world cultures & travelThe Public Domain Review1890s–1913 · Mexico
José Guadalupe Posada's skeleton satires became the image of Mexico's Day of the Dead
Calaveras are illustrated skeletons, and the word means 'skulls' in Spanish. In late 19th and early 20th century Mexico, the printer Antonio Vanegas Arroyo sold cheap broadsides to working-class readers, and the illustrator José Guadalupe Posada filled them with satirical skeletons. The skeletons mocked bourgeois manners, corrupt officials, cholera and the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, usually through verse epitaphs. Death was used as a leveller: everyone ends up a skeleton, whatever their rank. After Posada's death in 1913, his images were championed in the 1920s by the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who called him the printmaker to the Mexican people. Their skeletons later became closely tied to the Day of the Dead holiday.
Calaveras are verse epitaphs written as if the subject were already dead, paired with a skeleton illustration. Printed cheaply as broadsides and sold in the streets, they reached readers who could not afford books. Mocking the living through death let satirists criticise the powerful with less risk, because the joke was that everyone is equal in the end.
Posada's calaveras are one of the main visual sources of Mexico's modern Day of the Dead imagery, which many people now associate with the holiday worldwide. The prints show that the tradition began as popular, sharp-edged political satire rather than solemn decoration. They also show how a penniless printer's work could become a national symbol after his death.
Satirical skeleton imagery has a long European history, from medieval danse macabre paintings to the memento mori tradition, which reminded viewers that death comes to all ranks. Posada adapted that idea to 19th-century Mexican politics and daily life. The same pattern appears in later Mexican printmaking and mural art, where skeletons carry social commentary.
Posada's etching of a fashionably dressed skeleton was later given the name La Catrina by the muralist Diego Rivera, and that figure is now one of Mexico's best-known images of death.
Image: The Public Domain Review
