At 81, Mexican muralist Diego Rosales, whose works are on exhibit in South Miami, remembers with matter-of-fact clarity the day a fortuitous encounter changed his life forever.

It occurred in 1944, when Rosales, a 17-year-old adventurer who had taught himself to draw, was wandering San Francisco looking for work.

A crowd on Market Street caught his attention. When Rosales asked what was going on, he was told that the famous muralist Diego Rivera was speaking to the group of people gathered around him. Four years earlier, Rivera had completed his famous Pan American Unity mural in the city, and Rosales believes Rivera was in town to promote his work. Rosales waited patiently until he found an opportunity to approach the iconic artist whose murals interpreted the social and political history of Mexico in splendid color, filling the halls of the capital's National Palace with vivid images of indigenous Aztecs and conquering Spaniards.

The two Diegos chatted about having come from the same neighborhood of Mexico City, Coyoacán. Rivera gave Rosales a card with his address and invited the young man to visit.

''I showed him some of my drawings, and he sent me to school. He was very generous with his helpers,'' says Rosales, who went on to become one of Rivera's assistants from 1947 to 1952 and is one of a handful of surviving front-line witnesses to the period known as the Mexican Mural Renaissance.

In Miami recently to inaugurate Diego Rosales Works at Instituto Cultural de Mexico en Miami (Mexican Cultural Center in Miami), Rosales cheerfully shared stories of his time with Rivera. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., to deliver a talk at the InterAmerican Development Bank.

''We thought it would be interesting to hear his stories about an important time in Mexican mural history,'' says Félix Angel, director of the IDB's Cultural Center. ``Diego Rosales is a humble man who, thanks to life's coincidences, had a front seat to the work of a great muralist.''

Mural painting in Mexico dates back thousands of years to when the Aztecs and Mayans depicted scenes of battles and celebrations, human sacrifices and rites of passage in their temples and palatial dwellings. Then in the 1920s, at the end of the Mexican Revolution, Diego Rivera and two other artists, José Clemente Orozco and David Siquieros -- they were known as ''Los tres grandes'' (The Three Big Ones) -- began a period of mural-making that had a significant impact in the United States and internationally.

Rosales says he assisted in the preparation of paints and surfaces on such significant works as Disembarkment of the Spanish at Veracruz, the 1951 fresco in Mexico City's Palacio Nacional, and Water, Origin of Life in the capital city's Parque Chapultepec.

''In this massive and elaborate mural, Diego Rivera chose to incorporate the figure of Diego Rosales as a laborer carrying a shovel,'' says Bernardo Junco, director of an online effort to showcase Rosales' work at www.diegorosalesmuseum.com and to exhibit some of Rosales' collection of pre-Columbian art.

Rosales says he also assisted Rivera on Pesadilla de guerra y sueño de paz (Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace), a mural on canvas painted in 1952 which depicted Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung offering a dove of peace. The Mexican official who commissioned the work refused to exhibit it because of its pro-communist content, and the mural has been lost for more than half a century.

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