If you search "La Catrina," you'll find Halloween costumes, sugar skull makeup tutorials, and a thousand products that describe her as "a celebration of life" or "a symbol of Día de los Muertos tradition."
What Is La Catrina and Where Did She Really Come From?
La Catrina is a skeleton figure originally created by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada around 1910 as a political satire called 'La Calavera Garbancera' — a criticism of Mexican women who adopted European fashions and denied their indigenous heritage. Diego Rivera later named and popularized her in his 1947 mural.
Most of that is wrong — or at least, dramatically incomplete. La Catrina has an actual history, and that history is worth knowing before you put her image on anything or anyone.
The Man Who Made Her: José Guadalupe Posada
La Catrina starts with José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printmaker and political cartoonist who worked in Mexico City from the 1880s until his death in 1913.
Posada was a satirist. His calaveras — illustrated skeleton figures — were social commentary, not celebrations of death. He used skeleton imagery because it was egalitarian: everyone dies. The skull and bones that appear on his figures were visual shorthand for the idea that death doesn't care about your social class, your wealth, or your pretensions.
The specific image that would become La Catrina was created around 1910–1913. Posada called it La Calavera Garbancera — "The Dandy Skull" or, more specifically, "The Chickpea Skull." Garbancero/a was a slang term for Mexicans — often indigenous Mexicans — who adopted European dress and rejected their indigenous identity in favor of appearing more European. The Porfiriato era (under dictator Porfirio Díaz) was a period in which the Mexican elite aggressively imitated European fashion and culture while suppressing indigenous identity.
Posada's image was a skull wearing a European-style hat covered in feathers — the kind of elaborate hat that upper-class and aspiring upper-class Mexican women wore to signal their fashionable, European-facing identities. The message was pointed: all your French fashions and social climbing amount to nothing. You're bones underneath.
The original image was from the shoulders up only — just the skull and the hat.
Diego Rivera Made Her Catrina
In 1947, Diego Rivera painted his famous mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central — Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda. In the mural, Rivera placed Posada's floating skull figure into a full body: a woman in elegant period dress, surrounded by figures from Mexican history including Rivera himself as a child, his wife Frida Kahlo, and José Guadalupe Posada.
Rivera gave the figure a name in the mural: La Catrina. And he gave her the full body and fashionable clothing that Posada's original didn't have.
It was Rivera, not Posada, who created the image that most people recognize today. The full-figured elegant skeleton woman in Días de los Muertos iconography — that's Rivera's addition to Posada's original social critique.
What Día de los Muertos Actually Is
Día de los Muertos is a Mexican tradition observed primarily on November 1 and 2, coinciding with the Catholic feast days of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Its roots are indigenous — specifically from Aztec traditions around the dead — combined with the Catholic calendar imposed after colonization.
It's a day to honor specific people who have died. Not death in general. Not skeletons as a concept. The specific dead relatives and friends who are no longer alive.
Families build ofrendas — altars — with photographs of the deceased, their favorite foods and objects, marigolds (cempasúchil), candles, and other items that meant something to the person being remembered. They visit cemeteries to clean and decorate graves. They cook the food the deceased loved. It is, at its core, an act of remembrance, not a celebration of death as an aesthetic category.
How La Catrina Got Connected to Día de los Muertos
The connection between La Catrina and Día de los Muertos is relatively recent, partly the result of tourism promotion. As Día de los Muertos became internationally known — largely through the 1990s-2000s period of increased interest in Mexican culture and later through films and other media — imagery from the holiday was distilled and packaged. La Catrina, as a recognizable elegant skeleton figure, became visual shorthand for both the holiday and for "Mexican culture" more broadly.
For many people inside Mexico and in the diaspora, this distillation has been uncomfortable. La Catrina as social critique and La Catrina as Halloween aesthetic are very different things. The image has been extracted from its context and resold back to the culture that created it, often stripped of the original social commentary and the specific practice of remembering the dead.
The Costume Issue
Wearing La Catrina as a Halloween costume is a choice that many Mexican and Mexican-American people find disrespectful, particularly when it's done by people outside the culture. There's a specific reason why: it takes an image rooted in social satire and sacred remembrance and turns it into a costume — something worn for one night as an aesthetic statement, then discarded.
When the image is reduced to "cool skull makeup," it loses both the history (Posada's critique of class aspiration) and the context (the practice of honoring specific dead relatives that Día de los Muertos represents).
This isn't about permission. It's about what the image means and whether the person wearing it has taken time to understand that.
What Respectful Engagement Looks Like
Engaging with La Catrina respectfully means starting with the history. Posada. 1910. Social satire. Rivera's mural. The Porfiriato. Garbancera — what the word meant and why he used it.
It means understanding Día de los Muertos as a practice of remembrance for specific people, not an aestheticized "celebration of death."
It means, if you're going to use the image, being honest about what you know about it and why you're drawn to it.
For people who carry Mexican heritage, La Catrina can be a powerful image of cultural reclamation — taking back the social critique Posada intended, connecting to the tradition of honoring the dead, wearing the image as an assertion of where they come from. That's a very different relationship to the image than buying a skeleton-face costume at a Halloween store.
Why the Image Endures
Posada's original point — that death is the ultimate equalizer, that no amount of status or fashion saves you — hasn't become less true in 110 years. If anything, it's more resonant in an era of social media performance and conspicuous status display.
The Calavera Garbancera was a joke at the expense of people who thought their clothes and their aspirations placed them above others. That joke still lands.
La Catrina, as she has become — the elegant full-figured skeleton woman of Rivera's mural — carries that joke forward and adds to it the specific tradition of honoring the dead that Día de los Muertos represents. She's become a symbol of Mexican identity in part because she holds so much of the culture's history: indigenous imagery, colonial satire, post-independence political commentary, the art-historical legacy of Posada and Rivera.
To engage with her at any depth is to engage with all of that. That's what makes her more than a skull in a hat.
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