Museo de la Caricatura

Mexico boasts a rich tradition of cartooning. Save for an eight-year period during the Porfirio Díaz regime when the dictator banned their publication, Mexican political cartoons have targeted the country’s leaders since the early 19th century. And as a glance at many daily newspapers shows, the art of scathingly political caricatures is very much alive and well. Housed in an 18th-century building that was originally an annex to the Jesuit college of San Ildefonso, the Museum of Cartooning displays the works of Mexico’s most prominent cartoonists from a collection of some 1500 original panels. These date from 1826, when Italian Claudio Linati published the country’s first political cartoon, entitled ‘Tyranny, ’ in his newspaper the Iris. A browse through the collection provides an amusing take on Mexican political history. Prominently featured are the works of José Guadalupe Posada, whose instantly recognizable skeletal figures illustrated newspapers and sheet music in the early 1900s. His Calavera de Catarina, a female skeleton wearing a broad-brimmed frilly hat, has become a Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) icon, though originally it was a satiric barb against the typically aristocratic characters who sashayed through the capital prior to the revolution.