Born September 2, 1892, Antonio M Ruiz was a painter from Texcoco. Although his father was a physician and his mother was a concert pianist, his grandfather was also a painter. His family moved to Mexico City and he attended the Academy of San Carlos, studying architecture and painting. Ruiz not only relied on education as his mainstay after his parents died early on, but he also taught at La Esmeralda later. He spent a couple of years in Hollywood working on set design in the mid 1940's
Ruiz artistry was focused on Mexican culture; detailed depictions of everyday life. Although he was of the Mexican muralism time period, he was not part of the movement, preferring small canvases instead. He was a slow worker with attention to detail and completed only 3 or 4 paintings per year. Ruiz experimented a bit with Surrealism and one of his best known paintings: The Dream of Malinche is an example of this...
The painting depicts the mythical figure La Malinche asleep on a bed with the Mexican landscape upon her blanket. La Malinche is the symbol of the indigenous people, an Indian woman said to fall in love with a Spanish conquistador and alter the pure Mexican bloodline. Her reputation varies between that of the embodiment of treahery and/or the symbolic mother of the "New Mexico" It has been mused that the meaning is "Mexican's past still slumbers beneath the trappings of the European present".
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