When San Diego muralist Daniel Angeles got a call telling him that the first mural he’d ever painted in Barrio Logan was being erased, the 30-year-old artist was gutted. All he could do was watch his creation be painted over in real-time, as its once rich and vibrant colors turned into a dark brown colored hue.

“I was at a music performance for my oldest daughter when this youngster FaceTimed me,” recalls Angeles, who goes by the artist name Dentlok. A member of the Aztlán Youth Brigade community advocacy group was calling him from near the Barrio’s iconic Chicano Park, where his mural, “Birth of the Hummingbird,” was being painted over.

“A couple of guys were going over the art with rollers and dark paint. I contacted the owner, who granted me permission to paint his wall, and he told me that he had sold the property.”

Angeles’ art is the latest, but likely far from the last, piece of public art to be snapped away from the neighborhood. As more public murals disappear without notice, muralists and advocates in Barrio Logan are now pushing the City of San Diego to develop a citywide artist database and stronger legal protections to help prevent further erasure.

Barrio Logan has long been considered the beating heart of the city’s creative art scene and progressive political struggle. The neighborhood located southeast of downtown San Diego is often considered the soul of the city’s Chicano and Mexican American community, leading the charge in the struggle against racial profiling, aggressive policing, pollution from both the U.S. Navy and nearby portside industries, gentrification, and displacement of both residents and their culture. Much of the Barrio’s Chicano identity, along with its revolutionary spirit and history, is etched into these iconic murals that have made Chicano Park a community anchor.

“In communities like Barrio Logan and all of southeast San Diego, murals play an important role in maintaining the identity of the neighborhood,” Angeles says. “They capture the history and the culture that our ancestors left behind for us. It’s our roots in this city, and it’s what represents us in the community.”

Chicano Park holds a hard-fought National Historic Landmark designation from the U.S. Department of the Interior, but other murals outside of the park do not carry the same protections. Public murals that sit on private property can be subject to removal if they are damaged or if ownership of the property changes hands.

Last April, weeks before Angeles’s mural was painted over, one of the original founding Chicano Park muralists discovered that his mural had been painted over. Mario Torero facilitated the creation of the mural “La Vida es un Sueño” (Life is a Dream) in 2010 while a resident ‘artivist’ at Centro Cultural de la Raza. Torero worked on the mural as part of the “No Borders Show” in a cross-border collaboration with a group of artists from Mexicali.

But the mural had fallen into disrepair over the years, falling victim to taggers and suffering damage from exposure to both the sun and other elements. “We were in shock to see this historical mural painted over, but we weren’t entirely surprised because we were aware that the mural had been repeatedly tagged with graffiti,” Torero says. He learned of the erasure when Lucas Cruz, former chairman of the Chicano Park Steering Committee and co-owner of a local community space, texted him a picture of the painted-out wall.

Torero had been contacted by representatives of the building’s owner in 2023 about doing some type of renovation to the wall to protect it, he says, but those talks had stalled prior to the mural being removed. Torero also says that the property management firm that runs the building where the mural once stood said that the city of San Diego warned the owner to remove the graffiti or face fines. (Next City could not find any graffiti Get It Done reports or code violations related to the property in the last year on the City of San Diego’s website.)

Under the California Art Preservation Act and the federal Visual Artist Rights Act of 1990, artists and their works are afforded limited rights to preserve their work in its original condition. Damaging or modifying works without the artist’s consent, such as painting over it, defacing it, or covering up parts of the mural, can be deemed unlawful.

The Visual Artist Rights Act does not prevent murals from being removed, but it does require a property owner to notify the artist ahead of time so that they can take action to remove, document, or relocate their mural. Typically, the mural’s creator receives a 90-day notice.

But local artists say that San Diego lacks robust local regulations and the will to enforce them to ensure mural preservation, especially as compared to Los Angeles and other California cities that have enacted strong ordinances to enforce state and federal protection laws.

Blueprints for protection

Enacted in 2013, Los Angeles’s Mural Ordinance lifted an 11-year-long moratorium on murals and large outdoor artworks on private property, largely stemming from legal conflicts regarding large-scale commercial advertising. The ordinance established a registration process for new and existing murals, aiming to balance artistic expression with community concerns.

Artists have complained of a convoluted mural application process, and mural erasure remains an issue in L.A. neighborhoods undergoing gentrification. But more than a decade after its implementation, artists have mostly reaped the benefits of added protections along with more avenues to showcase their art in the city.

In San Diego, advocates hope to adopt a similar ordinance to replicate L.A.’s success. The mural ordinance in Los Angeles was created through the collaborative efforts of the city council and cultural affairs department, with significant input from various community stakeholders.

The process in San Diego would likely be the same, says Sarah Mondragon, the founder of the Barrio Artists Partnership. The local nonprofit advocacy group advocates on behalf of street artists and provides professional services, such as legal frameworks for the contracts and copyright laws that artists must understand when drafting agreements with potential clients.

“There was a need to educate the public on protections and legal rights for community artists,” Mondragon says. “Our goal is to concentrate resources for community artists so that they can carry out the work they want to do in the community without the constant threat of the destruction of their works.”

Mondragon says implementing a mural ordinance in San Diego would aid artists and others in understanding legal issues surrounding the creation of a mural; inform all parties involved in the permit process; protect existing murals; and enable the creation of new ones, ensuring that artists are knowledgeable and in compliance with the law.

The Barrio Artists Partnership has also reached out to San Diego City Council members and the San Diego County Arts and Culture Commission to develop a citywide artist database where artists can register their works. That way, property owners and landlords can reach out to artists and help prevent future losses, rather than simply painting over or destroying walls where murals exist, because property owners don’t know how to contact artists.

Mondragon says the Barrio Artists Partnership is open to creating a directory itself to share with the city and the local business owners. She also cited that some artists are wary of having to go through an approval process set by the city. “When governments are funding murals, artists will only be able to create things that are approved,” she says. “Sometimes there are broad licenses granted to artists, but often the truest expression sometimes gets edited out.”

Mandragon says that creating a citywide mural directory could also help protect historical community murals painted by artists who have passed away. An ordinance similar to those adopted by Los Angeles or Portland, Oregon, could ensure maintenance protection for historical murals so that they are not tagged with graffiti or fall into disrepair, she argues, as that could increase the chances that an older mural will be destroyed.

BAP also reached out to the City of San Diego seeking insight into city resources and best practices for mural designs that artists can consider when creating public art.

During a meeting with Christine E. Jones, Chief of Civic Art Strategies for the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Jones affirmed the importance of building strong community support, securing clear and mutually beneficial agreements between building owners, property managers, artists, and those responsible for ongoing mural upkeep and graffiti mitigation.

In particular, BAP says, Jones shared research showing that murals featuring dense, detailed design elements — particularly those at street level — tend to be less frequently tagged. The Project for Public Spaces also notes that research suggests that painting multi-colored designs and murals on surfaces discourages graffiti, as it makes tagging more challenging.

Inspired by that research, Mondragon and her team have worked to ensure that all surfaces within arm’s reach are filled with rich, visually complex content in the hopes that it will reduce its vulnerability to defacement.

A canary in the coal mine

Although BAP was able to have a meaningful dialogue with the Commission for Arts and Culture, Mondragon says that they have yet to hear back from the office of Councilmember Vivian Moreno, who represents San Diego’s Eighth District, in which Barrio Logan is located. Moreno’s office also did not respond to requests for comment from Next City.

To many residents, the indifference to the Barrio’s needs is par for the course. For Lucas Cruz, who has long championed public art preservation and anti-displacement efforts in Barrio Logan, city officials’ blasé response shows how little interest the government has in investing in the Barrio.

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“The city does not care because they do not own it and they do not align with most of the arts messaging,” says Cruz. Last year, he says, state transportation agency Caltrans painted over an anti-police mural without notice at Chicano Park. “They did it because they did not like the messaging and were willing to spend resources to remove it, but we receive no support in mural preservation from the city or state generally,” Cruz argues.

For many residents, the destruction of public art and murals serves as a canary in the coal mine, signaling the advancement of gentrification and the continued displacement of working-class communities in Barrio Logan and other neighborhoods across San Diego.

“Removing murals that tell the history of a neighborhood is a form of sanitization and bleaching out the colorful heritage of a community,” Mondragon says. “We have observed the gradual creep of gentrification in surrounding neighborhoods such as Golden Hill, and families are being priced out of their family homes. Art is often one of the first things to go in this process, and it’s easier to push people out when their stories have been erased.”

A 2023 analysis ranked San Diego as the most expensive city in the U.S., based on metrics including living costs, inflation rates, the price of gas, housing costs, median gross rent, and high fees associated with homeownership. In recent years, Barrio Logan has increasingly become a focal point of gentrification in San Diego. Several years ago, residents were shocked when a tiny Barrio Logan property described as a ‘shack’ was listed on the market for half a million dollars.

“The erasure of the murals shows the issues of people coming in and changing the makeup of our neighborhood,” Cruz says. “Art is a double-edged sword. It leads to gentrification because it brings in the ‘hip’ crowd, but it can also serve as a reminder to those coming into the neighborhood that there is preexisting struggle here.”

This post was originally published on Next City.