The Mexican Revolution was clearly one of the main sources of inspiration for the Muralist Movement; in fact, Los Tres Grandes expressed many of the revolution’s ideals in their murals. For example, one of the panels of The Epic of American Civilization (Hispano-America) depicts a revolutionary soldier. This piece portrays the chaos and destruction that characterized this time in Mexican history, through the inclusion of a destroyed city, several corrupt business men and military figures hoarding bags of money, and of course the revolutionary. I think that “los Tres Grandes” painted these types of murals as a way of expressing and promoting a new national identity. The revolution focused on a celebration of native Mexican traditions and the native Mexican population. There was a new found appreciation for Mexico’s pre-colonial history and basically every truly Mexican element (the Indian, Mexican symbols, traditions, etc). This was a departure from the reverence to the European way of life that existed during the Porfiriato. This new national identity can be found in many of the murals that these artists painted, which placed an emphasis on the “Indian past and the Indian in general as being the true representative of this new identity” (Rochfort 99).

There are some parallels between Azuela’s novel and the artistic representations of los Tres Grandes. The novel for example has a very “Mexican” description of a lot of the characters. These soldiers are described as the idealized revolutionaries, with the big sombreros, the bullets around their chest, the sandals, and even the darker color of their skins. One of the characters is even called the Indio, reflecting this idea of celebrating the native Mexican population. Initially, these characters are also presented as the soldiers of the people, not the capitalist and the corrupt that have taken everything for themselves.