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La Catrina Is Younger Than the Grave Custom

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-20

The skeleton in the wide hat looks older than the twentieth century. She started as a penny broadside mocking social climbers. She got the name Catrina in 1930. Mexico City's famous Day of the Dead parade began in 2016 because a James Bond film had already invented one.

By C. V. Wooster

The grave visit is old enough to argue about. The lady in the hat is not. La Catrina, the grinning skeleton in an oversized fashionable hat, is the picture Day of the Dead advertising now treats as ancestral. The paper trail is a print shop, a book in 1930, a mural in 1947, and a parade that did not exist until a movie needed a crowd. Stanley Brandes, in a 1998 essay in Ethnohistory, argued that Mexico's skull imagery itself comes from two later artistic developments, colonial religious needs and nineteenth-century politics and journalism, rather than from one ancient tradition. La Catrina is the most famous piece of that second development, and her dates are still disputed by a year.

A penny skeleton, and two dates

PBS, republishing Mathew Sandoval's essay, says José Guadalupe Posada made satirical calaveras, skull and skeleton cartoons, for Day of the Dead, printed on cheap broadsides. He died in 1913. When he engraved the figure in 1912, Sandoval writes, she was not called La Catrina. She was Calavera Garbancera, a jab at Indigenous market women who sold chickpeas and who powdered their faces and wore French fashions to pass as upper class. The broadsheet sold for a penny. Posada died broke and little known. The name Calavera Catrina, Sandoval writes, first appeared in 1930, in a book of his engravings edited by Frances Toor with Diego Rivera. "Catrina" made her a female dandy. In 1947 Rivera put her at the center of the mural "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park," holding hands with Posada on one side and a boyhood Rivera on the other.

Agustín Sánchez González, writing in El Universal, tells the print history differently, and the difference matters. He says the image was first stamped at the press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo in the summer of 1913, a posthumous printing. Posada died on 20 January 1913 without seeing it circulate. In mid-October 1913, ten months after the death, it ran on a cheap sheet titled "Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras," with a subtitle about powdered garbanceras who will end as deformed skulls. Sánchez González's conclusion is blunt: Posada never made a calavera named La Catrina, and he did not call this one Garbancera. The printer chose the verses and the titles. The drawing had no name until the 1930 monograph, Las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, introduced by Rivera and edited by Toor, Paul O'Higgins, and Blas Vanegas Arroyo, where page 160 labels it Calavera Catrina. The mural, he agrees, is 1947, in the Hotel del Prado, and Rivera's full-length figure does not closely match Posada's bust.

Both accounts agree on the things a careful sentence can carry. Posada died in January 1913. The famous name is a 1930 editorial choice, not his caption. Rivera made her the center of a 1947 mural. The engraving date is the fight: 1912 in the PBS essay, 1913 and after his death in El Universal. "Around 1912 or 1913" is the honest range. Calling her an ancient goddess is not in either source.

The parade that started because of a film

Mexico City's first Day of the Dead parade was held in 2016. The BBC reported it on 29 October that year: floats, giant marionettes, dancers. Tourism officials said the inspiration was the opening of the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, shot in the city, in which Bond chases a man through a skeleton parade that the film staged. The BBC's caption is the historical point: "Parades have never been part of traditional Day of the Dead celebrations." Lourdes Berho of the Mexico Tourism Board told the BBC the film had created "expectations that we would have something." The Guardian, the next day, quoted tourism secretary Enrique de la Madrid saying the city had celebrated the days "in a more serious way," and that what the government decided to do was a festival. The paper also printed the objection. Esteban Illades, editor of Nexos, called it a stunt. Shawn Haley, a Canadian scholar of the festival living in Oaxaca, told the Guardian he had been seeing urban processions since about 2000, and that the private family rite in smaller villages was a different event.

The Guardian also says, in its own voice, that Day of the Dead dates back to the Aztec period. That sentence is the popular continuity claim. Brandes's 1998 abstract says he challenges the stereotype of the death-obsessed Mexican by tracing the mortuary imagery to colonial religious and demographic pressures, and to nineteenth-century politics and journalism. The existing essay on the grave visit keeps that argument open. A 2016 parade invented to meet a movie's expectation does not settle it. It shows how fast a new public form can be called traditional.

The grave is the older object

What families do at a tomb in the first days of November is not a costume contest. In Yucatán the season has its own name and its own dish, and in Pomuch the visit includes cleaning the bones of relatives: Hanal Pixán. In two Guatemalan towns the offering is a kite the size of a building, made for All Saints and dated by UNESCO to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, not to the Aztec calendar: the giant kites. La Catrina can stand in a parade beside those practices. She cannot be used as evidence for how old they are. Posada was mocking a fashion. Toor and Rivera gave the mockery a name. A tourism board gave the name a parade route. The marigold on a family stone was there before any of them, and it does not need the hat.

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