I recall the notion that he was friends with Pablo Picasso, but I got the impression that he did nothing in Europe but wait for the chance to return to Mexico. I could understand why he had left Mexico during the years of the Revolution (1910-1920) because that is when my own family left Mexico for the unwelcoming but safe shores of Colton, California. My parents raised the children of my family to understand that we were part of a wonderful creative race of people from Mexico who had many histories and stories to tell, but I was also raised to understand that in 1912 my grandfather and grandmother left Mexico to find a safer way of life away from the fighting of the Mexican Revolution. I was raised to understand that I was Mexicano not Chicano. I was taught that Chicanos were political malcontents and that they were just trouble makers who wanted everything handed to them, we were Mexicano and it was our lot in life to take the short end of the stick and learn to enjoy it. You may well ask yourself how is considering myself a Chicano or Mexicano important to this article on Diego Rivera, but believe me self-description is very important to the artmaking of the Chicano Community. How you describe yourself explains where you place yourself in the larger context of the American Landscape and how you see your value in that landscape. Americans have traditionally turned towards Europe for the answers to what is valid and important for the culture. Chicanos have a hard time deciding where they will turn for their cultural validations.

Diego Rivera as a student in Europe, c.1908-1915

Diego Rivera in his autobiography My Life My Art describes his own feelings of inferiority and how this feeling of inferiority kept him from understanding his life and responding to it in his painting in ways that were more Mexican and less European.