splits in half, one side showing death squads, the other a country imagined at peace.