The short version: La Catrina started as “La Calavera Garbancera,” a zinc etching by printmaker José Guadalupe Posada around 1910: a skeleton in a fancy French hat, mocking Mexicans who denied their Indigenous roots and dressed European. Diego Rivera gave her a body, a name and a place of honor in his 1947 mural in the Alameda. Posada’s line, “death is democratic, in the end everyone ends up a calavera,” is the whole idea. The face paint you see every November is a century-old political cartoon.
La Catrina meaning is the question every November after someone paints half their face as a skull with roses on it and gets asked what it’s for. The answer is better than “it’s for Day of the Dead.” She’s a joke. A sharp one. And the people she was making fun of were, more or less, the people now wearing her.
The artist: José Guadalupe Posada
Posada was born in Aguascalientes in 1852 and worked most of his life in Mexico City as an engraver for cheap newspapers and broadsheets, the tabloids of the Porfirio Díaz era. He made thousands of images: crimes, disasters, saints, politicians, and above all calaveras, skeletons doing everyday things. Skeletons drinking, dancing, riding bicycles, giving speeches. The skeleton was his way of saying that under the uniform or the ballgown, everyone’s the same bones.
The calaveras ran alongside calaveras literarias, short satirical poems written as mock epitaphs for living people, still a tradition in Mexican schools every November. Posada died poor in 1913 and was buried in a common grave. Almost nobody outside the print trade knew his name.
The image: La Calavera Garbancera
Around 1910, the year the Revolution started, Posada etched a skeleton wearing an enormous plumed hat in the French fashion. No body, just the skull and the hat. He called her La Calavera Garbancera.
Garbancera was slang for a specific person: an Indigenous or mestizo Mexican who sold garbanzos (chickpeas) in the market but dressed and acted European, powdering their face, denying their roots, looking down on other Indigenous people. The hat is the punchline. All that Parisian feather and underneath it, the same skull as the woman selling tortillas next to you.
So the original Catrina was a class-and-race satire aimed at Mexicans ashamed of being Mexican. It was printed in 1913, after his death, on a broadsheet with a poem. It could have vanished like most of his work.
The rescue: Diego Rivera
Two things saved Posada. First, the French artist Jean Charlot “discovered” his prints in the 1920s and told the muralists. Second, Diego Rivera claimed Posada as his artistic father and put him in a mural.
In 1947 Rivera painted Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park), a 15-meter wall of Mexican history as a Sunday stroll. In the center: the Calavera Garbancera, now with a full body, a long elegant dress, a feather boa that’s actually a Quetzalcóatl serpent, holding the arm of Posada himself on one side and a child Diego on the other. Frida Kahlo stands behind them.
Rivera called her La Catrina, from catrín, a dandy, a well-dressed rich man. He turned Posada’s joke into the grand lady of Mexican death, and put her at the center of the nation’s story. That mural is where the full-length elegant Catrina comes from. Posada never drew her below the shoulders.
From mural to face paint
For most of the 20th century La Catrina was an art-history figure. She became the face of Día de los Muertos gradually: on papier-mâché figures sold in markets, in Oaxacan comparsas, on sugar skulls. The Catrina face paint you see now, half skull, flowers on the forehead, took off in the 2000s and went global with The Book of Life (2014), Spectre (2015), the Mexico City parade that film inspired in 2016, and Coco (2017). Catrina contests are now a fixture in Aguascalientes, Posada’s hometown, which holds a Festival de Calaveras every year.
She’s also become the thing that gets mixed up with Halloween. That’s its own article.
The line that explains her
Posada is usually credited with the sentence, whether or not he said it exactly:
La muerte es democrática, ya que a fin de cuentas, güera, morena, rica o pobre, toda la gente acaba siendo calavera. Death is democratic: in the end, blonde or brown, rich or poor, everyone ends up a skull.
That’s the whole philosophy of Día de los Muertos in one line, and it’s why La Catrina works as its face. She’s not scary. She’s the leveler. The hat is what’s funny.
Wearing her right
Paint the face if you want. Know that you’re wearing a political cartoon about people who were ashamed of where they came from, drawn by a man who died in a pauper’s grave and was made famous by a Communist muralist. Put her on an ofrenda alongside someone real. And if anyone asks what it means, tell them she was making fun of the rich. That usually lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does La Catrina represent?
That death is the great equalizer. Originally she satirized Mexicans who denied their Indigenous roots and imitated European fashion. Today she is the elegant face of Día de los Muertos.
Who created La Catrina?
Printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched the original skull with a plumed hat, “La Calavera Garbancera,” around 1910. Diego Rivera gave her a full body and the name “Catrina” in his 1947 Alameda mural.
Why is she called La Catrina?
From catrín, a Mexican word for a dandy or well-dressed elite. Rivera used it to name Posada’s satirical skeleton.
Is it OK to paint my face as La Catrina?
Yes, especially as part of Día de los Muertos. Know the meaning and keep it separate from Halloween costumes.
Where is the Diego Rivera Catrina mural?
Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central is in the Museo Mural Diego Rivera in Mexico City, next to the Alameda park.
Watch on Wehpa
Ofrenda meaning, Día de los Muertos vs Halloween, Frida Kahlo’s Tehuana style. Wehpa TV is free on Roku.
