Centenarian of the day (of the dead)
1 November 2013
La Calavera Catrina is 100 years old today. Born dead, she was the brainchild of José Guadalupe Posada, who first made zinc etchings of the “elegant” lady first appeared in a 1913 broadside pamphlet. Largely overlooked at the time, Catrina did not become an immediately recognizable figure until the 1930s, when the government began a concerted effort to encourage the middle and upper classes to accept Mexican folk customs in part to wean them for both Catholic and U.S. cultural influence and Posada’s best known disciple, Diego Rivera, began to incorporate into his own art Posada’s satiric comments on the Europeanized Mexicans of the early 20th century.
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