Every November, Death goes out for a stroll across Mexico. She shows up in the newspapers, in classrooms, in the family group chat. She’s looking for the teacher, the neighbor, the politician everyone’s talking about, the cousin who’s always late, and she dedicates a few verses to each one before carrying them off. Nobody’s scared: everybody laughs. These are calaveras literarias, “literary skulls,” often called by the affectionate diminutive calaveritas.
A calavera literaria is a short, teasing poem, usually in four-line stanzas of eight syllables, in which Death comes for someone who’s alive and pokes fun at their habits. They’re written for the Day of the Dead. As a genre, its origin is usually placed in the newspapers and popular print shops of nineteenth-century Mexico. Below: its history, examples in Spanish and English, and how to write one in four steps.
What is a calavera literaria?
A poem with three rules of play:
- Death comes for someone. La Calaca, la Flaca (“Skinny”), la Pelona (“Baldy”): she has many names. She comes to take a real person who’s still alive.
- She teases that person. About what they love, what they always do, what everyone knows about them. That’s the joke: in the face of death we’re all equal, so everyone gets laughed at a little.
- It rhymes. Usually in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with eight syllables per line.
The historian Grecia Monroy Sánchez, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), sums it up: calaveras can be written by “anyone who wants to make fun of their friends, relatives or some public figure of the moment,” and today they’re kept alive largely by schools, contests and the press.
When did the first one appear?
It depends on whom you ask, and it’s worth telling carefully.
What gets repeated on many websites: that the first calavera was published in the newspaper El Socialista, in Guadalajara, in 1849. Other pages say 1879. None shows the issue, and it doesn’t appear in the academic sources we reviewed. It may be true; for now it’s a claim copied from page to page without anyone producing the newspaper.
What’s documented:
| When | What | Who documents it |
|---|---|---|
| Eighteenth century | Joaquín de Bolaños publishes La portentosa vida de la Muerte (“The Portentous Life of Death”), a book in which Death is a character. Traits of the calaveras already appear | Monroy Sánchez, citing Gutiérrez and López Casillas |
| 1835 and 1836 | Two prints with engravings of skeletons acting like people, around All Saints’ Day. The historian Montserrat Galí sees them as forerunners; Monroy Sánchez notes they’re in prose and not yet calaveras as such | Galí 2013; Monroy Sánchez 2025 |
| 1847 | An illustrated newspaper called El Calavera (“The Skull”) comes out in Mexico City | Stanley Brandes, anthropologist at the University of California |
| From the 1870s | Writing calaveras against politicians is already common practice in the satirical press | Rafael Barajas Durán, cited by Monroy Sánchez |
| 1880–1917 | Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop in Mexico City publishes calaveras on cheap single sheets, with engravings. This is where the genre settles | Monroy Sánchez, as a working hypothesis |
| Today | Written in schools, in contests and in newspapers | Monroy Sánchez |
So the honest answer is that calaveras took shape over the nineteenth century, among mocking newspapers, broadsheets and the theater of the day: performances of Don Juan Tenorio, with its cemetery scenes, may also have played a part. And their roots go much further back: to the medieval danse macabre, where Death dances with kings and peasants alike.
What did José Guadalupe Posada have to do with it?
A lot, even though he didn’t write the verses.
Posada was an engraver. He worked for Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop making the images: skeletons dancing, riding bicycles, dressed to the nines. The calavera sheets carried one large engraving with the verses around it. Some engravings were made for the occasion and others were reused from earlier sheets.
And the verses? Other people at the print shop wrote them, and they almost never signed them. Monroy Sánchez examined sixteen of those sheets: most give the year, and none says who wrote them. They ran from 15 to 50 stanzas, in quatrains, and the lines were always eight syllables.
Posada’s most famous skull, the one we now call La Catrina, appeared on one of those sheets in 1913. That story, with her name and her trip around the world, has its own article.
Calavera examples for kids, in Spanish
Three written by our team, to show how they work. All in eight-syllable quatrains, with a plain English gloss so you can follow the joke.
For the teacher
La Muerte llegó a la escuela
buscando a doña Inés,
pero ella puso tarea:
y ahora cuenta hasta diez.
Death came to the school / looking for Mrs. Inés, / but she assigned homework: / and now Death is counting to ten.
For the brother who’s always hungry
A mi hermano comelón
la Calaca fue a buscar;
comiendo un gran chicharrón,
y se quedó a merendar.
For my greedy little brother / Death came calling; / she found him eating a big pork rind, / and stayed for a snack.
For whoever writes it (fill in the blanks):
A ________, que siempre ________,
la Flaca vino a llevar,
pero ________ ________
y se tuvo que ________.
Skinny Death came to take ______, who always ______, / but ______ / and she had to ______.
Notice the trick in the first two: Death arrives in all her seriousness and ends up caught in the person’s habit. That twist is the joke.
Can you write one in English?
Yes, and plenty of classrooms do. English doesn’t count syllables the way Spanish does, so aim for lines of about seven or eight syllables and rhyme the second line with the fourth. Keep the three rules: Death comes for someone real, the joke is about their habit, and it ends with a twist.
For the teacher, in English
Skinny Death came to our school
to take our teacher, Ms. Lee;
she gave Death a spelling test,
and Death’s still stuck on letter C.
For the brother, in English
Death came knocking for my brother,
who eats from dawn to night;
he offered her a taco,
and now they share each bite.
In a dual-language or Spanish class, a good challenge is to write the same calavera twice, once in each language, and compare which jokes survive the trip.
How do you write a calavera step by step?
1. Pick who it’s for. Someone you know well: your grandpa, your teacher, your dog, yourself. A calavera is written with affection; the joke is for laughing together.
2. List their habits. What they love to eat, what they always say, what they do when they’re mad, what they play. That list is your rhyme mine.
3. Imagine the encounter. Death comes for that person and… something happens: she gets distracted, stays to play, has to wait in line, ends up doing the homework. The funny ending comes from your list in step 2.
4. Rhyme and count. Write four lines. In Spanish, the first rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth (or the first with the fourth and the second with the third). To count syllables, clap each one: la-Muer-te-lle-gó-a-la es-cue-la. Two Spanish tricks:
- When one word ends in a vowel and the next begins with one, they count as a single syllable: lle-gó a sounds like lle-góa.
- If a line ends in a word stressed on the last syllable, like Inés or diez, add one syllable to the count.
The first version is almost never perfect: read it aloud, change a word, and try again.
How can you use them in the classroom?
A 50-minute session, from third grade up, or from Spanish II in a world-language class:
- Read two calaveras aloud and guess who they’re teasing (10 min).
- Clap out the syllables as a whole class, using the example lines (10 min).
- Write in pairs, with the fill-in quatrain: each pair picks a character from a book the class has read, so nobody in the room is the target (20 min).
- A calavera gallery on the wall or on the class ofrenda (10 min).
The book-character trick works well: it keeps all the fun and keeps anyone from feeling singled out. If your class is building an ofrenda, Halloween vs. Day of the Dead has ideas for keeping it about real memories. And to decorate the poems, sugar skulls are the natural companion.
Questions
Isn’t it in bad taste to make fun of death? It’s a tradition more than a century old, and its point is the reverse: to remember, with humor, that death makes us all equal. What does matter is making sure the joke doesn’t hurt anyone.
Do they have to be eight syllables? It’s the most common form, and the one that sounds like a calavera. Some calaveras use other line lengths; to start, eight-syllable lines are the easiest to rhyme. In English, aim for the rhythm rather than the count.
Can you write them about people who have died? The tradition dedicates them to the living: the fun is that Death comes for someone who’s still here. The ofrenda is for remembering those who are gone.
Sources
- Grecia Monroy Sánchez, “Muerte, política y sátira en la imprenta popular mexicana: las calaveras del porfiriato a la revolución,” Caracol (Universidade de São Paulo), no. 29, 2025, pp. 442–476. doi:10.11606/issn.2317-9651.i29p442-476 (open access, in Spanish). The references in this article are on pp. 448–452.
- Stanley Brandes, “Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2, 1998, pp. 181–218. Open access on eScholarship. El Calavera (1847), p. 202.
- Cited by Monroy Sánchez: Rafael Barajas Durán, Posada, mito y mitote (FCE, 2009); Montserrat Galí Boadella, “De romances, relaciones y otras hojas volantes…,” in Posada. 100 años de calavera (Fundación BBVA / RM, 2013); Herón Pérez Martínez, “La sátira popular mexicana. Las calaveras” (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2015).
Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.
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