Alebrije

The first alebrije came from a fever dream, and the date of the dream is told in different ways. In UNAM’s account Linares fell very ill in the 1930s; asleep with a high fever, he dreamed of mythical creatures, and when he woke he remembered the word “alebrije” and began to make them in papier-mâché. Mexico City’s government, in a statement honouring the Linares family, said he created alebrijes at the age of thirty, though the same statement dates their birth to the 1940s. His grandson David Linares, speaking at the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares in June 2025, put the illness in 1917, when Pedro was eleven: he dreamed of impossible creatures shouting “alebrije, alebrije!”, and thirteen years later, in 1930, made the first one of paper and paste, not to sell it but to free himself of the dream.

In the 1940s Diego Rivera became his first great promoter, the Ministry of Culture says, ordering pieces for the house and studio he shared with Frida Kahlo, the San Ángel Inn and the Anahuacalli. A documentary of 1975, Pedro Linares: artesano de cartón, made him known abroad, and in 1990, two years before his death, he received Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Sciences in the category of popular arts and traditions. In 2021 the word alebrije was registered as Linares’s intellectual creation, and Mexico City has declared the alebrijes part of its intangible cultural heritage.