The north wall transports viewers to the Valley of Mexico before Europeans arrived. At its center sits the sun, the axis of the Aztec cosmos, with a pyramid and an Aztec leader positioned below. Rivera filled the surrounding space with the everyday texture of pre-Columbian life: artisans weaving and shaping pottery, mothers carrying infants, scribes painting on scrolls. Religious ceremonies unfold across the composition - dances to the sun god Tonatiuh, the ritual worship of serpents and jaguars. The volcanoes that ring the Valley of Mexico rise in the background, and corn and other crops anchor the foreground. Rivera painted this wall not as a lost paradise but as a functioning civilization, complex and self-sustaining, that existed on its own terms before contact changed everything.

The west wall is the mural's heart, and it reads Mexico's history as one long fight against oppression. At the bottom, Aztec warriors battle Hernan Cortes and his army. In the middle registers, Spanish soldiers destroy sacred books and religious images during the Inquisition while, nearby, a conquistador rapes a Native woman - Rivera did not flinch from depicting the violence of colonization. Adjacent scenes show Indigenous people forced to build walls, forge weapons, and construct the very palace whose stairwell Rivera was painting. A great eagle clutching a serpent commands the center, the symbol shared by Aztec culture and modern Mexico. The upper corners show the French intervention and the execution of Emperor Maximilian, while at the top, the revolutionary armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa march beneath a red banner proclaiming Tierra y Libertad - Land and Liberty.

Rivera saved the south wall for prophecy. Here, Mexico's future unfolds as a socialist vision: factories hum, workers organize, and the Soviet flag waves alongside images of Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Rivera painted his wife Frida Kahlo and her sister Cristina as teachers bringing enlightenment to schoolchildren, casting education as the revolution's true weapon. The wall is unambiguous in its politics. Rivera and much of the post-revolutionary government were socialists, and the mural makes no pretense of ideological balance. Art historian Leonard Folgarait observed that Rivera consistently depicted the rich and foreigners who controlled Mexico as forces of evil, while peasants, Indigenous people, farmers, and workers embodied good and freedom. The south wall is not a prediction; it is a demand.

Rivera did not paint alone. Between 1923 and 1939, the Mexican government commissioned murals from the three artists who would define the movement: Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The program was deliberately populist - painting on public walls meant art that anyone could see, not just those who could afford gallery admission. The History of Mexico is the most ambitious product of this era, and its location matters as much as its content. The National Palace is the seat of executive power, and Rivera painted his radical vision of Mexican history on the government's own staircase. Every official who climbed those stairs, every dignitary who visited, had to walk through Rivera's argument that Mexico's story is a story of the people against their rulers. The mural remains where he painted it, still making that argument daily.