Diego Rivera was living the life of a “Chicano” for 10 years, painting and living within the dominant French/European culture. This painting Zapatista Landscape is proof of his desire to work within the context and confines of French/European art and at the same time affirm and express his Mexicanism. His return to Mexico is not only his rebirth as a pure Mexican, it is the rebirth of his artwork as Mexican. He no longer needed to apologize for being born in Mexico. He went to Europe and worked within the new artistic styles he found there, exploring the new territory with friends and enemies, ultimately discovering that what he was searching for was an art form that would be less personal and more monumental and that ultimately the early European modernism had nothing to offer his ambition but a stepping stone to the discarding of the kind of academic training he had studied at the Academy of San Carlos. So I feel that the time Diego Rivera spent in Europe (1911-1921) is the time a young artist spends searching for the answers that will lead him to a more mature style of making art. As I have pointed out this time he spends in Europe is much like the time we Chicanos have historicly spent here in the United States, the difference is that most of us will never go back to Mexico and Diego did. If Diego Rivera had stayed in Europe would his artwork be considered Mexican? No, course not, so our Chicano art is not Mexican either, but what is it exactly? So I say the Painting Zapatista Landscape is a masterpiece of Chicano Art, and it is ultimately very important to me that Diego Rivera not be elevated to the highest level of Western Art History as an important developer of Cubism and early European modernism, because to do this would negate his achievements of the Mexican artwork after 1921 and serve to Europeanize one of the greatest Mexican Chicano artist of this century.