When two community murals vanished under fresh paint at the entrance to Martha's Kitchen in East San Jose this month, the fight that followed wasn't really about a gray wall — it was about the fact that no one, including the city, had the power to stop it.

The murals — one painted by artist Jimmy Fonseca with children as young as six, another by artist Carlos Rodriguez — sat on a building the nonprofit ConXión to Community sold to the hunger charity Martha's Kitchen last October. Their erasure has produced dueling accounts of a broken promise, an unpaid $6,500 removal clause, and a letter from an Indigenous-rights coalition to the mayor. But the sharper story is what the artists learned when they went looking for protection: San Jose has almost none to offer for public-facing art on private property, and the state law meant to fill that gap rarely does.

The two sides tell irreconcilable stories about a promise. Lori Ramos Chavez, who runs ConXión, says she discovered the fresh gray on Aug. 8, and that Martha's Kitchen's leadership had assured her during pre-sale walkthroughs the artwork would stay. Nobody wrote it down; it was, as she put it to San José Spotlight (external source, opens in a new tab), "a gentleman's agreement."

Bill Lee, who directs Martha's Kitchen, says no such promise was made. He points to a letter his charity sent in late October 2025 warning that the weathered, leaking exterior would be repainted and waterproofed — a maintenance call, he insists, not a cultural one. The organization is "in a business solving hunger," he told the outlet, and the entrance to its dining hall should reflect that. A replacement, he says — made by students at a nearby high school and centered on how food is grown, cooked and eaten — is on the way.

The two nonprofits are not adversaries so much as landlord and tenant. In the sale, a 32,000-square-foot building changed hands, but ConXión kept a decade-long lease on roughly a third of it and still runs programs there, the Spotlight reported. Missing from the paperwork was the one clause that could have decided things: any recorded contract covering the walls.

Nobody wrote it down; it was, as she put it to San José Spotlight, "a gentleman's agreement."

That gap is the story. Rodriguez did hold a written 2020 agreement with ConXión entitling him to $6,500 if his mural came down — and the organizations now spar over who must pay it. Lee says the document surfaced only after the repainting was announced. Rodriguez says he pitched options in advance — a payout, a new piece, or reworking fragments of the old one — and got silence before the wall went gray.

He appealed to City Hall as well. His November 2025 letter asked whether the mural could be recognized as historic. San Jose's Office of Cultural Affairs answered that private-property art lies outside the city's Public Art Program, with no way to register it, and warned that even a listing on the Historic Resources Inventory "does not provide protection from demolition on private property."

State law is weaker than many artists assume. The California Art Preservation Act (external source, opens in a new tab), Civil Code §987, grants a moral right against the destruction of one's work, but the notice protections generally depend on a recorded written contract and on whether a piece can be detached without being ruined — a threshold murals painted onto exterior walls almost never meet.

The removal drew organized pushback. La Raza Roundtable co-chairs Craig Pasqua, Rose Amador and Raul Colunga, writing Aug. 13 to Mayor Matt Mahan and the City Council, called the murals "cultural landmarks" and said erasing them "without community consultation was a callous and insensitive action." A sage plant tended by local Indigenous residents was pulled from the lot, too.

East San Jose has lived this before. In 2018, the 87-foot Mural de la Raza on Story Road was painted over overnight the week its building changed owners (external source, opens in a new tab). Seven years later, a different property and a different owner taught the same lesson: a beloved wall has no legal life beyond the goodwill of whoever holds the deed.