Catrina

Catrina, recurring figure in Mexican visual arts depicted as a lively skeleton wearing a large plumed hat associated with early 20th-century upper-class European women’s fashion. La Calavera Catrina (“The Dapper Skull” or “The Dapper Skeleton”)—the figure’s name in full—was created by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada in the early 20th century and became an icon in Mexico through her popularization by artists such as Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and a traveling art exhibition during World War II.

The figure that later became known as Catrina was one of the many animated calaveras (skulls or skeletons) Posada created while working as an illustrator (c. 1890–c. 1913) for the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo. The skeletons depict individuals from all classes and occupations, which scholars have interpreted as symbolic of a macabre egalitarianism, suggesting that regardless of status, death comes for all. The first known publication of Posada’s illustration of a smiling skeleton in a large hat was several months after his death. The figure was labeled a garbancera, or a female garbanzo bean seller, in a 1913 broadside, a single sheet of paper printed on one side that has historically been used to spread information, including news, government decisions, entertainment events, and commentary. The text accompanying the illustration mocked the garbanceras, who worked throughout Mexico City, as traitors who betrayed their class and heritage by dressing in European fashions and selling a Spanish import. Posada had no role in the text, and Arroyo frequently reused graphics, so the image gained other meanings as it was reprinted with different text. A broadside from the 1920s uses the skull to lambast cucarachas, literally cockroaches, but referring in context to women who traveled with army camps during the Mexican Revolution.

Posada’s illustrations were unsigned and were meant to be consumed and then discarded. Consequently the artist was unknown during his lifetime. His work experienced a revival after his illustrations were rediscovered by French American artist Jean Charlot, who introduced them to Rivera. In 1930 Rivera worked with writer Frances Toor to publish a collection of Posada’s prints. In that work the calavera in the elaborate European hat is dubbed “Catrina,” a feminization of the slang term catrin, approximating in English to “dandy.” The book’s interpretation of the skull thus represented the Mexican bourgeoisie and its rejection of the nation’s Indigenous roots. Catrina became a satirical political symbol associated with Indigenismo, the post-Revolutionary movement promoting a national identity connecting Mexicans to Indigenous rather than European cultural beginnings.

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Catrina remained a relatively minor figure, however, until a 1944 traveling exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. The government of Mexico used the graphic for the cover of the exhibition catalog and promotional materials. She was further popularized when Rivera portrayed her at the center of his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (1947; Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central Park). In Sueño Catrina is depicted as a full-length figure. She wears the elaborate hat and grins broadly as in Posada’s original print, but Rivera added a seemingly European white dress with lace cuffs and a plumed boa that recalls the ancient feathered serpent god Quetzalcóatl. She holds the arm of Posada, who is dressed in a suit and bowler hat with a cane, and the hand of Rivera, depicted as a child. His wife, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, stands behind him, one hand on his shoulder and the other holding a yin and yang object. The quartet is surrounded by hundreds of figures depicting 400 years of Mexican history and the nation’s complex legacy of European and Indigenous heritage. Rivera thus transformed Catrina into a central symbol of the duality of Mexican history, religion, and life and death itself.

Through Rivera’s interpretation Catrina has become a national symbol of modern Mexico. Her unmistakable visage and hat are reproduced in various forms at Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations on November 1 and 2. Altars to the deceased often feature figurines of Catrina, while individuals paint their faces and wear elaborate costumes to emulate the calavera. Her status in the festival, a combination of Aztec celebrations of death and the Roman Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, has thus continued her association with the dual heritage of Mexican identity.