Aguascalientes Travel Guide

The Museo José Guadalupe Posada in Aguascalientes commemorates the Mexican printmaker. Posada (1852–1913) worked in cheap newspaper illustration, producing a vast body of skeleton prints that cast politicians, celebrities and ordinary trades as calaveras to satirise the politics of his day — among them La Catrina, later quoted by Rivera and now the most widely circulated image of Day of the Dead. The museum holds his original plates and a large body of impressions, showing how the imagery travelled from the street press into national culture.

The Museo Nacional de la Muerte occupies a colonial building of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, opened in 2007 around a donation of more than two thousand death-themed works by the artist Octavio Bajonero Gil. The displays run from pre-Hispanic skull ceramics and colonial funerary objects to Posada-style calavera prints and contemporary Day-of-the-Dead craft, setting out how Mexicans handle death — without evasion, and often with humour. That disposition is the ground on which the whole festival rests.