Every November, thousands of people in Mexico paint their faces as skulls, put on a feathered hat and go out into the street dressed as La Catrina. The elegant lady made of bones is on altars, in bakeries, in movies and in clay figures of every size, and in recent years on posters and in parades from Los Angeles to Toronto. She seems to have always been there. And yet she started out as something else: a lone skull in an outrageous hat, on a sheet of cheap paper a little over a hundred years ago.
La Catrina was born as a print by José Guadalupe Posada published in 1913 under the name Calavera garbancera. It was just a skull in a hat, with no body, and it mocked people who flaunted an elegance they didn’t have. The name Catrina appears in 1930, in a book about Posada with an introduction by Diego Rivera. And in 1947 Diego Rivera gave her a body, a dress and a feather boa in a mural, and put her at the center of Mexico’s history.
Who created La Catrina?
José Guadalupe Posada, an engraver from Aguascalientes, born in 1852. He worked for several publishers, above all for Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s print shop in Mexico City, which sold cheap single sheets with news, songs, miracles and, every November, calaveras: teasing verses paired with engravings.
Posada supplied the image. Other people at the print shop wrote the verses, almost always unsigned.
The first recorded appearance of his skull in a hat is in 1913, on a sheet titled Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras, now held by the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City. By then Posada had already died, early that year, never knowing how far his drawing would travel. The print shop kept using the same plate for years, with other verses: in 1924 it came out again in El panteón de las pelonas.
When did he engrave it? Nobody knows exactly. Some propose 1910; the certain date is still its first publication, 1913.
What does “garbancera” mean?
There are two readings, and both are worth knowing.
The most widespread: the skull mocked people who pretended to a social position they didn’t have. In the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, anything European was seen as elegant, and some people were ashamed of their Indigenous roots and wore ostrich-plume hats to pass for another class. Posada drew her that way: in a huge, luxurious hat, even though she was nothing but bones. It’s the reading found, for example, in Esmeralda Álvarez Contreras’s study (2026).
Another reading: at the time, garbancera also meant a woman who sold chickpeas (garbanzos), and some researchers read the verses on that sheet as a jab aimed at them in particular.
Both agree on what matters: the Garbancera was born as satire, a joke about appearances. And the punchline is the same as in every calavera: however much you dress up, underneath we’re all the same.
Did the original Catrina have a body?
No. This is the fact that surprises people most: Posada’s Calavera garbancera is only a head. A grinning skull under a wide-brimmed hat heaped with flowers and plumes. No dress, no arms, no boa. No painted face either: it was a black-and-white print, in a single ink.
Everything else came later, from other hands.
Who named her “Catrina”?
The name appears in 1930, in a book collecting hundreds of Posada’s prints: the Monografía de 406 grabados de José Guadalupe Posada, edited by Frances Toor, Blas Vanegas Arroyo and Paul O’Higgins, with an introduction by Diego Rivera. On page 160, the print is titled “Calavera Catrina.”
In Mexico, catrín and catrina described people who were very well dressed, elegant and a bit of a show-off: a dandy, a fancy lady. The name fit perfectly, and from then on the Garbancera was La Catrina.
You’ll sometimes read that Posada named her. No document shows it: in Posada’s lifetime, the print wasn’t called that.
What did Diego Rivera do with her?
He gave her a body and made her famous. In 1947 Rivera painted an enormous mural in the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City: Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central. Figures from the whole of Mexican history parade through it: the colonial period, Independence, the Reform, the Revolution.
And at the center, La Catrina. For the first time full-length, in a long dress and Posada’s hat, with a feather boa shaped like a plumed serpent, like the god Quetzalcóatl. On one arm is José Guadalupe Posada himself, very dapper, and holding her hand is a boy: Diego Rivera, painting himself as a child.
With that, Rivera paid two tributes at once: to the skull and to the man who engraved it. The mural can be seen today at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, beside the Alameda park in Mexico City.
See the full mural on the Museo Mural Diego Rivera website (opens in a new tab). Rivera’s work is still under copyright, so we describe it here and you can see it whole there.
That’s where the myth that Diego Rivera created La Catrina comes from. What he did was give her a body, a dress and a place of honor. The skull was already Posada’s.
What’s told and what’s known
| The story goes that… | What’s known |
|---|---|
| Diego Rivera created La Catrina | José Guadalupe Posada engraved her. Rivera painted her full-length in 1947 |
| Posada named her Catrina | Posada knew her as a calavera, without that name. “Calavera Catrina” appears in 1930 |
| Posada wrote the Garbancera’s verses | Posada made the engravings; the verses were by other writers at the print shop, almost always anonymous |
| La Catrina was always a symbol of the Day of the Dead | She was born as a satire on appearances. She became a national symbol over the twentieth century |
| The original Catrina had a face painted with flowers and colors | The print was black and white. The colorful face came much later |
How did she become a symbol of Mexico?
Little by little, in four steps:
- 1920s and 1930s. Artists like Jean Charlot and Diego Rivera, and the editor Frances Toor, rediscover Posada and present him as a great artist of the people. His skulls start to be seen as something deeply Mexican.
- 1947. Rivera’s mural puts La Catrina at the center of Mexican history.
- From the 1980s. In Capula, Michoacán, a potters’ village, the artist Juan Torres Calderón champions clay Catrinas, now sold all over the country. In 2014 a giant Catrina went up at the entrance to the village.
- The movies. The Book of Life (2014), produced by Guillermo del Toro, and Pixar’s Coco (2017) take La Catrina and skull face paint around the world.
Some say Mexico City’s big Day of the Dead parade, first held in 2016, was inspired by the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, which opens with one that didn’t exist yet. The press and tourism officials have told it that way; we didn’t find a study documenting it, but it’s a good example of how traditions keep moving. How the skull traveled north and into Halloween is in how Halloween came to North America.
From a joke on a broadsheet to the symbol of a country: La Catrina took about a hundred years to make that trip.
What does La Catrina mean today?
Many things at once. For some people she’s the whole Day of the Dead in one figure. For others, a reminder that death comes for everyone, feathered hat or not, which was Posada’s joke. And for many families she’s above all a joyful way of welcoming those who are gone.
For home or the classroom: draw your own Catrina. Start the way Posada did, with the skull and the hat, and then decide the rest yourself: what flowers does she wear? What color is her dress? What’s her name? And if you want to write her some verses, like the ones on Vanegas Arroyo’s sheets, here’s how to write a calavera literaria.
Questions
Is La Catrina a man or a woman? A woman. Her partner, in many figures and costumes, is El Catrín.
Is La Catrina a Halloween costume? She belongs to the Day of the Dead. In recent years she shows up at Halloween parties too, especially outside Mexico, but she was born here, on the calavera sheets. If you dress as her, the respectful way is the one that knows her story: an elegant skull who reminds everyone that underneath we’re all equal. How the two holidays cross paths is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead, and her sweet cousins are the sugar skulls.
Where can you see the original print? Original impressions are held at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City, and Rivera’s mural is at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, beside the Alameda.
Sources
- Esmeralda Itzel Álvarez Contreras, “Traslado semántico en la imagen del grabado La calavera garbancera del litógrafo mexicano José Guadalupe Posada a principios del siglo XX,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación (Universidad de Palermo), no. 305, 2026, pp. 149–163. doi:10.18682/cdc.vi305.13641 (open access, in Spanish).
- Grecia Monroy Sánchez, “Muerte, política y sátira en la imprenta popular mexicana: las calaveras del porfiriato a la revolución,” Caracol, no. 29, 2025, pp. 442–476. doi:10.11606/issn.2317-9651.i29p442-476 (open access, in Spanish).
- 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.
- Ariadna Lorea Ruiz Gómez, “Esqueletos, catrinas y judas en el universo decorativo de Diego Rivera,” Res Mobilis 8, no. 9, 2019, pp. 175–196. doi:10.17811/rm.8.9.2019.175-196 (in Spanish).
- Frances Toor, Paul O’Higgins and Blas Vanegas Arroyo (eds.), Monografía: las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, grabador mexicano, Mexican Folkways, 1930 (reissued by Editorial RM, 2014).
- Museo Nacional de Arte, Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras, 1913.
- Museo Mural Diego Rivera, gallery sheet for the mural (in Spanish).
Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.
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