Title: The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace – Smarthistory
Headings: The History of Mexico
: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace

The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace
How is history told?
A new national identity
Why murals?
The North Wall
The West Wall
The South Wall
An alternative history
Notes:
Additional resources:

Content: Sarahh Scher, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mexican flag
An eagle standing on a nopal cactus at the very center of the wall, mirrors the insignia at the center of the Mexican flag. These historical scenes have been compressed and flattened on the picture surface resulting in a dense visual mosaic of intertwining figures and forms. The lack of deep space in the composition makes it difficult to distinguish between different scenes, and results in an allover composition without a central focus or a clear visual pathway. This cacophony of historical figures and flurried action overwhelms viewers as they walk up the stairs. Annotated upper section of the west wall: Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: drkgk)
Given the breadth of the wall space, Rivera had to make critical decisions about which historical figures and narratives to include. Rivera’s formal choices—the flattening of the pictorial space, the nonlinear organization, and the monumental scale of the figures—create a non-hierarchical composition. These formal choices support Rivera’s decision to represent not just the historically well-known and recognizable figures, such as the independence fighter Miguel Hidalgo, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (who holds a flag with the words tierra y libertad, or land and liberty), or the first Indigenous president Benito Juárez, but also anonymous workers, laborers, and soldiers. As Rivera later noted,
“Each personage in the mural was dialectically connected with his neighbors, in accordance with his role in history.