Calaveras televisiosas

Date: 1949

Medium: Linocut

Dimensions (cm.): Information to be added

Alternate titles: Unknown

Published edition: TGP calavera publication Calaveras televisiosas (noviembre 1949), cover

Contemporary publication: Calaveras televisiosas

References: Information to be added

Commentary: Calaveras televisiosas indicates Méndez’s interest in new means of communication. Ora sí ya no hay tortillas, pero … ¿Qué tal televisión? (Hey, Yeah, There Aren’t Any Tortillas … How About Television?), from 1949, refers to social and technological changes during the post-war period, when television was just becoming widespread.

 The image, a remarkably early recognition of the power of the new medium, portrays a group of skeletons looking at a television in a shop window. The television screen is filled with two calaveras wearing suits and tuxedos, one in the clothing of a priest, who toast one another with wine glasses with large steaks on their plaes. Their opulent life style symbolizes a new post-war consumerism promoted and promised by television. The skeletons looki at the screen as though for the first time, and Méndez depicted them as impoverished urban workers, in contrast to the affluent, grinning characters on the television screen. In the foreground a skeleton couple stands gaping at the television. The husband wears the overalls and cap of a laborer, and the calavera wife and the baby in her shawl are thin and gaunt, even for skeletons. In depicting the woman and infant as emaciated from hunger, Méndez mixed motifs in an overlapping of signification. 

 As in El hambre en la Ciudad de México en 1914-1915, the skeleton is a shifting sign; Méndez portrayed his Aunt Manuela as practically a skeleton, resembling a calavera, while in the later print, in a curious inversion of the metaphor, the calavera woman resembles a starving, skeletal woman. Behind the couple a calavera man in a shabby overcoat and a fedora, looks at the television with fascination, while two boy calaveras in front of him stare open-mouthed at the screen. The smaller of the two boys points directly at a plate of food depicted on the television. At the top of the image, framed by two skulls, are the words “Calaveras televisiosas, todo por un hoyito” (“Calaveras depraved by Television, everything for a little hole”). “Televisiosas” is a clever neologism, a play on the word “viciosa,” -- “vicious, depraved, defective.” (Deborah Caplow)

Cataloging note: Alberto Beltrán quoted this print in his 1957 poster celebrating the 20th anniversary of the TGP.

Catalogue record number: 127