Guadalupe Rivera Marín was born in a house inhabited by giants. His father was the giant Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his mother, the writer and model Lupe Marín, was a sassy, talented and hypnotic woman. In the book Un río, dos Riveras, Rivera Marín said, “She was not prepared for the birth of her first daughter, either out of ignorance or selfishness.” He wore it on his lap “when no one was home”: “The upside was that I had an attachment to color and space from an early age; The disadvantages were the falls I suffered when the painter forgot his commission.” Rivera Marín could have gone down a path that seemed already mapped out to her, but she followed her own and entered the intellectual, cultural and political with her own story life in mexico. Lawyer, lawmaker and professor Rivera Marín passed away this Sunday at the age of 98.
This Monday, social networks were filled with condolences for the Rivera Marín family, who has two children and several grandchildren. The director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Lucina Jiménez, lamented the death of a woman “ahead of her time”. The senator from Morena Ifigenia Martínez has said goodbye to a “tireless promoter of culture”. Former Morelos governor Graco Ramírez, of the Democratic Revolution Party, lamented the death of a “creative and talented” woman in a tweet. Diplomat Luz Elena Baños described her as “a defender of women’s full rights and a social fighter who works for a better country”. Education Minister Esteban Moctezuma recalled that his “dear friend” was “the last living person depicted on the murals” of the Ministry of Public Education.
A small Rivera Marín appears in Union of Peasants, Workers and Soldiers, one of the murals her father painted in this building between 1922 and 1928. In Un río, dos Riveras, the book in which the lawyer reviews her father’s biography and testifies to her relationship with him, she recalls an anecdote that happened when she entered primary school. In 1936, her new teachers asked the girl her father’s name and occupation. She replied that Diego Rivera and that was a painter, adding “a painter, but not of walls, but of paintings.” The teachers burst out laughing and the girl started crying in embarrassment. “I didn’t know that everyone knew who Diego Rivera was,” he wrote in the 1989 book.
In a 1927 photograph, Guadalupe Rivera Marín with her father Frida Kahlo Museum Collection
Rivera Marín was born in Mexico City in 1924 in a house furnished with “Mexican folk style” between books on art, archeology and history. At six months she weighed only 2.5 kilos and the doctor had told her mother that she was dying. But the writer Alejandro Sux stopped by his house and offered his help. The narrator asked for rice and cotton soaked in boiling water to moisten the girl’s lips for hours. “I came alive with his recipes and advice,” said Rivera Marín.
From her father, who called her Pico, she remembered the snacks at the El Oriental cafe next to Santo Domingo Square in the historic center of the capital. Also the communist meetings, where he learned to say that as an adult he wanted to “kill bourgeois cigarillos” and where he learned to sing the Italian socialist anthem Bandiera rossa. He inherited his passion for cooking from his mother. “These corn tamales stuffed with cheese and poblano pepper slices were delicious,” he wrote. She herself will be remembered as “a great cook”. As an adult, she wrote three recipe books and founded a gastronomic festival in honor of her mother’s recipes.
While they all lived in the same house, she and her sister Ruth “had the opportunity to deal with impressive foreigners from the United States and Europe,” journalist Elena Poniatowska, who wrote a novel inspired by Lupe Marín, told EL PAÍS over the phone . , Twice Unique (Seix Barral, 2015). “Diego Rivera and Lupe Marín knew how to give their two daughters a career, work and support themselves,” continues Poniatowska, who emphasizes that their lives have been “exciting.” Guadalupe studied law and her sister Ruth studied architecture (Ruth was the first woman to enter the National Polytechnic Institute’s Higher School of Engineering and Architecture and died in 1969). “Lupe was able to live off her parents’ laurels, especially her father’s fame, and she wanted to live her own life,” adds the journalist.
Rivera Marín studied public administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and later received his doctorate in law. She practiced law for decades and was also a professor at UNAM Law School. Lawyer Leticia Bonifaz, who was her student, recalled her on Twitter this Monday as a “demanding and dedicated teacher”. She was also an MP, Senator and delegate in Mexico City and a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Between 1989 and 1998 he directed the National Institute for Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico and in 2000 established the Diego Rivera Foundation to preserve the muralist’s work.
Although Rivera Marín recalled “hours and hours” with her father, she had also described the “abandonment” she felt after her parents separated when she was five. “We lived as a family until 1929 when Diego married Frida Kahlo and Lupe married Jorge Cuesta (…) The memories of my childhood were sparks in the dark background of abandonment, fear, anxiety,” he wrote in Un río, two Riveras. The book, she said herself, was “abruptly interrupted” at that moment because of the distance: “When we separated, I was someone else, my father was someone else, life was someone else. From then on we were two parallel lives. Each on opposite banks of the same river; each on his shore.”
Why, then, did he devote part of his life to preserving his father’s artistic legacy? Leticia Vallín, who has worked for Rivera Marín at the Diego Rivera Foundation for more than 20 years, explains it this way: “She has asserted herself, including in politics. He noted that there were often hot encounters and very tight positions. However, it was always clear that Diego Rivera’s work was a good job for everyone, for history and for Mexico.” Vallín assures EL PAÍS that Rivera Marín wanted “the mural to reach prisons, children, indigenous communities and women “And it has been achieved,” he says.After his death this Sunday, his two sons will continue his work from the foundation.
Vallín remembers her as “a reserved woman”, an “excellent mother and grandmother”, a “great cook” and “extremely funny”. He defines her as “a well-rounded and respectful woman” who is “totally authentic” and “rebellious”: “She was able to achieve any goal. Goals that had nothing to do with the profile or the education he received from his father and mother, who were already very special and special personalities.” “As Diego Rivera’s daughter, I think it’s not easy at all . He has a place in history and in space, and she had to tell her story authentically at the time.” Vallín hopes that after her death she will be given “an important place” as a woman “who was active in education, culture and the arts”.
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