Our name, Talavera La Catrina, brings together two traditions that come from very different moments in Mexican history.
Talavera developed in Puebla beginning in the colonial period, when Indigenous ceramic traditions already present in Mexico encountered techniques brought from Spain. La Catrina appeared centuries later through Mexican printmaking, satire, and eventually muralism.
Before La Catrina, There Was El Catrín
In 19th-century Mexico, a catrín was recognizable as an elegantly dressed man, particularly one concerned with fashion and appearance. He belonged to the streets and social life of a changing Mexico City: polished clothes, carefully groomed hair, a fine hat, perhaps a cane or gloves.
The word could carry admiration, but it could also be teasing. Elegance could easily become vanity or social pretension.
José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi was already using the character for satire in Vida y hechos del famoso caballero Don Catrín de la Fachenda. Written by 1820 and published after his death in 1832, the novel follows a man intensely concerned with status, appearances, and his idea of what a gentleman ought to be.
The figure remained familiar throughout the century. When Clemente Jacques printed the lotería deck associated with the game today in 1887, card number four was El Catrín, dressed in formal clothes with the unmistakable air of a fashionable gentleman.
This Catrín was not a skeleton, nor was he created as La Catrina’s husband. He belonged to Mexican popular culture before the skeletal woman we now know by the related name existed.
Mexico’s Calaveras
La Catrina came from another tradition that was developing alongside him: the Mexican calavera.
By the 19th century, death had become a useful language for humor and criticism in Mexican print culture. Newspapers and inexpensive broadsides imagined the living as skeletons. Calaveras literarias playfully announced the fictional deaths of politicians, public figures, or acquaintances, often using rhyme and satire to say things that might have sounded sharper if written directly.
Illustrated calaveras did much the same visually. Skeletons danced, drank, worked, argued, dressed fashionably, and behaved very much like the people reading about them.
José Guadalupe Posada became one of the artists most closely associated with this world. Born in Aguascalientes in 1852, Posada worked as an illustrator and engraver during the final decades of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. His images circulated through popular publications rather than museums. His skeletons could be funny, political, unruly, or ordinary, reflecting the society around him through bodies that had been reduced to bone. Among them appeared a woman beneath an enormous hat.
Before She Had the Name La Catrina
The familiar story often says that Posada created a work titled La Calavera Garbancera. The surviving history is a little more complicated.
Posada generally did not name the individual images he produced for publishers. The same engraving could be reused on different broadsides with different text and titles. According to research published by INAH, the earliest documented printing of the image we now recognize as La Catrina appeared in October 1913, several months after Posada’s death.
That broadside was titled Remate de calaveras alegres y sandungueras. Later publishers reused the same image under other names.
The skeletal woman herself was simple: a skull, shoulders, and an extravagant feathered hat. The hat placed her immediately within the world of fashionable dress and the social satire surrounding Posada’s calaveras. European styles carried considerable prestige during the Porfiriato, particularly among people eager to present themselves as refined and cosmopolitan.
Posada removed almost everything except that symbol of elegance. Beneath the fashionable hat there was only bone.
The image circulated for decades before becoming the complete figure now associated with the name La Catrina.
Diego Rivera Gives Her a Body
In 1947, Diego Rivera painted Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, a large fresco filled with figures from different periods of Mexican history.
At its center stands Posada’s skeletal woman, now transformed.
Rivera gave her a full body and dressed her as an elegant society woman. Beside her stands José Guadalupe Posada. On her other side, Rivera painted himself as a child, with Frida Kahlo immediately behind him. The mural places Posada and his creation inside Rivera’s much larger panorama of Mexico’s history.
This is where the figure became La Catrina in the form recognized today. Artisans interpreted her through their own materials.
Her name also makes more sense beside the older Catrín. If the catrín was the finely dressed gentleman of the 19th century, a catrina could be his equally elegant female counterpart.
From Satire to Día de los Muertos
La Catrina was not created as an ancient Día de los Muertos figure. She was not a pre-Hispanic goddess, nor did she begin as a character traditionally placed on an ofrenda.
Her connection with Día de los Muertos developed over time.
Posada’s image already belonged to the world of Mexican calaveras, and calaveras had become closely associated with the season through popular prints and humorous verses. During the 20th century, Posada’s work received greater recognition, while Rivera’s mural gave the skeletal woman a memorable form that could easily be reinterpreted.
Artists and artisans continued that transformation. Catrinas appeared in sculpture, ceramics, cartonería, illustration, costume, and eventually face painting. Some remained elegant and restrained; others became humorous, regional, fantastical, or covered with flowers and painted decoration.
Her presence alongside Día de los Muertos became so familiar that today it can be difficult to separate the two visually, even though the Indigenous traditions underlying Día de los Muertos are centuries older than La Catrina herself.
And What About El Catrín?
The modern skeletal Catrín does not have an equivalent single origin story.
There was no one famous male skeleton by Posada that Rivera later turned into “El Catrín.” Instead, the older idea of the fashionable catrín remained available as La Catrina grew into a popular character.
Artists eventually paired elegant skeletal men with elegant skeletal women. A Catrín might wear a suit and hat while a Catrina appears beside him in a long dress, drawing on a vocabulary of fashion that was already embedded in both names.
That is why Catrines and Catrinas now appear naturally together in ceramics, sculpture, costumes, and Día de los Muertos art even though their histories did not begin as a matched pair.
La Catrina, Sugar Skulls, and Santa Muerte
La Catrina also shares skeletal imagery with other Mexican traditions, but the resemblance can make very different histories appear related.
A sugar skull, or calaverita de azúcar, belongs to the traditions surrounding Día de los Muertos and the ofrenda. Its familiar form developed after Spanish contact through alfeñique, a molded sugar craft, within a culture where skull imagery already carried older meanings. Calaveritas may be brightly decorated or given a person’s name.
La Catrina comes from Mexican print culture and satire. Her modern form passes through Posada and Rivera before becoming closely associated with Día de los Muertos.
Santa Muerte is different from both. She is a personification of death and an object of religious devotion within Mexican popular religiosity. Devotees pray to her, maintain altars, make offerings, and ask for protection or assistance. Although she is skeletal, she is not another form of La Catrina and is not simply a Día de los Muertos figure.
The shared skull and skeleton imagery can place them beside one another visually without giving them the same origin or purpose.
Talavera La Catrina
Talavera speaks to the ceramic tradition at the heart of our shop and to the artisans whose work first shaped what we carry. La Catrina belongs to another history of Mexican making: one that moved from popular printmaking into muralism and then into the hands of generations of artisans.
Today our shop extends beyond Talavera alone. We carry different ceramic techniques and other forms of Mexican craft, made in different regions and workshops.
Our name has stayed with us through that growth. Talavera La Catrina holds a little of both sides of what we love: the traditions passed down through generations of Mexican artisans and the creativity that allows those traditions to keep taking on new forms. La Catrina herself traveled from ink to paint to clay, changing in the hands of the artists who came after her. It feels fitting that she found a home in our name, too.
