Living tradition, Mexico
Mexico City
The capital of Día de los Muertos, where faces are painted as calaveras and La Catrina for the Day of the Dead.
In Mexico City, as across Mexico, the Day of the Dead on 1 and 2 November honours family members who have died, with altars, marigolds, food and visits to graves. Painting the face as a calavera, a decorated skull, has become one of its most visible customs, alongside dressing as La Catrina. UNESCO listed the festival's indigenous traditions in 2008.
La Catrina
La Catrina began as an etching of a skeleton in a fancy hat by the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada in the early 1910s, mocking Mexicans who copied European fashions. The painter Diego Rivera gave her the name and a full figure in his 1947 mural "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central". Today women and men paint white skull faces with flowers, dark eye hollows and stitched lips to dress as her.
Parades and altars
Mexico City has held a large Day of the Dead parade since 2016, after one was staged for the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, and face painters work along the route. Families build ofrendas, altars with photographs, candles, sugar skulls and the dead's favourite foods. Face paint is a celebration of memory, and many visitors ask families or performers before taking photographs.
Guides of Mexico City
Still to be written: La Calavera Catrina.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Calavera: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source