Michael Montenegro stands next to the most famous piece of street art in his hometown. It's a mural at Ortega Park that depicts Mexican-American farm workers tending crops as the sun rises on the horizon. Each figure's hat represents a different color of the Mexican flag — white, green and red. Towering over them is what at first looks like an eagle spreading its wings.
Moving on to the downtown core, where Mission revival buildings evoke a whitewashed Andalusian village, Montenegro stops at a mural so cherished it's housed behind glass next to the city's art museum entrance. Painted by the Mexican social realism muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1932 when he was in exile in Los Angeles and later donated to the museum, it shows two Indigenous women and a child seated not far from a corrupt Mexican corrupt politician, with the American financier J.P.