One of my favorite blogs these days coincidentally happens to come out of Echo Park (when its author isn't posting from UC San Diego). Ruben Ortiz Torres' "Rants about art and culture across borders in a post colonial era" is witty and smart and usually in English. He lives with his family in Elysian Heights but teaches at Davis.

Ortiz's bio explains that the artist was born in Mexico City and educated "within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism. Then:

...After enduring Mexico City's earthquake and pollution he moved to LA with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, and proposition 187.

A May 2007 post, Belfast Barrio, points out similarities between LA barrio murals and political murals of Ireland. (His most recent post notes the departure of the British soldiers from Belfast.)

The murals of Belfast achieve the same as the murals and graffiti of the barrios of Los Angeles, they delineate territory. The themes and styles are surprisingly similar: in the barrio they romanticize the Aztec past and in the communities of Belfast the Celtic past (the unionist murals depict the heroes and battles of the eighteenth century using a rococo style). In East L.A. they paint homages to their homies who were victims of enemy gangs and in West Belfast murals are painted in memory of the voluntary members of the Irish Republican Army (or the masked paramilitary unionists in East Belfast).

Irish murals have some characteristics of their own. British soldiers turn themselves into abstract expressionist painters by throwing paintbombs (balloons filled with paint) on the Republican murals to censor the parts they consider problematic.

Not lost in translation: a black-and-white photo essay titled "Mexipunx."