Manuel Centurion studied art in Mexico City at the Academia de San Carlos before participating in the Mexican Revolution (1910–ca. 1920). Following the Revolution, he worked at the Aztec Studio in San Francisco with Francisco Cornejo, who “urged American artists to study the aboriginal art of America and Central America as the true source of ancient sculpture and painting.”

The post-Revolution Mexican government adopted Aztec warriors as visual symbols of pre-colonial heritage and also of a nation centered in Mexico City, the ancient Aztec capital. Centurion’s "Death of the Aztec Warrior," simultaneously sinking beneath the earth and also rising from it, symbolizes both the defeat of the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, and the resurrection of Mexico following independence from Spain in 1821. One hundred years later, this sculpture was gifted by the “local Mexican art colony” to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum to commemorate Mexico’s centennial.