CALAVERAS AND COMMODITY FETISHISM

THE UNHALLOWED SUPERNATURAL IN THE WORK OF JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA1

Tom Gretton

This essay discusses some of the printed pictures of devils and animated skeletons that José Guadalupe Posada made in Mexico City from his arrival there in 1888 through into the 1910s; he died early in 1913.2 Posada produced thousands of printing blocks on a huge range of topics, both variously secular and variously religious for illustrated newspapers, pamphlets and books. However, his major claim to posthumous fame derives from the illustrations he made for Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, a publisher of cheap newspapers, chapbooks and single-sheet ‘street literature’.3 This is an exceptional body of work, not least because it has survived in quantities unusual for cheap mass-produced printed material, which almost always suffers from the law ‘the more there were, the fewer there are’. Vanegas Arroyo kept the blocks Posada made for him, and used them for different subjects, in different layouts, with different texts, for years and indeed decades afterwards.

One must assume that most of Posada’s blocks were made on commission, that Vanegas Arroyo asked Posada, whose business was located a few city blocks away, for a treatment of a specified subject in an image of a certain size. So although it may be accurate to call the images ‘Posadas’, it is not helpful to give that name to the objects in which the pictures were printed.4 On any Vanegas Arroyo sheet or pamphlet, several cultural agents (one or more print-makers, one or more writers, the people who did the typesetting and the page-making as well as the press-men) have been at work. So I will call these objects Posada/Vanegas Arroyo sheets, or PVA sheets for short.

Posada’s work has been celebrated now for ninety years, in Mexico, in the United States, in South America, and in Europe both east and west, via a flow of articles, books and exhibitions and the opening of museums in Mexico (Aguascalientes, 1972) and museum and library collections in the US and elsewhere. It has achieved this status through a combination of factors, including the need to construct a ‘national-popular’ culture in Mexico in the aftermath of the Revolution, the requirement of modernist art practice to identify and find value in its ‘primitive’ and ancestral other, and the availability of this body of work as a screen on which to project ideas of ‘the political artist’, ‘the people’ and ‘Mexican identity’.5 Alongside these accidental influences on Posada’s critical fortune, there is the fact that his output as printed in the PVA sheets has a striking materiality, a complex position in the play of cultural influences in modernizing Mexico City, and a considerable strength of design and draughtsmanship. These qualities enable his output to sustain the cultural work that for the best part of a century it has been asked to undertake.6

This essay frames Posada’s printed pictures in a different way. They can be understood to have provided a set of bleak metaphors for and commentaries on the realities of city life for subaltern groups under modern capitalism. They can also be understood to have provided representational and behavioural ‘weapons of the weak’.7 At the same time, they provided, for a significant section of the population of Mexico City and its hinterland, an ironizing and self-devaluing induction into a commodified visual and printed-news culture. These pictures reward such interpretations, and respond to such hypotheses, as least as richly as they have until now rewarded interpretations that have cast them as ‘popular’ in the drama of the myth of origin of the Mexican nation.8

Of the huge and various set of pictures made by Posada for Vanegas Arroyo, one group has had an especially splendid critical fortune: the calaveras (skulls) and those ejemplo (example) images that show devils attending the devastation of families. For this body of images, I will construct an argument that links what is represented with the commodity-form functions of these sheets, in particular their embodiment of ‘cheapness’ and their negation of the benefits that print-culture pedagogy was understood to bring to those interpellated by it. That is to say, I offer an analysis that shows that the power of the PVA sheet lies, at least partly, in its synthesis of iconography, visual form, genre and commodity-form. I interpret these synthesized aspects of the sheets in the context of the incomplete, imperfect and contested processes of class formation in Mexico City in the generation before the Revolution.9 In this frame, I take their iconography to be a representation of migration to cities as the work of the devil, and of life in the city as a purgatory at best. I argue that the primary audience for these prints was urban, literate and with occasional spare cash for recreational reading. This audience was not drawn from the pelados and léperos, whose presence on the street evoked bourgeois disgust and fear (and who are well represented, often with that spin, in Posada’s oeuvre), but from another group, marginalized in ways and by processes different from those that pauperized the pelados.10 For the consumers of PVA sheets, whose integration into the urban socioeconomy had not been completely disastrous, the sheets produced and reproduced both a material inclusion in and a cultural exclusion from a commodified, modern urban existence – that is, a subaltern position. This chapter does not deal with the question of whether the role of these sheets was causal or symptomatic; but for me, the production and reproduction of a relationship to the means of consumption within a given mode of consumption has a claim to be thought of as causal.

My title is adapted from that of a book by Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.11 Taussig, at that time a Marxist anthropologist, investigated the history, and the contemporary significance, of devil-worship in the tin mines of Bolivia and on the sugar plantations of western Colombia.12 ‘Devil’ here is a collective noun: in this context Catholicism has to some extent managed to simplify the spirit world into two opposing cartels, one of good and one of evil, but it has failed to convert those cartels into stable monopolies. Taussig found that both in mining communities and among manual workers on sugar plantations an intensification of capitalist exploitation was accompanied by an intensification of forms of devil-cult. The mine, and the ore, have a ‘devil’ guardian, and groups of workers maintain altars to him within the mines. This spirit owner of the mountain has evolved into a devil, a malevolent power, since the Spanish arrived. In contrast, the spirit owners of agricultural resources, which are much less turned to the market, remain, as the sources suggest they were in the pre-Columbian world, supernatural powers with the capacity to help or hurt us, a tendency to do both indiscriminately, and an unstable willingness to be drawn into relations of reciprocal benefit. Individual cane-cutters are said by their colleagues to make bargains with what they characterize as the devil to increase their productivity, and thus their income. Such diabolical bonuses are fated to be sterile: the worker concerned will spend the gains on drink or on similar pleasures, not on accumulation. Taussig understands these phenomena as being produced by social groups whose world view is based on analogical relationships rather than causal ones (the barter relationship, the exchange of different but similar use-values, being one of analogy) as they are forced to make adjustments to a world in which use-values are replaced through the capitalist market by exchange-value, by the fetish forms that are money and the commodity.

Taussig’s ambitions for his data are enormous and focus on the desire to make us see the workings of the market not as natural but as a social construct, one that to these outsiders looks to be sterile, diabolical, unnatural. He argues that participation in ‘devilish’ activities gives those involved a set of resources through which to resist smooth insertion into the market; for him, devil beliefs show that the culture of these neophyte proletarian miners is in an important respect antagonistic to the process of commodity formation. In mediating the oppositions intrinsic to these acculturations to capitalism, such beliefs may even stimulate the political action necessary to thwart or transcend it.13 Thus, for Taussig, devil-cults are not some picturesque outcrop of ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ beliefs that have till now withstood the erosions of time and ‘reality’, but a cultural innovation, a new way of dealing with new circumstances, though one that gains much of its power by making a plausible claim to being old. For Taussig, devil beliefs are antithetical rather than antecedent.

I want to use Taussig’s schema to provide an analogical understanding of the processes of which I take Posada’s devils and skeletons for the PVA sheets to be both constitutive and symptomatic. Antonio Vanegas Arroyo printed and published many different sorts of cheap commodities: a non-periodical newspaper called the Gazetta Callejera, as well as several actual periodicals; images of Christ, the Virgin and saints to sell on the street or outside shrines; song-sheets (including corridos) and song-books to sell in the market and the drink-shops; chapbooks with household hints and recipes; conjuring tricks and spells; short stories and playlets for children or for puppet booths; broadsheets on the occasion of disasters, crimes and executions; fake-news sheets that mixed the lurid with the moralizing; and sheets for the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead (All Souls’ Day), 2nd November, the morrow of All Saints’ Day. All of Vanegas Arroyo’s stock-in-trade was illustrated, the pamphlets and chapbooks having at least a cover picture. His business in Mexico City had been going for perhaps eight years by the time Posada started to provide prints for him, supplementing and then probably supplanting the work produced by Manuel Manilla. With Posada’s arrival, the pictures became bigger in area and visual impact and more inventive than they had e arlier been.

Pictures of devils visiting this world, or views from a world just like this one but populated by skeletons, figure largely. Many of the moralizing fake news stories (collectively ejemplos) are illustrated with devils urging on invented criminals and sinners to their violent, and almost always intrafamilial, sins and crimes. Devils like monkeys urge on daughters to kill their parents, sons to kill their fathers, or fathers their children; devils like bat-lizards prompt men to immolate and then snack on their whole family; while the visitors from the underworld wait for their own takeaway. Devils deliver to the mouth of hell a daughter who had told lies about her parents. And for the Day of the Dead, Vanegas Arroyo produced a range of sheets, which he called calaveras, on which skeletons do things that belong to this world.

Critics and historians have tended to deal with this material as though it were in one way or another ‘traditional’. It has been examined as a continuation of the European danse macabre convention, in which skeletons haul off to judgment men and women who represent the range of social stations, an iconographic tradition revisited in late-eighteenth-century Mexico.14 Perhaps more usually, it has been seen as a reincarnation of Aztec death-cults, a symptom of an essential aspect of an essential national character, of Mexico’s special relationship with death.15 Of course, cultures do have their longue durée, and it is very tempting to interpret these devils and skeletal presences as evidence of the survival of an Aztec imaginary through four centuries of Spanish cultural imperialism, another example of the syncretic relations between Hispanic and pre-conquest belief systems that is taken to characterize Mexican culture. Despite the fact that they tell us nothing particular about the nature and direction of cultural change in Mexico in the generation before the Revolution and fail to address the particularities of Posada’s oeuvre, such interpretations are so comfortable that few have moved beyond them. It is striking that few have tried to understand the emergence of the calaveras and the devil ejemplos in terms of the social pressures of nation-building, class formation and induction into the imperialist-capitalist world economy and culture.16

Vanegas Arroyo developed a new commodity, and for it Posada invented an imagery, a stock of pictures to make it desirable. These sheets are not only representations, they are also bits of an innovative material practice. They are things for sale, directly dependent for their substance, their appearance and their market on the most recent technological advances spawned by industrial capitalism. PVA sheets were printed on wood-pulp paper, new to Mexico and to the world in the second half of the nineteenth century, and utterly transforming the cost and supply of their raw material. Vanegas Arroyo printed his merchandise on modern rotary or treadle-platen presses. The pictures that Posada supplied were cheap and plentiful because he made inventive use of line blocks, one of the new photomechanical processes that, emanating from Vienna, Paris and New York after 1870, were by the 1890s transforming printmaking regimes in Calcutta as well as Mexico City. The sheets were sold to and consumed by men and women who had a choice of commodity in this price range: a PVA sheet typically cost the same as the government-sponsored El Imparcial, or as the wide range of downmarket four-page penny-press newspapers. Vanegas Arroyo distributed his prints around the Federal District using the network of newsboys that had developed with the growth of the low-price newspaper press. So the PVA sheets were new sorts of things: new in the manufacturing and distribution techniques and resources which made them possible; new in terms of the development of a ‘modern’ relationship between news and the everyday; new as material objects that structured and were structured by that broad evolution that we call the commercialization of culture.

Antonio Vanegas Arroyo sold his single-sheet products and his pamphlets to a market that is hard to define: we do not know who bought PVA sheets and have to work from internal and contextual evidence. Internal evidence is harder to come by than it is with newspapers: there are no advertisements through which to correlate the market, no letters to the editor. We are left with the nature of the objects themselves, the limited range and register of their texts, and whatever the style and iconography of the images can tell us. We will come back to these.

Contextual evidence must begin with the city. Mexico City was both a boom town and a relatively small one in the period. Its population had been more or less static at between 150,000 and 200,000 from the middle of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries; from the 1850s to 1910 it almost tripled.17 This growth depended on immigration from the rest of Mexico, made up to a large extent of more or less literate adults, many from the country’s central states, rather than from the arid ‘frontier’ north or the tropical and still largely uncolonized south.18 Posada was typical of an important strand of this immigration, a skilled artisan-entrepreneur arriving from Aguascalientes via Léon in his late thirties; Vanegas Arroyo was also typical, coming from Puebla in his late twenties. Mexico City’s economy was being shaped by considerable foreign investment in waterworks, public transport, power generation, and the metropolitan retail sector, and by the growth of a state with modern ambitions, ideology and bureaucracy. The postal and telephone system, the drainage and sewage system, the tramway and railway system, the booming newspaper industry, the growing police force and swelling ministries all provided both skilled and unskilled ‘working-class’ metropolitan jobs that do not fit the archetype of the industrial proletariat. There was also a diverse and adaptable artisan and service-sector workforce. Manufacturing was overwhelmingly in small workshops, typically in premises open to the street or the courtyard. Women worked as servants, in the clothing industry, in the booming and mechanizing tobacco industry and the few large cotton mills; but in huge numbers they worked on or just off the street, providing food and drink to a workforce, of both sexes, that was still largely without the means of preparing or storing food.

‘Working class’ will do as the name of this metropolitan workforce, and of the market for the PVA sheet, only if one recognizes how badly it fitted the classic definitions of what at the end of the nineteenth century the working class was supposed to be – supposed not only by the leaders of the Second International and their alarmed opponents in national and municipal governments over the developed and developing world, but by politically aware men and women in every place where books and newspapers were read. The idea of the proletariat was paradigmatic: its relation to the means of production within a specific mode of production, its organizational forms, its cultural ambitions, its critique of capitalism provided the models and the yardsticks. In this context it is significant that in Mexico City, where there seem to have been fewer ‘worker peasants’ than in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the most developed oppositional political movement among workers was not socialist but anarchist.19 Politically aware workers in Mexico, for the most part, did not want to think of themselves precisely as members of an organized working class struggling for the state. But they, like the rest of this population sucked in by the labour demands of modernization, needed to distinguish themselves from agricultural workers, both of the peasant and of the new agri-proletarian sort.20

Life on the city street was one of the tools of this double differentiation, a site of struggle both between the forces of order (broadly experienced) and the people who occupied the streets of the metropolis, and between metropolitan ‘popular culture’ and patterns of deference and solidarity that had been adequate away from the city. Baudelaire’s street, the boulevard, was a great river that swept the observer along in its powerful course, leaving him, as once had the River Jordan, baptized into a modern state of grace. The paradigmatic street in Porfirian Mexico City was something more like a swamp: it teemed with noxious life, it was dangerous if you did not know your way about it, it was hard to extract yourself from, and living in it made you unfit to enter bourgeois spaces and places. In this context, it is worth noting that one of the inescapable characteristics of the PVA sheet is its hostility to those who try to make the street a Baudelarian site of spectacle.21 Not only gringo tourists but also catrins, dandies who may be more or less hard up, are represented in hostile ways and particularly subject to a plebeian violence with which devils have nothing to do.22 The PVA sheets are also very frequently hostile to forms of transport that prioritize the street as a communications network rather than as a cultural space. Vanegas Arroyo used the play on the word slaughter, matar, to produce sheets featuring a motorista matarista; but bicycles and especially electric trolley-cars are also represented as murderous.

1 José Guadalupe Posada, Asombroso y funesto suceso … Eleuterio Mirafuentes (Shocking and terrible incident that really took place in the city of Saltillo on the first day of this month, and the miracle full of portents done by the Most Holy Virgin Mary of Guadalupe for Anastacia Mello, the mother of the wretched Eleuterio Mirafuentes), c. 1890–1900, photomechanical line-block from scratch-board original, 8.2 × 13.4 cm. This title comes from the 1918 republication preserved in the Vanegas Arroyo collection.

The violence that devils promote is of a different sort. It breaks up families rather than impinging on already disarticulated lives lived on the street, and especially it breaks up the lineage structures that give those families their value and their stability. Family relationships are understood in this iconography as sacred. Relations of duty and dependence are part of an order that is natural and divine: that is why devils promote the profane, unnatural, diabolical acts that destroy it. In the families of the poor especially, such acts take the form of physical violence. They often involve reversals of sanctioned roles: women act violently to men, children kill parents. In ‘horroroso asesinato! Acaecido en la ciudad de Tuxpan el 10 del presente mes y año’, a woman has asked a man for sex. Because they are linked in a pseudo-family through shared godparenthood, the man turns her down, so she knifes him to death. While one devil gives her a helping hand, another reaches out, symbolically to take her to hell. In rich families, too, violence may take its toll, but in such cases the PVA sheets tend to represent devils promoting behaviours of unnatural greed; avarice and disinheritance break up the flow of the lineage – sacrilege in a different mode.23

In Asombroso y funesto suceso … Eleuterio Mirafuentes [1], another image for a pseudo-news sheet, probably made in the 1890s and last republished in 1918, a son drops a rock on his father while his mother looks on and a devil gives him a helping nudge. The sheet tells of the miracle the Virgin of Guadalupe granted to the mother: the father survived the son’s murderous attack. It is worth pointing out the disjunction in graphic register between the two-dimensional and summary graphic code used to represent son, mother and devil and the subtle rendering of the father’s body position and clothing: the picture embodies an assault on ‘high’ culture and its values in every respect, from its aggression against news (as with ‘horroroso asesinato!’, the assault is announced as having taken place ‘this month’) to its concentration of artistic competence in the body of the brutalized father.

This iconography is not of itself particularly surprising. Parricide and thus its cognates have long been singled out as diabolical in Western culture, and for centuries devils have carried sinners gleefully to hell. But the emergence of this imagery aimed in this commodity at this audience in Mexico City at this time was not determined by the recurrent nightmares of recurrent family dramas or by the representational resources that made up the historical dimension of Mexican visual culture. Mexico City, which until the last third of the eighteenth century had been represented as an Utopia, was by this time very clearly established as a focus of chaos, crime and debauchery, as a place at least a little hellish.24 The people who formed the audience for these sheets were very likely to be newcomers to the city, and to its economic and cultural relations. It seems probable that in this period, migration to Mexico City was provoked by ‘pull’ motives more than by ‘push’ ones (even if pressure on customary landholding from the beneficiaries of liberal laws and judicial favours had played a part), which may differentiate it from the city’s even more explosive growth after the Revolution. By coming to the capital, the men and women who made the journey had destroyed their ‘natural’ family-based community and done violence to their own lineage in search of worldly gain. The argument by analogy, that choosing to take a place in globalizing metropolitan capitalism entails taking a place in hell, is at least implicit.

I have argued elsewhere that one of the dominant characteristics of Posada’s imagery of family violence (and of criminal violence other than with guns in general) is its lack of specific location, so that the association in the family-devil genre is rather between dislocation and the anxiety of cultural dissolution than between Mexico City and cultural dissolution. Family violence thus represents marginality rather than urbanity.25 The calaveras add a dimension to this argument. In them, location is very often perfectly clear. The already-dead are on the streets of the city, which is not exactly how the Christian festival of All Souls seeks to represent them. The two-day festival in memory of all the dead has since the seventh century been important in the Christian calendar. All over Christendom it has two phases: on 1 November to celebrate a catch-all saints’ day for those saints whose deeds and names and achieved passage into heaven have slipped the earthly Church’s attention; and on 2 November, to pray, in a portmanteau memento mori, for the souls of all the departed, whatever their destination. By emphasizing the inevitability and the imminence of the passage between this world and the next, the festival asserts and maintains the difference between them. In Mexico the festival concentrates on the souls more than on the saints. Its dominant ritual takes the form of a visit to the graves of relatives, where special food and drink is both consumed and sacrificed (left on the grave), and the grave is decked with cempasúchitl, marigolds. Onto this firmly established and important festival – which (mutatis mutandis) closely resembles Spanish, French and other European practice in the closing decades of the nineteenth century – have grown, in Mexico, a couple of other, linked, functions. The first is prophylactic: if the dead are not acknowledged and honoured on 2 November, they may come back and command our attention in unwelcome ways. The second expresses the participants’ sense of place and of lineage. The grave must be visited. The visit reties the bonds between the generations, and emphasizes the lineage as localized and rooted.26 This requirement to visit the grave made the ritual celebration problematic in Mexico City in the 1890s and 1900s, given the fact that cities until the installation of ‘modern’ public-health facilities needed steady immigration even to maintain a constant population, the great majority of living men and women in the booming city would be much more likely to have children in the ground locally than ancestors.27

Since the second half of the eighteenth century, the festival in Mexico City had developed a specialized market. The food to be consumed included the widespread pan de muerto, dead bread, but also sugar skulls as well as little edible (sacrificial) sculptures of priests, soldiers, market women and figures representing other social positions, perhaps originally made of marzipan but already by the 1780s typically made of sugar. Sugar is special, as Stanley Brandes has pointed out.28 Sugar tied Mexico to global capitalism nearly as strongly as silver had done, and as baler twine for Mr McCormick’s harvesters was beginning to do. And sugar is empty calories; it gives much pleasure, but it is sterile. The diabolical pacts supposed to be made by cane cutters had that same trajectory. Do the PVA sheets, by analogical projection, fulfil the same function? Do they represent a sterile pleasure, an integration into consumer capitalism that devalues the values that ‘modernization’ is promoted as bringing? I think that that question can best be answered by looking at the nature of the commodity, rather than at the representations it carried. But first there are things to be said about the representations.

In the 1880s Vanegas Arroyo had published sheets illustrated not by Posada, but by a designer/relief engraver called Manuel Manilla. The illustrations that survive, from later printings, are of two sorts. First, there are spin-offs from a play about the Don Juan story, Don Juan Tenorio, written in Spain in 1844 by José Zorilla with the Day of the Dead in mind and by the 1880s performed at that time every year both in Spain and in Mexico. Then there are danse macabre images, in which skeletons usher or haul the living into the land of the dead, represented as the cemetery: Calaveras, saltad de la tierra, in which Hercules wrestles a skeleton, is an example. Manilla’s seems to me to be a conservative imagery, supporting the performative emphasis of the Day of the Dead festival, and following the established representational forms and ambitions of the Church’s version of it. No sheets printed by Vanegas Arroyo in the 1880s seem to have survived, so we cannot know precisely what they looked like.29 We may assume that they had a mixture of representational and emblematic images, as sheets made in and after the 1890s had, even if we guess that the profuseness of illustration came with Posada.

Posada’s dominant iconography is different. Manilla showed the inevitability of contact between the living and the dead, but there are a limited number of surviving Posada calavera prints that show interactions between us and them, and in none of them is the skeleton that inexorable summoner of the danse macabre. Instead, Posada most usually showed the dead as functionally the same as the living, so that our fleshliness became a distinction without a difference. It is as though the purpose of the Days of the Dead, to keep the departed securely in their place, has itself been turned on its head. It is not even that Posada is deploying the convention that reminds us of the skull beneath the skin, as did a contemporary, and in social terms more successful, Mexican caricaturist such as Villasana.30

Posada’s calavera images are of two main sorts. There are the set pieces, scenes in which large groups of skeletons interact in some this-world environment, and sets of smaller blocks (the smallest no more than 20 millimetres square), made to be used over and over again scattered among the texts of a whole range of different calaveras. These small blocks give us typical and representative figures. They represent the parade of social types. The composite overleaf [2] is made from much recycled blocks from the 1890s, each about 60 millimetres high; out of the group, I have selected a priest, a street entertainer, a nattily dressed but aging bourgeois man and rich woman of uncertain age. Here as elsewhere, Posada has collapsed the couple doing the danse macabre into a single figure: death is not imminently coming for the whole range of social types but has already taken possession of them.

Such small blocks often represent work, and particularly the retail food industries on and just off the street. In another composite of images [3], perhaps 75 millimetres high at most, dating from the later 1890s or the 1900s, I see three women and one man: the bird-seller with the baby on her back is the poorest, the man at the drink machine with the bottle of aguardiente on the table is the most prosperous and may, like the baker, be working in a shop. These figures come from a set of street traders, probably all done for the two-sided Calavera chusca, dedicada à las placeras, tortilleras, verduleras y toda gente de lucha …, and again much recycled: trades also figure prominently in the thumbnail set.31

2 José Guadalupe Posada, Composite of four figures from a set of social types, c.1890–1900, photomechanical line-blocks from scratch-board originals, from 5.8 to 6.2 cm high. The earliest surviving examples of these blocks seem to be distributed between the Calavera de Cupido and the Gran Panteon Amoroso, both from the 1890s.

In Posada’s images, the skeletons do what we do, and particularly what we do on the street. They fight, they court and they flirt, they saunter arm in arm. There is another loose series, or maybe it is an observer’s conflation, in which the friendships, sentimental adventures, hard knocks and conflicts of the street are pictured, again in scratch-board images from the 1890s no more than 70 millimetres high. A prosperous man up from the country flirts with a woman; a poorer couple shout and argue. A policeman hauls a streetwalker away. Two poor men drink pulque arm in arm; and a similar pair are in the last act of a dispute: a standing man holds a curved knife over a kneeling, screaming companion. One has to wonder on what plane of existence the murderee will find himself next.

The set-piece images cover much of the same ground. They represent life in the market and on and off the street, including the noisy work of calavera sellers (Rebumbio de calveras). The Calavera de las Artes shows workers plying their different trades on the street. In Calaveras Zalameras de las Coquetas Meseras, a party is going on in a bar.32 In the Calavera de los Patinadores, three men work off their night-court sentences by sweeping the streets under the eye of an equally skeletal policeman.33 Sometimes these calaveras represent crowds involved in all the business of nation-building and state-formation, for example reacting to the affair of Mora and Morales, executed in June 1907 for assassinating the ex-president of Guatemala; fleeing from a man with a bloody knife (Calavera Oaxaqueña, 1903, reissued several times, in 1912 as Calavera de Pascual Orozco); or riding bicycles decked out as personifications of Mexico’s newspapers, an image from the 1890s much recycled and reworked (for example in De Este Famosa Hipodroma en la Pista …).

3 José Guadalupe Posada, Composite of four food-and-drink-sellers from the Calavera Chusca, 1911 printing. Photomechanical line-blocks from pen drawings; the blocks are all c. 7.5 cm high.

The roles of history and of armed struggle are invoked [4], as in an image that was probably made for the Centenario of 1910, the celebration of a hundred years of independence from Spain. It was much recycled and is here used in 1911 as Calavera Revuelta de Federales, Comerciantes y Artesanos, with verses about the Federales, their regiments and their officers, and about named street traders and artisans; it was used later for a calavera about the First World War.34 The imagery thus involves the dead both in street life and in the emerging national culture.

The imagery also scrambles the relationship between the dead and the living in the cemetery, as in llorando el hueso [5], where a group of skeletons in modern dress looks at a shrouded skeleton weeping upon a grave.35 Skulls litter the foreground; the well-dressed skeletons on the left run away in terror; those behind the weeper and on our right, representing a wider cross-section of types, either frown in disapproval or seem to laugh at the weeper, whom Western traditions of tomb iconography prompt me to call ‘her’. Posada’s iterative iconography draws no line between metropolis and necropolis, and the success of the commodity suggests that his way of seeing struck a chord.

This way of representing the dead goes some way towards solving the growing capital’s cultural problem of dislocation. If life on the city street can be shown as a vigorous and eventful living death, then, in a macabre way, migration has not severed the cord that links this world to that of the departed. But although this innovation lessens the problem of dislocation, it reinforces that of dissolution. These images turn a sacred ritual of separation into a secular spectacle of assimilation and demystification. That which was sacred is profaned, and the everyday experiences of urban life are represented as identical with activities in the ectoplasm; thus that which was solid is melted not into energy, as are sugar skulls, but into air. 36

So far I have concentrated on a discussion of Posada’s imagery of devils and skeletons as representations available to recently arrived and subaltern urban groups and have not discussed them as objects that play their part in constituting a commodified print culture dominated by bourgeois values, as producers, not merely denizens, of the subaltern. The PVA sheets are not just representations, they are things made, sold, bought and consumed. So are sugar skulls, so what is the difference? The analogy of empty calories, of sterile pleasures, is useful here. Food is supposed to be consumed without residue, so that nothing is thrown away, and also so that the consumer does not get obese. From this point of view, the sugar skull, though peculiar, is not flagrantly transgressional. But the whole logic of print culture is (or at any rate was, for men and women educated in the nineteenth century) that it is cumulative: its twin apotheoses are the library and the well-stocked mind, given that paper is too valuable to throw away. Even its characteristic ephemeral form, the newspaper, takes its identity from the (anti-ephemeral) series to which it contributes. Thus, while getting fat on food is a sin, getting fat on print is a virtue.

5 José Guadalupe Posada, llorando el hueso, c. 1905, photomechanical line-block from pen-drawing, 12.5 × 16.3 cm; taken from a sheet entitled la Calavera de los Peleles. ‘Calavera de los Peleles’ is difficult to translate: a pelele is a wimp or a simpleton, but also a puppet or a guy (as in Guy Fawkes).

The PVA sheet is, within this analogy, transgressionally ‘lite’. It provides an integration into (bourgeois, commodified) print culture that, given its occasional nature and its sacrificial destiny, undermines the possibility of accumulation: thus it integrates the group defined by its market as outsiders, people who belong on the street, not in the book-room. The calavera is sold and bought at a festival whose theme is sacrificial consumption, so that it would be sacrilegious to keep such a sheet and add it to your library. In this, the calaveras are typical of the PVA sheet. In all the collections that I have examined, only one print, probably a theatre poster, bears evidence of having been used (in this case, of having been pinned up). The rest all seem to have come from the stock-in-trade of the Vanegas Arroyo family, switched over in the mid-1920s from the street market to the collectors’ market. This is reasonably good evidence that the original people who bought these sheets bought them to use them up, not to lay them down.

The nature of the different sorts of sheets reinforces this tendency to treat them as something that is bought to be thrown away – bought, in a sense, to be garbage. The recycled and reissued bogus moral stories of familial murders violate the primary requirement of the newspaper, that it be at the same time always the same as itself and always different; they violate the primary requirements of news, that it specify place and time, and that it make truth claims of the ‘fact’ sort, rather than of the ‘value’ sort: the devils pictures make this incompatibility flagrant. To choose to buy such a product is to choose a specific negation of print-centred ‘modern’ culture, one that is newly (that is, ‘modernly’) produced by that culture. Again: ‘real’ news reports in PVA sheets may be acknowledged as being quoted from a newspaper, but in their material form they specifically refuse to become newspaper-like.

The calaveras both embody and represent abundance. They were various in any one year, and they were cheap. Calaveras en monton is a very common headline: a whole heap of calaveras. Barata de calaveras, cheap skulls, and rebumbio de calaveras, racket, crowd-noise of calaveras, are other repeated titles. Posada and Vanegas Arroyo developed the calavera as a form with a mass of verses, and typically a jumble of different prints, often evidently in different styles, and printer’s decorative blocks, large and small, decorating each page. Thus chaotic plenty is a theme both of the way the commodity is marketed and of the way it is constructed. They are cheap, they are plentiful, and they represent cheapness and plenty in both their design and their rough and fragmentary facture. So buying them is no sacrifice; but they are produced to be consumed for an occasion in which sacrificial consumption is required. They were thus both some sort of surrogate of sacrificial food and a debasement of the sacrificial ritual; the fact that the paper on which they were printed is of the same relatively high quality as is now (and perhaps then was) used for decorative cut-outs around the Day of the Dead tends to confirm the sacrificial circuit in these prints. Buying these sheets thus functions to represent the triumphalist claim of capitalism, that the production and consumption of commodities produces growth, as that proposition’s own negation: capitalism offers its neophytes sterile gratification at best.

The commodity nature and the representational function of the PVA sheets were powerfully contradictory. They give us, cultural historians, access to a set of material practices through which men and women both accepted the cultural relations of print-commodity capitalism and developed a subversion of these relations. But the terms of that subversion made it rather a disempowering than an empowering one, at least in the way it tended to close off access to disciplined and informed political organization and activity. Those forms of cultural power depend on and derive from the sort of this-worldly cumulative behaviours that the PVA sheet represents as sterile.

And aesthetic merit? In the case of Posada’s imagery it is a complex matter: post-mortem publishers have had the luxury of severing the images from the texts that always accompanied them in Posada’s lifetime and for almost twenty years after that. If artists and art historians had not found aesthetic merit in these pictures, the archive – consisting partly of printing blocks, but largely of printed sheets constituting the stock-in-trade of Vanegas Arroyo’s heirs – would not have survived. If I did not find various of the strengths and depths in these images that go under the collective title of aesthetic merit, I probably would not go working on or thinking about the work. I do not think that if Vanegas Arroyo had gone on working with Manilla, rather than with Posada, the archive would have survived, and I do not think historians would have found themselves prompted to ask the same questions, or find such various and relevant answers, if by chance it had. But what about the first consumers of the work? Did they seek or find aesthetic gratification in the shoddy sheets in which his images appeared? There is no evidence about the problem, but there is no reason to suppose that the people who bought the PVA sheets could not see the sorts of merits of design and draughtsmanship that I see, no reason to suppose that Posada helped to make Vanegas Arroyo (relatively) rich and powerful only because of his astute identification of subject matter and iconography. And this presents a final complexity. These sheets make material a contradictory identification with what is worthless, bad, in the ‘goods’ that modernity offers, but their ‘popular’ commercial success also suggests that in that ‘bad’, men and women identified and valued something that we might be able to agree was a good.

1 This essay first saw the light of day as a paper for the seminar ‘Comparative Labour and Working-Class History’ that Andrew Hemingway and Rick Halpern ran at the Institute of Historical Research. Andrew urged me to publish it: his wish is my command. I dedicate it to Posada, a hundred years after his death.

2 Posada was born, the son of a baker, in Aguascalientes (430 kilometres north-east of Mexico City).

3 Tom Gretton, ‘Posada’s prints as photomechanical artefacts’, Print Quarterly, vol. 9 (1992), pp. 335–56. My account of Posada’s use of line-block technology is not fully accepted in Mexico.

4 ‘Posada’ was the trademark of a block-making shop as well as the signature of a picture-maker: many of the standard publications on Posada attribute to him images that may be contested on connoisseurial grounds, as well as more than a few that legibly bear other signatures and are clearly by other hands.

5 David Forgacs, ‘National-popular: genealogy of a concept’, in Simon During (ed.), Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge: London, 1993), pp. 177–90.

6 A brief introduction to the first half-century of his critical fortune appears in chapter one of Ron Tyler (ed.), Posada’s Mexico (Library of Congress: Washington, DC, 1979). Fernando Gamboa curated the first monographic exhibition ‘Posada Printmaker to the Mexican People’ at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1944.

7 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1985).

8 For a recent interpretation of Posada’s work that reads it against the ‘revolutionary precursor/essential Mexican’ grain, see Raphael Barajas Durán, Posada: Mito y Mitote: la Caricatura Política de José Guadalupe Posada y de Manuel Manilla (Fondo de Cultura Economica: Mexico City, 2009).

9 Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Volume 1 – Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1986), pp. 42–4, 127–39.

10 Pelado literally translates as skinned/skint, and lépero, leper, means both a shunned outcast and someone whose skin/clothing is hanging off in tatters. In both cases, the nakedness, the lack of resources, is both real and metaphorical.

11 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1980).

12 His current web autobiography characterizes his thinking as ‘strongly influenced by both the Frankfurt School of critical theory and French post-structuralism’, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/michael-taussig/biography/, accessed 12 December 2012, which tell us not much more than that he has moved on.

13 Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, op. cit., p. 17.

14 Fray Joaquín Bolaños, Portentosa vida de la Muerte, Emperatriz de los sepulcros, Vengadora de los agravios del Altísimo, y muy señora de la humana naturaleza (Mexico, 1792).

15 Peter Wollen, J. G. Posada, Messenger of Mortality (Redstone Press: London, 1989), p. 15, puts it thus: ‘a crucial connection can be discerned between the calaveras and the art of the pre-Columbian period, with its own profusion of skulls and pressing reminders of death’.

16 Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890–1910 (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1998) has shown how closely Vanegas Arroyo’s ‘ephemeral’ production followed and referred to scandals and catastrophes made famous in the ‘mainstream’ press.

17 See, for example, Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (Henry Holt: New York, 1988), p. 354.

18 Mexico had even by 1910 about 40 per cent as many kilometres of railway as Britain, and in a count of railway metres per square kilometre, less even than that of the Russian Empire.

19 John Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1978).

20 Tom Gretton, ‘Posada and the “Popular”: commodities and social constructs in Mexico before the Revolution’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 2 (October 1994), pp. 32–47.

21 Curiosidades mexicanos shows Gringo tourists react with horror to the sight of a sewage-collection cart. Asalto en Teplito: Corrido gives us a toff mugged at night in a park. Los Atropellamientos electricos: Corrido shows a cyclist slaughtered by an electric tram.

22 What is perhaps Posada’s most famous single image (and the most famous Mexican woman after the Virgin of Guadalupe), the calavera catrina (the calavera of the female catrin) reprised by Diego Rivera in his ‘Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Park’, had been known on an earlier sheet as a garbancera, a chick-pea-stew-seller.

23 There is no catalogue raisonné of Posada’s oeuvre; given the disputable attribution of many ‘Posadas’, the dispersion and duplication of holdings of his work, and the recycling and reworking of many of his pictures from sheet to sheet, there may never be one. The most accessible collections of his (and others’!) work in the Anglo-Saxon world remain Stanley Appelbaum and Robert Berdecio (eds.), Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints (Dover Publications: New York, 1972) and Julian Rothenstein (ed.), J. G. Posada, Messenger of Mortality (Redstone Press: London, 1989). In Mexico, the 1930 publication by Frances Toor et al., Posada: Monografia de 406 Grabados has been re-editioned since the 1990s, most recently by Diego Rueda (RM Verlag: Barcelona, 2003). There is also the much fuller Carlos Pellicer (ed.), José Guadalupe Posada: Ilustrador de la Vida Mexicana (Fondo Editorial de la Plástica: Mexico, 1963). One may also consult the even more inclusive compilation by Hannes Jähn, The Works of / Das Werk von José Guadalupe Posada (Zweitausendeins: Frankfurt am Main, 1976).

24 Jérôme Monet, La Ville et son double: Images et usages du centre – Le parable de Mexico (Nathan: Paris, 1993).

25 Tom Gretton, ‘The Cityscape and “the People” in the prints of José Guadalupe Posada’, in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell (eds.), The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002), pp. 212–27.

26 Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloe Sayer, The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1992).

27 For this ‘negative net reproduction rate’ in early modern cities in the Western world, see for example Peter Clark (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013), p. 404.

28 Stanley Brandes, ‘Sugar, colonialism and death: on the origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39, no. 2 (1997), pp. 270–99.

29 There are no surviving calavera prints either with the Calle Incarnacion address, or with Vanegas Arroyo appearing named simply as Vanegas, both of which would date the production from the 1880s and before the era of Posada.

30 La Situacion: a lithograph probably from the 1880s republished without further identification in Aida Sierra Torre, José Maria Villasana: Caricatura Política y Costumbrista (CNCA: Mexico City, 1998).

31 ‘Saucy calavera dedicated to the street-vendors, tortilla-sellers, greens-sellers [all female] and all struggling people. Clothes-dealers, stall-holders and meat-sellers …’. Title taken from the British Museum’s copy, published before c. 1905.

32 ‘Flattering calavera about the cute waitresses’.

33 ‘Street-cleaners calavera’. This is an unusual image, in that the four skeletons share the picture space with a live man. He is unaware of their presence, and stands drinking pulque in a bar. He drinks from a skull.

34 The messy/turbulent/scrambled calavera of the Federales (national militarized police force) traders and artisans.

35 ‘The bone is weeping’, or perhaps ‘weeping over the bone’.

36 I do not simply pull ‘ectoplasm’ out of the ether. Many prominent people, in Mexico as elsewhere, were committed to spiritualism in these years. In Mexico, the belief had a focus in opposition to the official positivism of the Porfiriato.