The Río Lerma embankment project gave Diego Rivera, as he acknowledges in this article, the chance to combine painting with sculpture by making both coexist under water, an environment that would endow his forms and figures with movement. This combination of sculpture and painting was created in the lake in the Chapultepec woods, where Rivera substituted water for air as his medium of communication. This article describes the themes in Rivera’s project that was created with mosaics and featured the different races, the origins of each, and how they interbred until they formed the Aryan superman. Rivera refers to the ideas of Count Gobineau, Goebbels, and Hitler.  

Espacios magazine pays tribute to Diego Rivera by publishing his essay on the painting-sculptures he created in the Río Lerma basin. Rivera cleverly inserts the subject of his mural into the discussion on the integration of the visual arts that—in 1952—was being disputed by abstract and realist painters. The different formal vocabularies favored by each side formed the basis of their disagreement.