Early this year, the Antonios began to notice that some stores and commercial buildings in the neighborhood weren’t being tagged, and they tended to be the ones with murals. After some investigating, they learned that if you hired the right muralist, the taggers would respect the work and not mess with the mural.
So they shelled out $3,000 to hire a team that included a guy known as Playboy Eddie and Israel “Ezra” Cervantes, who had previously done a mural on a little grocery store on York Boulevard. In no time at all, Los Paisanos market had a praying Virgin Mother on a front corner along with “Jesus Saves.”
Read the entire LA Times article here