The revival of mural painting that has occurred in San Francisco since the 1970s, especially among the Chicano population of the city's Mission District, has marked differences from its social realist forerunner in Mexico and the United States some 40 years earlier. Rather than being government sponsored and limited to murals on government buildings, the contemporary mural movement sprang from the people themselves, with murals appearing on community buildings and throughout college campuses. Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is the process. In earlier twentieth-century Mexico, murals resulted from the vision of individual artists. But today's murals are characteristically the products of artists working with local residents on design and creation.

Such community engagement is characteristic of the Chicano art movement as a whole, which evolved from the same foundations as the Chicano civil rights movement of the mid-1960s. Both were a direct response to the needs of Chicanos in the United States, who were fighting for the right to adequate education, political empowerment, and decent working conditions. Artists joined other cultural workers in making political statements and played a key role in taking these statements to the public. They developed collectives and established cultural centers that functioned as the public-relations arm of the Chicano sociopolitical movement.