What is La Catrina (Mexican Skulls)

La Catrina, also known as La Calavera Garbancera, is a fictional character created by the Mexican illustrator Juan Guadalupe Posada and popularized by a famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera.

La Catrina and the Day of the Dead

The character created by Juan Guadalupe Posada is more than just a skull. In fact, through his illustrations a portrait of Mexican society was made, especially the joys and sorrows of a people who lived in a deep crisis and with great differences social.

La Catrina and the rest of the skulls in her stories dress in gala clothes and participate in lively parties in the context of the Day of the Dead. With these representations the Author expressed a double message: the hypocrisy of society and, in parallel, the demystification of death, an aspect essential in Mexican culture that comes from pre-Columbian civilizations and was later integrated by the tradition catholic.

On the other hand, with the character of La Catrina, its author was criticizing a sector of society, those popularly known as garbanceros, that is, people with blood

indigenous that they pretended to be European and, therefore, they denied their culture and their roots.

La Catrina became a benchmark cultural and this made the painter Diego Rivera immortalize her in a mural entitled "Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Alameda Central." Based on this background, the image of La Catrina, a skull with an elegant and striking hat, is part of the Mexican national symbolism and the collective imagination. For this reasonIn the celebration of the Day of the Dead, the Catrina costume is one of the most popular.

La Catrina in the movie "The Book of Life"

In 2014 the movie "The Book of Life" (The book of life), a comedy romantic of animation in which the story of Manolo is told, a bullfighter who has no courage to kill a bull, and Joaquín, a humble man who is in love with María, as well as other secondary characters.

In addition to the human characters, two spirits appear: Xibalba, the lord of a Mexican hell called La Land of the Forgotten, and the Catrina, who represents death and is the one that governs the Land of the Remembered. In this way, the plot takes place in the world of the living, but the world of the dead is very present. And so that the plot has the ingredient of social criticism associated with La Catrina traditional, there is a clear denunciation of bullfighting as a barbarian spectacle, a hot topic in current Mexican society.

Photos: Fotolia - ramonespelt / AGcuesta

Themes in La Catrina (Mexican Skulls)