As part of a 1970 community betterment initiative, the city of Los Angeles used federal tax dollars to commission ten artists to create murals throughout East Los Angeles. For his mural, Romero wanted to depict a California where the land meets the ocean, as if the former were falling into the latter, a precursor to today's grim realities. What appeared on a wall in a parking lot on Indiana Street was a stunning, colorful California landscape, where the only indication of something awry was an angel flying above. All that is known to exist of this Chicano mural is several sketches, of which this is an early survivor of what would become a mural renaissance in East Los Angeles.