Rivera

Ribera is the bank or the shore of a river: not a building, not a father's given name, but a piece of terrain, and on the dry tablelands of the Iberian interior it was the piece that decided whether a household ate. Land beside the water could be irrigated and cropped as the ground above it never could, so a river ran through the country as a green line, carrying the orchards, the plots and the best pasture, and doubling as the boundary between one man's ground and the next. A family that worked that line needed no further description: they were the de la Ribera, the people of the riverbank.

The older spelling keeps the b, Ribera; Rivera is the form that carried, and the two are one name. The long form outlived its own explanation: the boy born in Guanajuato in 1886 and named Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez still had of the riverbank sitting in the middle of his name. Spanish naming practice travelled with Spanish rule into Hispanic America and the Philippines, and in Puerto Rico Rivera became one of the commonest surnames on the island.

Fernando Javier Rivera y Moncada was born near Compostela in New Spain around 1725, ninth of the eleven children of Don Cristóbal de Rivera, a locally prominent office holder, and his second wife Josefa Ramón de Moncada. He entered military service in 1742 at Loreto in Baja California, a peninsula then settled almost entirely by Jesuit missions, and in 1751 was raised over older and higher ranking soldiers to command the presidio, riding reconnaissance into unexplored country in the north with the missionary explorers Ferdinand Konščak and Wenceslaus Linck.

The Jesuits were expelled in 1767, Franciscans took the missions, and civil authority arrived with them, putting José de Gálvez, Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra on the peninsula alongside him. Carlos III, worried about Russian and British encroachment on Spain's Pacific claims, ordered an expedition north. Rivera, at odds with the missionaries already, was made second in command and charged with provisioning it, and in 1769 he led the first overland party into San Diego, ahead of Portolá, with the diarist Juan Crespí and the engineer José Cañizares. Going north again to find Monterey Bay, they failed to recognise it and came instead upon San Francisco Bay.

Serra and the Franciscans had quarrelled with Pedro Fages, and in 1774 Rivera replaced him as governor of The Californias. He then quarrelled with Serra in turn: Serra wanted as many new missions as possible, while Rivera, with only about sixty soldiers to police four hundred and fifty miles of country, wanted reinforcements first. Three went up under him even so, at Santa Clara, at San Juan Capistrano, and at the northern end of the peninsula that is now San Francisco.

Scouting ahead of Juan Bautista de Anza's expedition of 1774, he rode north from Monterey with the missionary Francisco Palóu, and that party was the first of the Europeans to stand on the shores of the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the channel later called the Golden Gate; Portolá's men had found the bay but had their view of the narrows blocked by hills. Palóu named a valley south of the modern city the Cañada de San Andrés, and the name passed to the fault beneath it.

His last assignment was to recruit settlers for the new pueblo of Los Ángeles and bring them overland from northern Mexico. They reached southern California safely; Rivera and many of his soldiers were killed on the lower Colorado River during the Quechan revolt of July 1781. Outside historians of California he is barely remembered, which sits oddly beside the explorations he led and the settlers and livestock he brought north.

José Fructuoso Rivera y Toscana, born on 17 October 1784, was a rancher who joined the army of José Gervasio Artigas in 1810 and rose to general. When the Banda Oriental was occupied and Artigas driven into exile in 1820 he stayed on in the new province of Cisplatina, serving the Brazilian imperial army for a time. He met Juan Antonio Lavalleja in 1825 at the encounter remembered as the Abrazo del Monzón, joined the fight against the Empire of Brazil that year, and fought at Rincón and at Sarandí in the Cisplatine War.

Independence was proclaimed in 1828 under the Treaty of Montevideo, and Rivera held the presidency from 6 November 1830 to 24 October 1834 and again from 1 March 1839 to 1 March 1843. His supporters wore red armbands and Manuel Oribe's wore white, and out of that the Colorados and the Blancos took their names; the Colorado Party he founded governed Uruguay without interruption from 1865 to 1958.

Belle Camblos was born in Philadelphia on 15 March 1848, of French and Scottish ancestry, and graduated from the Emma Willard Seminary at Troy in 1865. She married John de Rivera in New York on 7 February 1877, so the Rivera on fifty years of clubroom letterheads came to her by marriage rather than by descent.

Between 1890 and 1915 she founded or cofounded twenty-six women's organisations. She was the mover behind the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs, the first local federation in the city, served as its first president for two terms of two years, and was made Founder and honorary president for life. She led the New York Equal Suffrage League for seven years, represented New York at the 1904 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, inspected mercantile establishments for the city Department of Health in 1896, and helped establish a working girls' hotel on West 22nd Street.

Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato on 8 December 1886 to a well-to-do couple, María del Pilar Barrientos and Diego Rivera Acosta. He was drawing at three, and when his parents caught him working on the walls of the house they fixed chalkboards and canvas to them rather than stop him. From the age of ten he studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, and Teodoro A. Dehesa Méndez, governor of Veracruz, sponsored him to continue in Europe.

He arrived in 1907, studied in Madrid under Eduardo Chicharro, then moved on to the cheap flats of Montparnasse, where his circle at La Ruche took in Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1914, along with Chaïm Soutine and Max Jacob. He worked in Cubism from 1913 to 1917, then turned, after Cézanne, to simple forms and large patches of vivid colour. His mother's family was said to be of converso descent, Spanish ancestors forced to convert from Judaism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and he wrote in 1935 that his Jewishness was the dominant element in his life.

Urged by Alberto J. Pani, Mexico's ambassador to France, Rivera left Paris in 1920, and came home in 1921 to the government mural programme planned by José Vasconcelos, working in the same scheme as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo. Creation went up in the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in January 1922, painted with a pistol to hand against right wing students, and the Secretariat of Public Education frescoes, begun that September and finished in 1928, were meant to run to a hundred and twenty-four panels.

The Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1931, and in 1932 and 1933 he painted the twenty-seven panels of Detroit Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts, part of the cost met by Edsel Ford. Man at the Crossroads, commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. for Rockefeller Center in 1933, carried a portrait of Lenin; told to take it out, Rivera refused, and the work was destroyed on the decision of the management company. He announced that he would repaint it wherever anyone asked until the money ran out, and did repaint it in 1934 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes as Man, Controller of the Universe.

In June 1940 he went back to San Francisco for the ten panels of Pan American Unity, painted in front of the crowds at the Golden Gate International Exposition and held now by City College of San Francisco. The Mexican government has declared his work monumentos históricos.