The photographs, taken in November 2012, depict graffiti art and political wall paintings concentrated in and around the area of Balmy Alley in the Inner Mission District, located between 24th Street and Garfield, where, since 1973, most buildings have been decorated with murals.

As noted in Wikipedia, in 1984, Ray Patlan spearheaded the PLACA project to install murals throughout the alley to celebrate indigenous Central American cultures and protest US intervention in Central America. Topics of the murals included the Nicaraguan revolution, Óscar Romero, and the Guatemalan civil war.

Mission District mural art, traditionally presented as communal and anonymous, is typically unsigned, but early contributors prominently include individual artists like Maria Galivez, Patricia Rodriquez, Graciela Carillo, and Irene Perez. The 1984 painting, "Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance" (p. 15) by Miranda Bergman and O’Brien Thiele, was considered important enough to have been restored in recent times. In 1991, Susan Kelk Cervantes and Mia Gonzalez painted the five-panel mural, "Five Sacred Colors of Corn,” a series of meditations on the relationship of the people of Mexico and North America with the cycles of nature. The fifth “Sacred Color” appears on page 7, and the fragment of another on page 33. The 1995 mural "Tributo a Mujeres Muralistas and Future Generations" by Precita Eyes Muralists is on the front cover and on page 54. A large portion of the 2000 painting “Leyenda Azteka” by Leia Mash and Jaime Wynn, with the Youth Mural Workshop, appears on page 47. A fragment of noted artist Marta Gayala’s 2001 “Memorias Primas” is visible next to an image of Michael Jackson on page 35.