Papel picado
Tissue paper cut into lace-like patterns and hung in rows over the ofrenda, the graves and the streets. For Día de Muertos the designs show skulls, flowers and candles.
Meaning
Papel picado (cut or pierced paper) is made from sheets of brightly coloured papel de China, tissue paper, cut by hand with gouges and strung in rows as garlands for altars and graves, as UNAM’s Gaceta CCH describes it. UNESCO counts paper cut-outs among the handicrafts set with the dead person’s favourite dishes around the home shrine and the tomb. Mexico’s Ministry of Education (SEP) says that papel picado and the bright colours of the Ofrenda (altar) stand for joy and for air. Its colours change with the feast. The Horniman Museum in London writes that purple and black signify death, and orange and yellow echo the cempasúchil believed to light the spirits’ path; a report from Puebla in 2015 gives purple, white, orange and black for Día de Muertos, with catrinas, skulls or crypts cut into them. The same craft decorates Christmas, Independence Day, weddings, carnivals and saints’ days.
Origin and history
The Horniman Museum tells the history in three steps. Before the Spanish, Indigenous communities such as the Otomí of San Pablito, Puebla, made ceremonial cut paper from amate, a paper made by boiling and pounding the fibres of bark. In the sixteenth century papel de China reached Mexico through the Manila–Acapulco galleon trade, as wrapping for goods, and artisans began to cut it into decorations. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries papel picado was part of fiestas across central and southern Mexico.
San Salvador Huixcolotla, a town in the Tepeaca valley of Puebla, is where the craft began, according to a Notimex report of 2015. There Roberto Reynoso, who learned it at ten from his father, as his father had from his grandparents, counts out 100 sheets of tissue paper, lays the pattern on top, and cuts through the whole stack with chisels struck with a hammer, on a base of lead. In the busy months before Independence Day, Día de Muertos and Christmas, his family’s workshop sells up to 10,000 strings a day.
Paper that lasts a season
Papel picado is made to be ephemeral, the Horniman Museum notes: the sheets fall apart in wind and rain. Digital design and laser cutting now make finer pieces possible, and in Huixcolotla some strings are cut from plastic or metallic sheets. The museum keeps pieces made for its exhibition Fiesta Mexicana in 1977 that have outlasted their purpose.
Read next
- Next in Day of the Dead symbolsCopalThe aromatic resin of Bursera trees, burned in an incense burner on the ofrenda. Its white smoke is believed to purify the place and guide the dead to their altar.
- The same shape in Aztec symbols and godsCoatlicueThe Aztec earth goddess whose name means “serpent skirt”, mother of Huitzilopochtli. Her colossal statue in Mexico City has two facing serpents for a head, a necklace of hands and hearts and a skirt of woven snakes.
See also
Ofrenda (altar), Alebrije, Cempasúchil (Mexican marigold), Pan de muerto, Sugar skull (calavera de azúcar), La Catrina.
Sources
- Papel picado: Mexico’s festive paper art (Horniman Museum), Horniman Museum and Gardens, story, 2025, Horniman Museum and Gardens, story text
- El papel picado, una expresión del Día de Muertos (Gaceta CCH, UNAM), Gaceta del Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades, UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, article text
- Papel picado, artesanía de San Salvador Huixcolotla para el mundo (Notimex, 2015), Notimex report, El Informador (Guadalajara), 29 June 2015, El Informador, report text
- Elementos básicos para la ofrenda de Día de Muertos (Nueva Escuela Mexicana Digital), Secretaría de Educación Pública, Nueva Escuela Mexicana Digital, educational resource, Secretaría de Educación Pública (Gobierno de México), summary
- Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead (UNESCO Representative List), UNESCO, Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, element 00054 (inscribed 2008, proclaimed 2003), UNESCO, description
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from diamonds or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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