Calaveras literarias, “literary skulls,” are verses written for the Day of the Dead. National Geographic calls them the Day of the Dead tradition that mocks death. They are “epigramas o versos rítmicos de rima variada cuyo motivo principal es la muerte” (epigrams or rhythmic verses with varied rhyme whose main subject is death).
The first ones were published in 1879 in El Socialista, a newspaper of Guadalajara. In the early 1940s, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective of printmakers, promoted them.