La Catrina
The elegant skeleton lady of Día de Muertos. José Guadalupe Posada drew her as a skull in a flowered hat, first printed in 1913; Diego Rivera gave her a full body and a long dress in his mural of 1947.
Meaning
La Catrina is a female skeleton in a wide hat trimmed with flowers and feathers, the best-known calavera of Día de Muertos. She began as a print by the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913): only a bust, “an elegant bust of a skull wearing a hat adorned with flowers”, in the words of the historian Agustín Sánchez González. The verses printed with her mocked the garbanceras, and catrín was the word for an elegant, well-dressed man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Conaculta notes. Today she is everywhere during the holiday: in clay and papier-mâché figures, in murals and posters, and in costume parades and contests, which the scholar Mathew Sandoval calls a relatively new Day of the Dead tradition in Mexico and the United States.
Origin and history
Posada never named his prints. The publisher titled each sheet to suit the verses printed on it, Sánchez González explains, paid Posada for the plate, and reused it as often as he liked. Posada died on 20 January 1913. The image first appeared in mid-October 1913, ten months later, on a cheap broadside from the press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo: Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras, with the subtitle “Las que hoy son empolvadas garbanceras pararán en deformes calaveras” (“Those who today are powdered garbanceras will end up as deformed skulls”). It was reprinted as the Calavera de los Fifís in 1918, El panteón de las pelonas in 1924 and on two undated sheets; the text and the layout changed each time, the drawing stayed the same. Sandoval dates the broadside to 1912. Sánchez González, who identifies the reprints by their titles, gives October 1913, and INAH follows him.
The name came later. In 1930 Frances Toor, Paul O’Higgins and Blas Vanegas Arroyo published Monografía: las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, grabador mexicano, with an introduction by Diego Rivera, and at the top of page 160 the skull appeared with the caption “Calavera catrina”. Who chose the name is told differently. Sandoval writes that Toor and Rivera chose it “for reasons unknown”. Sánchez González, interviewed in 2009, said it was Rivera who named her, when Posada’s first book was being made, which he placed in the 1920s. Conaculta says Rivera gave La Catrina “the name and the form” we know.
The form came in 1947. Between July and September of that year Rivera painted Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central) for the Versalles dining room of the new Hotel del Prado in Mexico City. At its centre, INBAL describes, the Calavera Catrina holds the hand of Rivera as a boy of nine and the arm of Posada, her creator, with Frida Kahlo behind the boy. Rivera’s Catrina has a whole body and a long party dress, a feather stole like a serpent, and pince-nez hanging from her breastbone; apart from being a skull, Sánchez González writes, she has little in common with Posada’s bust. The mural survived the earthquake of September 1985, which almost destroyed the hotel, and since 1988 has had a museum of its own, the Museo Mural Diego Rivera.
Was she ever called the Garbancera?
Conaculta says the print was originally christened La Calavera Garbancera. Sánchez González disagrees: the word appears only in the subtitle of the 1913 sheet, and he concludes that Posada never made a calavera called La Catrina, “still less called it Garbancera”. Both names, in his words, are a cultural invention. Who the garbanceras were is also told in different ways. For Conaculta they were people of Indigenous blood who pretended to be European and renounced their roots. For Sandoval they were Indigenous peasant women who sold garbanzo beans in the street markets, and powdered their faces and wore French fashions to pass as upper class. The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Community Altar project says a garbancera was a seller of roasted chickpeas, and so an ordinary or vulgar person, and reads the print as a jab at an aristocracy copying Europe while the people starved.
How she became famous
In the mid-1920s the French painter Jean Charlot, then painting murals at San Ildefonso in Mexico City, went looking for the author of the anonymous calavera sheets and found his way to Vanegas Arroyo’s workshop. Sandoval credits the exhibition Posada: Printmaker to the Mexican People at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1944: on 13 April crowds clashed with police on the museum steps, a large print of La Catrina hung on the wall, and she was on the cover of the catalogue. Sánchez González points to an earlier show, the first large exhibition of Posada at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1943, whose small catalogue also had her on the cover. After Rivera’s mural, Sandoval writes, folk artists in Mexico made her into ceramic toys and papier-mâché figures sold for the holiday, and Mexican American artists put her in the murals and posters of the Chicano Movement. Sánchez González sees in her today a symbiosis with the world’s Halloween.
Read next
- Next in Day of the Dead symbolsMonarch butterflyThe orange-and-black butterfly that reaches the mountain forests of Michoacán and the State of Mexico around Día de Muertos. The Purépecha hold that the monarchs are the souls of the dead.
- The skeleton of Día de Muertos and of HalloweenSkeleton and skullA human skeleton or skull: the dead made visible. Its place in Halloween goes back to the late-medieval Dance of Death and to the Christian days for the dead that follow Halloween.
See also
Sugar skull (calavera de azúcar), Mictlantecuhtli, Las Posadas, Ofrenda (altar), Cempasúchil (Mexican marigold), Pan de muerto.
Sources
- Las historias falsas que se leen de la Catrina de José Guadalupe Posada en Relatos e historias de México (INAH, 2023), Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, boletín, 2023, on Agustín Sánchez González’s article in Relatos e historias en México no. 177, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, bulletin text
- La invención de la calavera Garbancera y La Catrina (Agustín Sánchez González, El Universal, 2025), Agustín Sánchez González, Confabulario, El Universal, 2 November 2025, El Universal, article text
- La historia de “La Catrina” que todos llevamos dentro (Conaculta, 2011), Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, news, 31 October 2011, Secretaría de Cultura (Gobierno de México), news text
- Diego Rivera bautizó a “La Catrina”, no Posada (Notimex, El Universal, 2009), Notimex report, El Universal, 4 February 2009; interview with Agustín Sánchez González, Cenidiap, El Universal, Notimex report
- How La Catrina became the iconic symbol for the Day of the Dead (Mathew Sandoval, 2023), Mathew Sandoval, The Conversation, republished by PBS NewsHour, 29 October 2023, PBS NewsHour, article text
- José Guadalupe Posada and the Famous Catrina (UW–Madison Community Altar), Community Altar project, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Wisconsin–Madison, English text
- Museo Mural Diego Rivera (INBAL), Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, venue page: the mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, venue history; the mural
- La gráfica de José Guadalupe Posada, un legado para el patrimonio mexicano (Conaculta, 2012), Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, news, 20 January 2012, Secretaría de Cultura (Gobierno de México), news text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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