The Mission is the oldest neighbourhood in San Francisco and, depending on who you ask, still its most alive. It takes its name from Mission Dolores, the adobe chapel built by Spanish Franciscans in 1776 that still stands on Dolores Street — the oldest intact building in the city. Everything that has happened here since flows from that founding moment: the waves of immigrants who arrived and remade the neighbourhood in their own image, the political movements that erupted from its streets, the artists who covered its walls.
For most of the 20th century the Mission was Latino San Francisco. By the 1960s it had become the heart of Chicano and Central American culture in the Bay Area — taquerias, panaderías, community murals, radical newspapers, and the kind of dense street life that Jane Jacobs would have recognised. The murals are not decoration. They started in the 1970s as protest art and grew into something unprecedented: more than 700 murals now cover the neighbourhood's alleys, building facades, and garage doors, making it the largest outdoor mural gallery in the United States.
The dot-com boom of the late 1990s began a transformation that is still unfinished. Tech money pushed rents up and longtime Latino families out — the neighbourhood's Latino population dropped from over 50 per cent in 1990 to under 35 per cent by 2020. The tension between the Mission's cultural legacy and the forces remaking it is visible everywhere: in the mural that went up last year over the one that was there for thirty years, in the juice bar next to the carnecería, in the anti-eviction posters still stapled to the telephone poles.
What survives is extraordinary. Balmy Alley is still one of the most concentrated outdoor art spaces on earth. The Women's Building still wears MaestraPeace, the five-storey feminist mural painted in 1994. Galería de la Raza, founded in 1970, is still running exhibitions on 24th Street. Calle 24, the fourteen-block Latino cultural district, still holds Carnaval and Día de los Muertos. The Mission has been changed but it has not been emptied.
It is also the warmest part of the city, sheltered from the fog by Twin Peaks, which makes it the default destination when the rest of San Francisco is socked in. The 24th Street BART station is the heart of the neighbourhood; Valencia Street, one block west, has become the trendiest corridor of restaurants, bars, bookshops, and boutiques.