Guadalupe Rivera Marín was born in a house inhabited by giants.
Her father was the huge Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and her mother, the writer and model Lupe Marín, a cheeky, talented and hypnotic woman.
She "was not prepared" for the birth of her first daughter, Rivera Marín recounted in the book
Un río, dos Riveras
, “either through ignorance or through selfishness”.
He carried her on her lap “when no one was home”: “The advantage was that from such a tender age I related to color and space;
the disadvantages were the falls I suffered when the painter forgot his order”.
Rivera Marín could have followed a path that seemed already marked out for her, but she followed her own and entered the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Mexico with a story of her own.
Lawyer, legislator and professor, Rivera Marín passed away this Sunday at the age of 98.
Social networks have been filled this Monday with messages of condolence 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 cultural promoter".
The former governor of Morelos Graco Ramírez, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, lamented in a tweet the death of a "creative and talented" woman.
Diplomat Luz Elena Baños described her as a "defender of the full rights of women and a social fighter committed to a better country."
The Secretary of Education, Esteban Moctezuma, recalled that her "dear friend" was "the last living person portrayed on the murals" of the Ministry of Public Education.
A little Rivera Marín appears portrayed in
Union of the peasant, the worker and the soldier
, one of the murals painted by her father between 1922 and 1928 in that building.
In
Un río, dos Riveras
, the book in which the lawyer reviews the biography of her father and testifies to her relationship with him, she recalls an anecdote that occurred when she entered elementary school.
In 1936, her new teachers asked the girl the name and profession of her father.
She replied that Diego Rivera and that a painter, and added: "Painter, but not of walls but of paintings."
The teachers burst out laughing and the girl began to cry, embarrassed.
“I didn't know that everyone knew who Diego Rivera was,” she wrote in the book, published in 1989.
In a 1927 photograph, Guadalupe Rivera Marín with her father. Frida Kahlo Museum Collection
Rivera Marín was born in 1924 in Mexico City in a house with “Mexican popular style” furniture among books on art, archeology, and history.
At six months, he only weighed five pounds and the doctor had told his mother that he would die.
But the writer Alejandro Sux was passing by his house and offered to help.
The narrator asked for rice soaked in boiled water and cotton to moisturize the girl's lips for hours.
"With her recipes and advice I came back to life," 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.
She also attended communist meetings, where she learned to say that when she grew up she wanted to “kill bourgeois cigarillos” and where she learned to sing the Italian socialist hymn
Bandiera rossa
.
From her mother, she inherited a taste for cooking.
“Those corn tamales stuffed with cheese and poblano chili slices that were delicious,” she wrote.
She herself is 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 formidable foreigners who came from the United States and Europe," the journalist Elena Poniatowska, who wrote a novel inspired by Lupe Marín, told EL PAÍS by phone. ,
twice unique
(Seix Barral, 2015).
"Diego Rivera and Lupe Marín knew how to give their two daughters a career, to work and fend for themselves," continues Poniatowska, who points out that the lives of both were "exciting."
Guadalupe studied Law and her sister Ruth, Architecture (Ruth became the first woman to enter the Higher School of Engineering and Architecture of the National Polytechnic Institute and died in 1969).
"Lupe was able to live off the laurels of her parents, especially the fame of her father, and she wanted to make her own life out of it," adds the journalist.
Rivera Marín studied Public Administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and later did a doctorate in Law.
She practiced law for decades and was also a professor at the UNAM Law School.
The lawyer Leticia Bonifaz, who was her student, remembered her this Monday on Twitter as a "demanding and committed teacher."
She was also a representative, senator and delegate in Mexico City and a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Between 1989 and 1998, she directed the National Institute for Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico and in 2000 she created the Diego Rivera Foundation to preserve the muralist's work.
Although Rivera Marín remembered "hours and hours" with her father, she had also described the "abandonment" she felt after her parents separated, when she was five years old.
"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, fear," he wrote in
Un río, two Riveras.
The book, she herself said, “is interrupted abruptly” at that moment due to the distance: “When we separated I was another, another was my father, another was life.
Ours were, from then on, two parallel lives.
Each one on the opposite bank of the same river;
each one on his own shore.”
Why then did he dedicate part of his life to preserving his father's artistic legacy?
Leticia Vallín, Rivera Marín's collaborator for more than 20 years at the Diego Rivera Foundation, explains it this way: “She made her way, even in politics.
She commented that many times there were hot encounters and very firm positions.
However, it was always clear that Diego Rivera's work was good work for everyone, for history and for Mexico."
Vallín assures EL PAÍS that Rivera Marín wanted "muralism to reach prisons, children, indigenous communities, and women."
“And it was done,” she 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 round and respectful woman” who was “totally authentic” and “rebellious”: “She was capable of achieving every goal.
Goals that had nothing to do with the profile or the education that she received from her father and her mother, who were already very particular and special figures.
“Being the daughter of Diego Rivera I suppose that it is not easy at all.
He has a place in history and in space, and she had to authentically do her story at the time."
Vallín hopes that after her death she will be given "an important place" as a woman "whom she worked in education, culture and art."
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