Returning to Mexico City under the patronage of Education Minister José Vasconcelos, Rivera discarded his European bohemia to reinvent himself as an indigenous cultural revolutionary. In 1922, he married Guadalupe "Lupe" Marín, a towering, sharp-tongued native of Jalisco who modeled for his early National Preparatory School murals. Marín was not merely a passive muse; she was an outspoken intellectual who understood Rivera's ego better than anyone.
Their marriage produced two daughters who would become the public keepers of the Rivera legacy:
- Guadalupe Rivera Marín (1924, 2023): Known within the family as "Pico," she earned a doctorate in law, served as an active federal deputy and senator in the Mexican Congress, and authored definitive memoirs on her father's home life and culinary tastes. She spent her final decades presiding over the Diego Rivera Foundation.
- Ruth Rivera Marín (1927, 1969): Breaking structural barriers in Mexican academia, Ruth became the first woman to graduate with an architecture degree from the prestigious Escuela Superior de Ingeniería y Arquitectura (ESIA) at the National Polytechnic Institute.
Marín and Rivera divorced in 1928, exhausted by mutual infidelities and Rivera’s relentless work habits. Yet Lupe Marín remained an inescapable force in Rivera's orbit, even cooking meals for him during his subsequent marriages and maintaining an uneasy, razor-sharp camaraderie with his next wife, Frida Kahlo.
